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RUSH: This is Denae in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It says she’s 15 years old. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Mr. Limbaugh.

RUSH: I’m fine. Thank you.

CALLER: I wanted to call and talk to you because when I was a kid, my mom would listen to you all the time on the radio, and for some reason you really scared me. You always sounded very angry to me.

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: But now —

RUSH: Well, I still do. You’ve got nine more years of being afraid of me.

CALLER: (laughing) No, I was actually gonna say, I took a class on government, and now I get your passion for what you say.

RUSH: Oh! Cool, okay. Thank you.

CALLER: Yeah. I just wrote a paper on one of the principles that the Founders originally set to protect our freedom, which was the freedom of equal opportunity, rather than equal things.

RUSH: That’s right. Equal opportunity, rather than equality of result.

CALLER: Yes. Because it made me think about it. As you let the government control your life, when you ask them to take care of you, the more they do take care of you, the more control they get of your life.

RUSH: Now, wait a minute here. Wait a minute. What, in the first place, why were you reading about the Founding Fathers? Was this something to do with school?

CALLER: I took a class in my co-op about a book called The Five Thousand Year Leap, which talks about all of the original principles and things the Founders set forth to protect our freedom in our country.

RUSH: The class was not part of your day-to-day schooling?

CALLER: It was, actually. It’s my government class. I’m homeschooled, so I get —

RUSH: Oh, okay. That’s what I wanted to know. So you’re homeschooled.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Because this doesn’t happen in the public education. What I was getting at, what the hell do you know about the Founding Fathers? They’re not taught. The Founding Fathers and how this country came to be isn’t taught anymore, not in too many places. So that’s good. See, you were immediately, probably because of your parents, drawn to it for some reason. At 15, you’ve already been able to make an important distinction between the difference in equality of opportunity and equality of result. We live in a country where most people — or way too many people — think that freedom and equality mean everybody is the same and it’s not fair if somebody’s better off or has more than everybody else. And so they agree with policies that will take away from others.

CALLER: And also, when everybody has the same stuff, there is no motivation to do better. When you’re guaranteed the same pay and the same amount of everything as everyone else, what’s driving you to be better?

RUSH: Well, that’s exactly right. But in the socialist utopia, you’re not supposed to have ambition. And the reason is that everybody has different ambitions, and ambition is the route to evil in a totalitarian or a utopian statist society. Wanting to do better than what you have or are is what they consider to be a major problem they have to deal with. They need to wipe that out in people. They need to curb this desire that people have to do better, to improve, to acquire more, to achieve more, they have to chill that. And that is why you’ll hear President Obama, in talking about retirement income, “Nobody needs more than two and a half million dollars, that’s all anybody needs.” Well, frankly, it’s not his business what anybody needs. It’s not his job to determine it. He doesn’t have the power, but he wants it, and the Democrat Party does.

But you have steered yourself here into some important concepts. And at 15, the fact that you understand them is heartening to me because you’ve stated these things in extremely logical, understandable ways. Ways that most people, Denae, don’t even understand, your age particularly. I mean, you don’t know how right you are. If everybody has the same thing, then the idea is that nobody’s gonna want more. Well, somebody out there is. Somebody’s always gonna want more. Somebody’s always gonna want to be better. No matter what the utopians try, somebody’s always gonna screw it up. That’s why it never works. That’s why it never has worked.

People are always going to yearn for more freedom, for more liberty, to be whatever they want, to be the best they can be. And that’s why governments have to put people in dungeons if they get too uppity. That’s the history of the world. That’s why the United States is so exceptional. The United States is the first nation in the history of the world which was formulated, founded, assembled on the context, on the precept of human liberty and freedom. That’s why we’re exceptional. It’s not that we’re better people or smarter or any of that. We’re the freest people that have ever been. That’s why we’re the lone superpower of the world. And that’s why so many people are worried about what’s happening. Because that freedom and that liberty and that ambition, those things are the greatest threats to big government types that you can imagine.

That’s what they have to quell. That’s what they have to erase from people. And they’ve been successful. They have done that. They’ve destroyed people’s dreams and ambitions way, way too successfully in this country. It’s a shame. And that’s why we conservatives are always opposed to liberalism and socialism, ’cause it ultimately is dehumanizing. As opposed to being compassionate, as opposed to being loving, it’s the exact opposite. It imposes things on people against their will. It is a structure that violates, in my estimation, the notion of human creativity and creation. It attempts to limit and rein in and control the natural yearnings of the human spirit. And that’s why it has always ultimately failed. It’s why it has never, ever worked. But they don’t stop trying. Anyway, congratulations to you for picking it up at your age. Don’t lose it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hey, folks, a pop quiz. Prior to capitalism, how did anybody get rich? How did anybody get wealthy prior to capitalism? They had to steal it. They had to commit crime. No, no. Seriously. They had to commit crime or steal it. Capitalism enabled people to get wealthy by providing services and doing things for other people. In socialism or communism, the only way you get rich is to steal it.

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