One of my favorite cliches of life is the story of gazelles and the lions. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it goes like this. “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle ... when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

The story is often used as a motivational tale, illustrating that it’s the go-getters that prosper. It’s also a narrative showing the brutal reality of nature, that the strongest members of a species are the ones that not only survive, but thrive.

I’ve always found it interesting that liberals have such affection for the animal kingdom. Some liberal extremists even value animals over mankind, yet they reject the inherent truth in the survival of the fittest that guides the world of nature.

What if Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi became the leaders of a gazelle herd? They of course would find it repulsive that the fastest gazelles had a far less chance of being mauled by the lions than the rest of the herd.

They would immediately go about enacting a doctrine of fairness throughout the herd. Thus, they would come up with new governing regulation to change this. Like all government regulations, it would be called a “meaningful” name like the Herd Fairness Doctrine or something like that.

The doctrine would enforce some sort of handicap upon all the gazelles in the herd so that no gazelle would be able to run faster than the slowest member of the herd. This could be implemented by the attachment of some type of physical contraption to the rear legs of the gazelles such as rocks; the faster the gazelle, the heavier the rocks that would be tied to its legs.

Barack and Nancy would be heralded by a majority in the herd as they had always envied how fast the fastest members of the herd could run. Things would finally be fair now and the herd would experience a new era of happiness and prosperity.

An interesting thing would happen, however, over the course of time. The herd would grow weaker.

Before the Herd Fairness Doctrine, the lions feasted mainly on the weaker, older or sicker members of the herd. Once in a while, though, they would snare a healthy member of the herd through a surprise ambush.

Now, the lions had an equal (fair) shot at all members of the herd, and the strongest gazelles were going down at the same rate as the weakest ones. This meant that the next breeding season, there were fewer of these hardy males available for mating. This of course sacrificed the quality of the gene pool. Each generation of gazelles would be a little bit slower than the previous one.

After a course of several decades, the gazelles would find themselves prey to a growing number of predators besides just lions as they became easier and easier to catch. As a result, the final outcome of the herd would be uncertain.

This little analogy encompasses a great deal of truth. The liberal wing of our government is continually trying to instill their economic fairness doctrine. Instead of tying rocks to our most productive members of society, they saddle them with high taxes. These progressive taxes ensure that the more productive you are, the higher you are taxed.

When Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi take over next year, they will accelerate these tax rates in order to appease those who are engulfed by envy and “fairness.”

The results, unfortunately, will be similar as it would be for the gazelles, a weaker economy with diminishing opportunities. Therefore, as with the gazelles, our future will also be uncertain.

Brad Rudisail

Peachtree City, Ga.