By Louis Avallone
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In a shopping mall, recently, I saw a young man wearing a Nike T-shirt that said, in large bold letters, “Hard Work Pays Off.” Obviously, this was a reference to the great preparation and training athletes undertake to play their sport successfully. Michael Jordan spent his off seasons taking hundreds of jump shots a day, for example. Award-winning pitcher Roy Halladay regularly puts in a 90-minute workout before his teammates even make it to the field. Another example are Olympic gold- medalists and No. 1-ranked duo Venus and Serena Williams, who were up hitting tennis balls at 6 a.m. from the time they were 7- and 8-years- old.
Then there’s Kobe Bryant, the leading scorer in Los Angeles Lakers history, who just wants to be remembered as a hard worker, saying, “To think of me as a person that’s overachieved, that would mean a lot to me. That means I put a lot of work in and squeezed every ounce of juice out of this orange that I could.”
So this got me thinking about “hard work.” There’s no one out there talking about how “lucky” Bryant is to have been the NBA scoring champion (twice) or to have led his team to win the NBA championship five times. There’s no one saying he’s made enough points now, even though he has already scored more than 30,000 points in his career and is ranked in the Top 5 of all NBA players in history for scoring. Despite his success, no one would even consider suggesting it’s unfair he scores so often or that history ought to be revised so that some of his points can be redistributed to his other teammates, who arguably deserve some of those points since Kobe didn’t score all those points on the court by himself.
The same holds true for basketball great Michael Jordan. Even though he holds the NBA records for highest career regular season scoring average (30.12 points per game) and highest career playoff scoring average (33.45 points per game) and led his team to win the NBA championship six times, no one even questions the “fairness” of so many points being scored by a single player or that he received so many awards during his career, even though there were other players on the court with him that worked hard also and would have liked to have scored lots of points and won awards just the same.
But while it seems ridiculous to consider redistributing a player’s points at the end of a game to lower-scoring players by taking points away from folks like Kobe or Michael (who obviously have more points than they know what to do with), this is precisely what some folks in Washington are doing by raising taxes on folks that have more “points” than most. And even though “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard,” none of that occurs to these same folks in Washington – and it may never – as long as the fallacy in raising taxes doesn’t matter to millions of voters, either.
Can you imagine telling Kobe he needed to “get some skin in the game” right after he scored 81 points in a single game (the second-highest point total in NBA history)? Or that he needed to offer an attitude of “shared sacrifice,” so his teammates might have more opportunities to score the same amount of points that he does, even though he’s doing more than his “fair share” to make sure the team wins?
As a coach, would you ever tell him that at a certain point he’s made enough points (like Obama said at a certain point, “You’ve made enough money.”)?
Of course not. That’s ridiculous. But this is the essence of modern- day liberalism. It seeks to minimize the power and responsibility of the individual to affect its own success … or failure. Even an economics professor from Cornell University wrote in The New York Times recently that “talent and hard work are neither necessary nor sufficient for economic success.” You see what we’re dealing with here?
But Michael Jordan explains his success this way: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
For Michael Jordan, success wasn’t rooted in the equality of the outcomes but rather in the equality of opportunities to fail. The folks in Washington just don’t get it – instead of incentivizing hard work, they virtually demonize it by taxing it.
There’s a reason that hard work is at the root of success on the court or on the field whether you are Michael Jordan or Venus and Serena Williams. It’s because hard work works. Period. And you don’t have to dribble a basketball to figure out why.