I guess there may be some people out there who as youths, were not prone to flights of fancy of one sort or other. I may even be able to name one or two looking back in time.

I wasn’t always in a fantasy land when I was a child—really up until I came closer to my late twenties—but I spent far too much time there.

One of my daydreams that recurred, was of a small community of people of like mind sitting around a long wooden table, in nice chairs.

Their leader? Well of course, it was yours truly. “After all,” I reasoned, “I came up with this whole thing, and if not me, who?”

Such are the hazy memories of childhood and young adulthood.

Looking back, I can’t imagine what might’ve been going through my head. Today, I would all but have to be drafted into a leadership position, and that’s particularly true if it was political in nature.

I recognize a large reason for this change in me. I’ve been introduced to a good many attitudes and perspectives, and I’ve come to realize the average person lives a life in which cognitive dissonance is common.

People seek equality, as if that’s something to desire. They fail to realize, the way successful people got where they are, is largely hard work and more often than not, a great deal of sacrifice.

The point is, if you could suddenly level the playing field, in the course of time, unless you found some magical way to keep it flat, those willing to put forth the effort would do again as they had before, and rise “above” their peers. And to be frank, I’m pretty sure your best effort to enforce equality would fail miserably in the course of time.

The truth is, there are two ways to talk about equality to begin with.

You can talk about equality of opportunity—an absolute impossibility—in which those in wheelchairs would have to be allowed to join in foot races (which they would invariably lose without some additional help). It’s clear this idea isn’t workable.

Then there’s the thing most people think they want. That would be equality of outcome. This concept too, is purely foolish. A petite person will likely eat fewer calories than a larger individual, so even if you could make it so they got the same amount of sustenance, you’d actually be doing a serious disservice to both.

I suppose where outcomes are concerned, you could attempt to implement the Communist ideal, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The obvious questions would be, “Who determines ability?” and “Who decides what one’s need looks like?”

The answer to both queries in past, has been, “The government makes those determinations.” The results of this choice have proven disastrous on many levels. Not the least of these, has been bias in government that caused countless deaths of people that entity purposely didn’t support.

One need only look at what happened in Armenia in the fairly recent past (an entity that wasn’t even under Communist rule) or the former Soviet Union, to see examples.

You might argue that entities like the United States have done a better job of implementing systems of government that encouraged equality or that have even tended to level the playing field.

Doing so would be entirely errant.

Rather, what countries like the U. S. have tried to do, is make it so all people found it its borders have a higher standard of living when compared to much of the rest of the world (if not all of it).

Are we always successful? No. That’s not even debatable. Yet when compared to the rest of the planet, and most particularly to basically all third world countries, we stand out as a shining example of what others can aim to achieve.

Our poverty rates may be high by our own standards, but even our poor, tend to have more substance, and live better lives than folks considered well above those earning low incomes in other countries.

Further, I defy anyone to show me any serious numbers on starvation or even severer malnutrition in this country—and unlike North Korea, you can look when, where and how you please to do so, as long as you stay within relatively liberal laws when you perform your study.

The best most folks can come up with when discussing such things where we’re concerned is the rather meaningless term “food insecurity.” There’ve certain been times when I was unsure where my next meal was coming from. I’ve definitely skipped a meal here and there out of a lack of resources. That said, where these days I’m only mildly so, by health standards, I’m actually overweight.”

It seems, in fact, for some time, that our children have been growing bigger, taller and are healthier on average than folks elsewhere and even here in times past; and where some remain smaller, it’s seldom if ever as a matter of not getting sufficient nutrients.

About now you may be laboring under a delusion. You might be thinking I’m saying the representative republic under which our land operates is the “perfect government.” Let me burst that bubble right here and now.

I could’ve come out and said this up front, but I wanted to set the stage, as it were.

There is no such thing as a perfect government.

It should be pretty well recognized that I don’t believe in perfect people; the result is I can see no way to create a perfect government. People make mistakes, aggregating power makes it so when they do, the error made affects more individuals. As such, I don’t believe in perfect government.

So again, if you ask the question, “What does the perfect government look like?” the simple answer is, “I don’t believe there can be a perfect government, any more than there’s a perfect man now on Earth. As such, it doesn’t look like much of anything.” That doesn’t mean we stop striving towards the best possible government. It just means, where we work to get as close as we’re able to perfection, we should expect never to reach it.

Thanks for reading, and may your time be good.