What IS a "Fair Share"?

This week at Sunnyside, Troy gets to the studio late after battling a bug...a real toe-biter! He tells the tale of their unplanned rodeo experience and discusses the meaning of "fair share", the politics of envy it represents, introduces a better way to delegate your income taxes and shares the allegory about socialism he's used to teach his kids these many years. Plus, two new original songs that help tell the tales and keep you humming along!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello friends and neighbors, welcome into life, where laughter's the answer and hearts are shining bright with callous hands and with storage shark. Let's craze the place where love ignites spark.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Hello, friends and neighbors, and welcome to Sunnyside. You know, if you want to make the Almighty laugh, all you have to do is show him your neatly organized schedule for the week. And it's been quite a week, friends. Just seven days ago, I was convinced I finally had the old train running squarely on the tracks. I was losing weight. I was eating a strict carnivore diet, fueling the temple with all that magnificent, delicious beef we produce right here at Sunnyside. And I started each morning in the quiet hours with my prayers and reflections, and I closed out the evenings with the comforting rhythm of Vespers, body, mind, and spirit all tuned up and running smoothly. Or so I thought. Now, I'd seen this kind of trouble before, friends. Not in that exact spot, mind you, but I've had my share of ups and downs with a painful little devil often tied to the old sin of gluttony. A regular visitor called Gout. Hmm. I figured I knew the drill. It would pass. It always had. So I gritted my teeth and went right on ahead to the alumni golf tournament. I spent the day working the booth, catching up with old friends, and enjoying the fellowship. My foot was throbbing, sure, but I was taking it easy. When the afternoon heat advisory kicked in, I might have had a couple of cold beers to cool down, but nothing more, and just a little temporary discomfort, I told myself. And then came Sunday. My son, Jack, had just returned from a trip out to a cattle ranch in Wyoming with some of his buddies, and while he was out there, he went to his very first rodeo, and it must have left an impression because he came home with a brand new lasso, and he was absolutely dying to use it. Now you have to understand the layout of the situation. The cattle we have around here, they're not so small timers anymore. They're all sitting right around that seven hundred pound mark or better. Jack had never lassoed a single living thing in his entire life, and we don't exactly have a horse standing by. But youth is full of ambition. So out we went into the pasture on foot. Jack was wearing his favorite sneakers. Earlier that day, trying to be a good steward to the animals, I had installed, with the help of Heidi, a little sprinkler system to keep the co the cows cool in the sweltering heat, and that meant the pasture was nice and muddy in some choice locations. Jack swung that rope. The cattle ran around, kicking up clods of dirt and mud. He missed, swung again, and on or about the fourth or fifth or eleventh try, crack. He hit his mark. He actually lassoed a cow. And that is when the celebration stopped. And reality walked in the Winnebago County Sheriff. Because suddenly we had a problem. A 700-pound moving problem. How exactly, by the way, do you get a lasso off a cow that has absolutely no intention of stopping The answer, my friends, involves a great deal of deep mud, some choice vocabulary words that, by the way, aren't found in that Vespers hymnal, and the brave or perhaps foolish act of a father running directly into the middle of a moving herd. Eventually. I lunged forward, latched my hands onto the rope out of desperation, right around the animal's neck, and I ran precariously alongside and within the moving herd, hoping against hope the tension would loosen up enough to slip the loop over her head. And you know what the funny thing is? As I was dodging flying hooves in the muck, it wasn't the thought of getting trampled or broken that filled me with absolute unadulterated terror. No, sir. It was the terrifying realization that one of those seven hundred pound cows might step directly on my inflamed left pinky toe. We got the rope off. We survived. But by this morning, and the reason that I didn't release this much earlier, that toe wasn't bargaining anymore. I called the doctor, and wouldn't you know it? It wasn't the gluttony devil gout after all. It turns out it was a simple tiny insect bite that had quietly invited an infection in and it was busy making its way up my foot. So here I am today, I am clean, I am medicated, and soon, hopefully, I'll be entirely cured. But as I sit here keeping the weight off this foot, I've had some time to do some thinking. We look at a young fellow like Jack taking a risk with a rope, eager to try something hard, something new, and we realize that's how the world moves forward. Even if it's a little crazy. It takes hard work. It takes a little dirt and it takes being willing to run alongside the herd. When things get tangled up. It makes you realize that when the mud clears, all you're really left with is a deep sense of gratitude for the family around you. And the health you often take for granted. We spend so much time worrying about the phantom gout we think we've brought on ourselves when the real battle is just dealing with the unexpected stings that life froze our way. But if you can face the herd, clear the infection, keep your sense of humor, you might just find a way to be the stunning side of someone else's life today. But every now and then the eyes of the soul turn inward and they get fixed on what the next fella has. And that's when a quiet little sickness creeps in. The old writers called it a root sin because of how it feeds other vices and rots us from the inside out. We call it envy. Now, envy isn't just wanting what somebody else has got. No, sir, that's greed. Envy is a much darker animal. Envy is looking at another person's blessings and feeling a deep, bitter sorrow that they have them at all. It's the secret wish to see another person fall, just so you can feel taller. And it targets the things we think we want the most. Take intellect. You'd think the halls of higher learning would be a sanctuary of pure reason. But you look closely and you'll see the brilliant student or the seasoned professor consumed with a quiet rage because a colleague wrote a better paper, solved a tougher