Working with undergraduate honor students is a great pleasure. FREE’s summer interns are from this set. They are normally headed on to graduate or professional school and not yet distracted by looming job prospects. Hence, they focus on ideas and ideals. I delight in sharing a few “life lessons” with them.

Last year’s interns, Steph Baliga and Cart Weiland, surprised me with a collection of my observations on the way the world works. Both were top students and a joy to work with. Their writing flatters my casual observations.

Below are the last three of their observations (for the first three, please see last week’s FREE Insights). Cart is a student at Harvard Law School and Steph is working with a religious order. I’m confident that both organizations, like FREE, will gain from their contributions.

John Baden Articulated: Part II

As collected by Steph Baliga and F. Cartwright Weiland

FREE Interns, Summer 2009

4) It’s easier to work with winners than losers. (By Steph Baliga)

Let’s start this explanation with an anecdote. In my senior year of high school, I was expected to be top 10 in the state for cross-country. Let’s just add a zero to that number, and you would have gotten my real place. At the finish, I essentially laid on the ground for about 20 minutes not exactly sure where I was or what was going on. Not only was the newspaper reporter who always interviewed me hovering above me during this time, but both of the college coaches that were heavily recruiting me were too. When I finally regained full consciousness, the first thing my future coach at University of Illinois told me was that I was anemic and I better get that figured out before I came to her school. And then she went to go talk to her “winner”... the other girl she was recruiting who got second. She was so disgusted with my performance that she couldn’t even talk with me. The other coach who was recruiting me decided to comfort me and said things equivalent to “we still want you to come to our school...this won’t change any of our agreements” etc. This is the moment I decided that I was going to U of I. Although I didn’t think of it in this way, I wanted a coach who worked with winners and realized that it’s easier to work with winners than losers. Luckily, she still let me come.

This coach, although a bit extreme, taught me how to win. She showed that winners have it together and losers have either made bad choices, had bad luck, or weren’t endowed with natural talent. Winners know what they are doing and don’t have to tell anyone about it. Working with these more optimistic and successful people is naturally easier than working with those lacking in these areas.

5) Have you ever met a happy liberal?

The weight of the world falls on liberals’ broad shoulders. They are racked by guilt for the state of the world, plagued by oppression and by the state of the oppressed. And for all this, they are angry and demand recompense. They must do, do, do! There is little time for all they plan to do, and many people stand in their way. They yell and scream at ignorant conservatives with whom they disagree and cry and weep for poor and the privileged minority groups they support. They are the few, the proud, the anointed liberal elite. They will make the world better for all.

And they are generally an unhappy and unpleasant breed.

6) Social coordination is extremely difficult.

Conveying a message initially is already flawed before the words even come out of your mouth. Language is inherently unreliable, and people are even more unreliable when passing on messages to others. Just think of the game telephone. Even if no one intentionally distorts the message, the meaning of the phrase changes dramatically by the time it gets to the last person. Real life is like a big game of telephone with real, time consuming, expensive, and frustrating consequences.

Actually completing the distorted original message makes the situation even more complicated. Cars break down, people get distracted, supplies run out, and sometimes people just don’t care. Maybe instead of getting frustrated when things don’t work out as planned, we should celebrate the minor miracle when things do work.

This is why socialist or any other centrally planned form of government is doomed to fail. Coordinating the actions of thousands or millions of people (through the power of government) is linguistically and logistically impossible.