America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great by M. D. Ben Carson Page A

opportunity at each bank to receive a credit card with a $20,000 limit. He accepted all ten of the credit cards and used the credit of $200,000 to start his own engineering firm. As his inventive genius was given the opportunity it needed to succeed, his company grew and prospered, and he ultimately sold it for a nine-figure amount when he retired at age forty, which was his dream. Even though he is now extremely wealthy, he continues to work and engage in charitable endeavors to advance science and engineering education in America.
    My friend’s story of being taken advantage of is only one example of how greed can manifest itself within the capitalist system. Unfortunately, however, greed is a significant drawback for
any
economic model, including communism and socialism. No one can justify ascribing a flaw in human character to one economic model or another, for greed is a human weakness seen in all societies.
    In the Bible, God instituted a system of tithing, which meant giving 10 percent of one’s profits back to God. Since God is all powerful and owns everything, he certainly does not need any percentage of our profits. So why did he institute tithing? Could it be that he understood that all human beings are subject to greed and that by requiring them to give away 10 percent of their profits they might learn a valuable lesson about not hoarding and about voluntarily sharing with others?
U P THE E CONOMIC L ADDER
    As a member of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, 2 I could easily fill this entire book with others’ inspiring rags-to-riches stories. If you think long and hard enough, you probably know someone yourself with a wonderful success story. My inventor friend worked very hard and part of his motivation was his own financial independence. But on the wayto achieving financial independence, he created many jobs, and I know others who also became financially independent because of their association with this man’s company. Sometimes the creation of jobs and the wealth that are side effects of someone else’s efforts and creativity get labeled as “trickle-down economics,” because inventing needed products creates jobs and opportunities for others and therefore should be encouraged if the aim is to have a prosperous society.
    Many Americans understand this correlation between their own hard work and success, a cause-effect relationship that led to the can-do attitude that brought us to the economic table with the big boys of the world when we were still a fledgling nation barely fifty years old. As our country developed, so too did a sense of personal responsibility and pride in the ability to take care of oneself and one’s family. People were willing to take menial jobs in order to support their families with the intention of increasing their knowledge and skills, thus increasing their value and eventually moving them up the economic ladder. There were a variety of economic outcomes for persons depending on their productivity and value to an organization or to their community. In other words, the harder you worked and the more value you produced, the higher you moved up the economic ladder of financial success.
    Of course, there are many in our society who bring only entertainment value, and American society is as enamored with celebrity as British society is with royalty. Although I have nothing against sports and entertainment, I believe there is a danger of getting lost in a fantasy world while neglecting the serious things in life such as education and productive work. The enormous salaries paid to sports stars and entertainers lead people to believe that they are the most important people in our society, or have the most important jobs. I believe they are as important as anyone else, but we must ask ourselves what will maintain the pinnacle position of our nation in the world: the ability to shoot a twenty-five-foot jump shot, or the ability to solve a quadratic