equation, or grasp a concept just a little faster. Instead of celebrating a leap forward for mankind, envy whispers, why wasn't it me? It turns a brilliant mind into a prison of resentment. Or consider beauty. We see a face that stops traffic, a grace that moves effortlessly through a room. And what does envy do? It doesn't admire the artistry of creation, it starts picking it apart. It looks for the flaw, the wrinkle, the blemish. It invents gossip to tarnish what it cannot replicate. It turns the admirer into a critic, and a beautiful thing into an offense. Then there is fame, the bright lights, the applause of the crowd, the names up in marquee bulbs. Envy sits in the dark balcony, chewing its fingernails. It watches the ovation and fumes. It waits for the stumble, the bad review, the public fall from grace. It convinces the envious man or woman that the applause belong to him or her. If only the world weren't so blind. And of course, fortune. The big house on the hill, the sleek automobile, the bank account with commas to spare. Envy looks at the wealth and doesn't see the years of sweat, the sleepless night, or the financial risks that built it. It just sees the prize. It demands that the successful fellow be brought down, not to lift the poor up, but simply to even the score. You see, that is the corrupting nature of envy. It is a parasite that eats its own host. It robs you of your time. It wastes your energy, and it divides your attention so completely that you can never walk your own path. It makes you a spectator in your own life. Perpetually miserable over a scoreboard. You didn't even write. But there is an antidote. There are two old-fashioned virtues that can cure sickness if you let them into your heart. The first is gratitude. Gratitude is the simple act of turning your eyes away from what's missing and looking squarely at what's already there. It's looking at your own modest table and saying, Thank God for this bread. When you practice gratitude, you realize your own life is uniquely woven, and you don't need to live in the shadow of anyone else's spotlight. And the second is charity. Not just giving away a few dollars, but the kind of charity that rejoices when the other fellow wins. It's looking at your neighbor's promotion, his beautiful family, or his stroke of good luck and feeling a genuine, warm delight for his sake. Charity breaks the mirror of self-absorption and lets you share in the joy of the whole world. Because in the grand design of things, the size of your neighbor's house doesn't make your roof leak any faster. Another man's brilliance doesn't dim your own light unless you choose to blow it out yourself. We spend so much time measuring what we think we're owed. When the real secret to living is realizing how much we've already been given. You know what's a funny thing about a city with a big appetite? It never stops eating. And when it runs out of bread, it starts looking around for someone else's baker. Which brings us right back to that quiet little sickness we were talking about. Envy. Only this time it isn't just hiding in the dark balcony of a theater or festering in a neighborhood dispute. No, sir, this time it's got a smartphone, it's wearing a mayoral sash, and it's typing out a tweet. Why just the other day, the new chief executive of the Big Apple, Mayor Zoran Mamdami, took to the digital airwaves. He decided to send a little public postcard to anyone holding a second home in New York City worth more than five million dollars. Folks with a few of those extra commas in the bank account to spare. He didn't invite them to a civic round table. He didn't ask how the city could help them invest or create more jobs. No, he taunted them. He told them to check their mailboxes when they got back into the five boroughs because you've got mail. And inside that envelope, a brand new first of its kind pay to tear tax bill. His honor smiled for the cameras and wrapped the whole thing in that familiar, comforting blanket paying your fair share. I guess he figures that by penalizing the wealthy absentee owners, he's fixing what's broken. But you see, history has a funny way of teaching us what happens when a city decides to feed its budget deficit with the meat of resentment. The mayor thinks he's trapped a captive audience of billionaires. He looks at a penthouse and sees a permanent gold mine. But what he forgets is that capital, like a wild bird, has wings. And a tax bill born out of political theater doesn't make a wealthy investor stay and say, Thank you, sir, may I have another? It makes them call a moving truck. Down in Florida, the governor and real estate agents are reading the mayor's tweets, and they are absolutely delighted. They're rolling out the welcome mat, and why not? Because when the wealthy leave New York and they've already been leaving, they don't just take their secondary penthouses with them. They take their income taxes, their investments, their charity, and the thousands of jobs that depend on high-end residential buildings, from the doormen and the electricians to the local contractors. By turning the tax code into a weapon of political envy, the bureaucracy isn't solving housing affordability or building better schools. It's simply starving the golden goose. To buy a few rounds of applause from the gallery. True leadership doesn't point a finger at the mailbox of the successful and say, We're coming for yours. True leadership creates an environment where everyone wants to pitch in because they trust the chef. They trust the kitchen, and they know the money isn't being wasted in the bottomless pit of a slow, non-innovative bureaucracy. But the Big Apple is choosing the old bitter path. They are banking on the idea that you can tax a city into prosperity by making success look like a crime. And pretty soon, when the mailboxes stay empty, and the tax base heads south for the winter, or longer, New York is going to find out the hard way that Envy is a very poor financial planner. You know what's funny about that phrase? Fair share? If you say it long enough and loud enough, folks start to believe it's as solid as granite. Even when it's made of nothing but hot air. Yes, that old political chestnut. Fair share. You hear it every election cycle, we're in one right now, echoing down the marble halls of Washington and even in our own towns and townships. Politicians love it. They roll it around in their mouths like a sweet lozenge. From President Biden pitching a billionaire's tax to Bernie Sanders decrying the wealthy class and whether they should even be billionaires.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

