The islanders lived on the fish and vegetables that were easily gathered and then spent the rest of the day swimming and socializing.
Some cynic said that when the white man came to the South Pacific, he brought with him the four great advances of civilization: the Bible, pants, guns, and syphilis. He also brought time clocks and paychecks.
The native women did learn to covet "stuff." (The famous philosopher George Carlin did a wonderful treatise on the concept of "stuff.") When that conversion was made, it became easy for plantation owners to get the men to sign their "X" to papers which were legal documents consenting to an often unspecified period of work in return for a substance (called "money") which could be exchanged for the stuff the women now coveted.
Bleeding hearts liberals decry this example of capitalism in action and assert that the signed legal documents constituted an egregious example of fraud.
Radio personality Mike Malloy recently hinted that there is a similar motivation relationship for the military's health care. He says that universal health care would destroy the allure of free medical care provided to the folks who join the various branches of the all volunteer military which protects the United States. He snidely suggests that may explain why Republicans are working against the Health Care Reform Bill.
Republicans love to foster the folk legends about self-made millionaires. According to their philosophy of "self determination," a poor but honest disk jockey from Sacramento can become a millionaire by giving advice and encouragement to the workers of the world, or at least the United States. Democrats refute this by spreading myth-busting unsubstantiated information that the aforementioned inspirational example was actually the grandson of President Eisenhower's ambassador to India and that he got his first radio gig when his family bought a local radio station.
According to Republicans, John D. Rockefeller was a gracious grandfatherly self-made millionaire who bestowed a generous dime tip to newspaper boys at a time when the papers sold for less than a nickel. The Democrats used a whisper campaign to paint the fellow as a ruthless cad who would destroy competitors and then deceived the public by hiring the same Public Relations firm that Hitler had selected to improve his image in America during the Thirties.
Sometime in the past, a wise old man revealed to this columnist that there is a curse on money and that the rich people, by taking the money from the poor, are thereby eliminating the danger of the curse and thus protecting the poor from danger by assuming the risk themselves.
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