You work hard, you start a business, you make money, fine, become rich. But there's got to be a limit. Do you really need $50 billion, $100 billion? Where are you going to spend that money? How many homes, how many islands are you going to own? I mean, we should have a progressive tax system which says to billionaires, you're going to pay your fair share of taxes. And my own view, to be honest with you, may sound radical. I don't think we need billionaires. You want to be rich? That's fine. Take good care of your family. Buy five homes, but you don't need 50 homes.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

All the way back to 2012, when Barack Obama championed the Buffett rule. Either we asked the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share in taxes, or went out to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare. They tell you a fair share is a math problem, a percentage, a penalty for winning the grand game of American enterprise. But if you look real close into the history books, you'll find the phrase doesn't belong to just one side of the aisle. Back in nineteen eighty five, a fellow named Ronald Reagan stood before the American people and used those exact same words. He looked at a tax code rotten with loopholes where a multimillionaire could pay less than a bus driver, and he said the wealthy ought to pay their fair share too. We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. So everyone wants it. But nobody can tell you exactly what it is. Because fairness, you see, isn't a button on a calculator. It's found in a busted philosophy. The folks in Washington will tell you that the wealthy owe a permanent debt to the state because they use the roads, the legal systems, and the stable markets to make their millions or billions.

unknown 20:50

Or trillions.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

They'll look at the internet today and say, aha! But the government built ARPANET back in the 60s. So you owe us a piece of everything you build on it forever. I mean that's that's a bit like telling the architect of a hundred-story skyscraper that he's permanently indebted to the caveman who first figured out how to bake clay into bricks. The state may have laid a few early tracks, in any case, but it was private risk, sweat equity, and American genius that built the locomotive and the global commerce that rides on it. An economist named Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction. It's that beautiful, violent, wonderful storm of capitalism where the entrepreneur enters the market, destroys the outdated, slow ways of the past, and invents a future nobody else saw coming. And today, private research and development outspends the federal government by a mile. Seven out of every ten dollars spent finding the next medical break. Through or technological marvel comes from private pockets, not Washington grants. Why? Because the free market cares if a machine actually works. It doesn't care about political favoritism, keyword screenings, or whichever ideological rhetoric happens to be in vogue this Tuesday. When a private firm competes in an open, unrestricted bid, they have to be sharp, lean, and fast. When a government bureaucracy runs things, failure is often rewarded with a bigger budget next year. Which brings us back to the riddle of the fair share. Right now, the top 1% of earners pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% pay over 70%. The politicians tell them it's an insurance premium for living in a functioning society. But isn't it a shame that we force the most innovative minds in the world to hand their insurance premium over to the single least efficient bureaucracy on earth? Before the 20th century, Americans took care of Americans through local churches, civic groups, and mutual aid societies, and they did it with a fraction of the overhead. So what if we changed the game? What if, instead of letting a temporary majority in Congress decide what your fair share is based on a line on your tax return? What if you got to decide? Imagine an America where your tax return is a menu of sovereignty. Sure, we would probably pay a baseline for national defense and the courts to keep the peace. But the rest, you check the boxes. If you want your hard-earned dollars going to cancer research, you slide that dial to 40%. If you hate foreign wars or corporate bailouts, you turn them down to zero. Suddenly, government agencies would have to compete for your respect and your dollar they'd have to do it just like a private business. The bureaucratic complacency dies, and real bottom-up accountability is born. Why? It's like a a governmental Schumbeer effect. Your tax burden would no longer be a moralistic penalty imposed on you by some bureaucrat. It would become something entirely new. It would be a voluntary investment portfolio in our society. I like that. And that, my friends, I think is the only definition of fair that matches the spirit of a free people. You know, if you look at a map of these United States, you'll see thousands of miles of blacktop, endless cornfields, and towering city skylines. But if you look beneath the surface, you'll find that we are a nation currently fighting a quiet intellectual civil war over a single question. Who is responsible for the soul of a community? Just a moment ago, we were looking at the concrete canyons of New York City. Out there, the progressive vision has reached its logical conclusion. The bureaucracy has an insatiable appetite, and politicians view the successful citizen as nothing more than just a captive gold mine. They believe the state must be the author of all charity, the builder of all safety nets, and the sole arbiter of what a fair share happens to be. But if you get out of the city and head west, past the toll roads, across the Mississippi, right into the heart of the American breadbasket, you might find a completely different story unfolding. Welcome to Iowa. Right now, the Hawkeye State is hosting a gubernatorial race that has caught the attention of the entire nation. With Governor Kim Reynolds stepping aside, the field is wide open, and the battle lines are drawn sharp as a freshly honed plowshare. Now, on one side, you've got the Democratic nominee, State Auditor Rob Sand. He's crisscrossing all 99 counties on a massive town hall tour, running on his record of government accountability. He's warning voters about what he calls fiscal time bombs, and he wants to protect public systems like Medicaid. It's the traditional view that the government must maintain a reliable, centralized baseline to protect its people. But on the other side of the ticket stands the Republican nominee, a farmer and businessman named Zach Lane. Now, Mr. Lane didn't come out of the traditional political machine. He's running with a heavy emphasis on individual health freedom and a desire to keep government small. His supporters are explicitly warning that they don't want Iowa turned into another California, Illinois, or God forbid, Minnesota. Places where they believe big government welfare systems have just stifled the human spirit. And this isn't just happening in Iowa. This same clash of ideas is igniting a gubernatorial campaign, well, much like it all across the country. And it's a grand national synergy of debate. One philosophy looks at a problem and says, We need a state-led system, a new agency, a mandatory tax to fix this. The other philosophy looks at the very same problem and says, get the state out of the way. Let private civic engagement, local businesses, churches, and individual charity handle it like we used to. And it returns us to the concept of the voluntary investment portfolio in our society. The centralized model tries to mandate compassion from the top down through an expensive and sluggish bureaucracy, but out on the plains, the free market model argues that true social security, well, it doesn't come from a government check. It comes from a strong economy, local accountability, and neighbors choosing to lift up neighbors out of genuine charity. Not legal coercion. The politicians in the big coastal cities think they can tax their way to prosperity by appealing to a sense of you guessed it, envy. But the folks in the heartland, oh, we may be testing a different hypothesis that a society is strongest when the individual taxpayer is trusted to decide where their blessings can do the most good. We'll find out. In November, the voters will log on to the ultimate menu of sovereignty and cast their ballots. Hopefully. They will decide if the state is our master or our utility. So let me conclude with this. You know, there is a place where the water is as blue as a robin's egg, and pines grow so tall they seem to tickle the belly of the clouds. It's a beautiful lake. A pristine lake. And the water is absolutely teeming with fish. And right there, sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket on the grassy bank, sat a lonely fisherman. Now, this fella didn't have a bad life. He had a sturdy cane pole, a pocket full of nightcrawlers, and truth be told, he was catching plenty of fish right there from the shore, like big fat crappies and a few keeper bass. But the human heart is a peculiar piece of machinery. It has a way of looking right past its own blessings to stare at what's happening on the other side of the fence or in this case, out on the water. Because, see, every afternoon, this lonely fisherman would look out toward the deep center of the lake and he'd watch those big, fancy, gleaming fiberglass fishing boats just cruise on by. They had twin stroke outboard motors, high-tech depth finders, and plush swiveling seats. And as the man on the shore watched them kick up wake, a familiar, bitter little sickness started to cloud his vision. Envy. He became absolutely certain, without without a shred of proof, that those fellas out in the deep water there were catching more fish than him. He was sure their fish were bigger. He was convinced they were having a grand old time, while he was just a miserable forgotten soul stuck on the mud bank. So he decided he was going to do something about it, by golly. But he didn't save up his money to buy a nice boat, and he didn't ask to hitch a ride with a neighbor, no, sir. He packed up his bucket, walked right up the steps of the local government bureau, and he told them his problem. Well, now, you know how a bureaucracy loves a problem. Especially a problem wrapped in the sweet, relatable language of resentment. T The politicians saw a magnificent shortcut straight into the envious hearts of the voters. They nodded. They stroked their chins, and they promised they would solve this injustice for him. And for everyone else, too. But the government ran into a snag. They conceded they couldn't just march out there, confiscate those nice fancy boats from the wealthy fellows and hand the keys over to the guys on the shore. No, that would just swap one disgruntled boat owner for another. And it wouldn't look good on the evening news. So the central planners came up with a much grander, much more comprehensive solution. They called it a fairness initiative. They rounded up every single boat on the lake, the sleek ones, the fast ones, the innovative ones built by years of private sweat and capital, and with the heavy hand of regulation they demolished them. They smashed them down into many, many, many pieces. Then, using the expensive, slow, non-innovative blueprint of the state, they reconstructed new boats. A whole fleet of them. Only these new government-designed vessels were much smaller. And they were clunky and they had patches where where they shouldn't. Their motors wouldn't start. And truth be told, they leaked like a sieve. They didn't work well for fishing at all. But the bureaucrats smiled, stood on the docks, and proudly handed the exact same poorly composed boat to every single fisherman on the lake. There, they announced. Now everyone is equal. And they were right. Out there on the water, the men in the leaking, stalling boat sat soaking wet, completely miserable, unable to catch a single thing. But if you looked back toward the grassy bank, you'd see a funny thing that had happened. There was another lonely fisherman over there, sitting quietly, cheerfully on his overturned five-gallon bucket. He had his cane pole in his hand, a fresh worm on the hook, and a cooler full of fish by his side. He was just fishing, all by his lonesome, completely content, his heart filled with a quiet, old-fashioned gratitude. And as the miserable man that had led the charge and all the other wet men out in the government boats looked back at the shore, they found themselves staring with a deep burning new jealousy at the simple man who had never left the bank.

SPEAKER_03 35:01

I'm sitting on a bucket with a simple cane pole, just a pocket full of night crawlers and peace inside my soul. From the grassy muddy shoreline, I can cast my line and wait and thank the Lord for every single keeper on my bay. But the human heart is fragile and it likes to look away. And then we started clouding up the blessings of my day. He watched those fancy boats cruising through the deep with their high-tech ear and the promises they keep. So he took his heavy grievance to the halls of government. And the politicians listened to the message that he sent. They saw a golden shortcut to the voters' jealous hearts. And they promised they would fix it with their regulatory art. They route it off the vessels and they slashed them to the ground. And they built a brand new people's fleet for everyone around. Now the fancy boats are gone, and in the place to leak the hug. The motors will not start, and all the fishermen are done. They are soaking wet and miserable and frozen in their tracks. While I am on the muddy bank with fish inside my stacks, they're staring at my door now with a brand new job. While I'm singing to the waters underneath the sunny sky. Oh the stunning.

SPEAKER_01 39:28

That's the story that I have told my kids as they grew up, and I try to explain how socialism works. Only to create a whole new class of resentment. Because you can you can tear down a fancy boat, my friends. But you can never design a bureaucracy big enough to manufacture. The sunny side of life.