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In Defense of My Participation Trophy – Article by Tricia Beck-Peter

In Defense of My Participation Trophy – Article by Tricia Beck-Peter

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The New Renaissance HatTricia Beck-Peter
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I have one participation trophy, from a youth soccer league I joined when I was five. I joined the league, not because I aspired to a career of professional athleticism, but because my mother wanted me to try a sport.

I was awful at soccer. The coach called me “flower child,” because I would grab my teammates by the hand when we ran drills. The coach imagined my motives to be peace and love and friendship, when in reality I was just trying to pull the slower kids forward. My motives were not derived from the hippie upbringing he imagined had shaped me, but out of compassion for those even less athletically inclined than myself.

Too Much Reward?

My participation trophy is the target of ridicule by smug baby-boomers who spout an “up by the bootstraps” ideology. For them, it is a symbol of mollification and complacency. They think it makes me too soft to handle the pressure of this world. This five-inch-tall piece of cheap, gold-painted plastic threatens their entire worldview.

Do they think that children don’t understand participation trophies? Do they think they don’t notice that the better players get bigger, shinier pieces of cheap gold plastic? They do. Even at five I knew my trophy did not mean I was destined to be a famous soccer player.

The trophy meant that I tried. The trophy meant that every Saturday morning, despite the skinned knee earned in that week’s practice that was still healing, I showed up to play. It meant that despite the heat and the way the grass made me itch and the fact that I had never scored a single goal, I kept going to practice. It meant I kept trying to help the slow kids run faster. It meant I kept trying.

Is it so evil to encourage a child to try by offering them a reward? Those who decry participation trophies will say that trying matters less than succeeding, but I disagree. Trying is a requirement for succeeding. To have a fulfilled life, you must try many more things than you succeed in. To accomplish anything, you must try. That trophy is not a pat on the back and a grudging “good enough.” It is a reminder of the time you spent trying.

Trying Is Good

It’s easy to pick on millennials. We enjoy a higher quality of life than any previous generation. The draft is over, there’s a vaccine for polio, and we can watch color TV on the tiny computers that live in our pockets and let us make phone calls. To the outside observer, we are soft, entitled, and complacent.

Yet Forbes calls us “the true entrepreneur generation.” Our smartphones are loaded with more than Netflix and Buzzfeed, they’re loaded with investment apps like Acorns and business software like Square. One study showed that 63% of 20-somethings want to start a business. While they may not be currently starting their businesses, 90% of millennials recognize entrepreneurship as a mentality, meaning they’re entrepreneurial about their work in settings outside the old “entrepreneurs start businesses” model of generations prior.

Maybe this mindset is not in spite of participation trophies, but in part inspired by them. Entrepreneurs fail. They fail all the time, and they keep trying. They keep trying the same way they did when they were children in grass-stained soccer jerseys, in leagues where they earned participation trophies.


Tricia Beck-Peter is a development intern at FEE, and a graduate of Flagler College.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The CBO Sees the Economic Cliff Ahead – Article by Ron Paul

The CBO Sees the Economic Cliff Ahead – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
June 19, 2012
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In early June 2012 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued its annual long-term budget outlook report, and the 2012 numbers are not promising. In fact, the CBO estimates that federal debt will rise to 70% of GDP by the end of the year– the highest percentage since World War II. The report also paints a stark picture of entitlement spending, as retiring Baby Boomers will cause government spending on health care, Social Security, and Medicare to explode as a percentage of GDP in coming years.

While the mainstream media correctly characterized the CBO report as highly pessimistic, they also ignored longstanding errors of methodology in CBO estimates. And those errors tend to support arguments for higher taxes and government spending, when in fact America needs exactly the opposite.

As Paul Roderick Gregory explained in a recent Forbes column (http://tinyurl.com/cf746dl), CBO has always applied wrongheaded assumptions inherent in Keynesian economics when forecasting future deficits – no matter how many times both history and economic theory have proven such assumptions incorrect. In particular, CBO seems wedded to two enduring Keynesian myths: First, that higher taxes necessarily increase federal revenue and have no negative effect on the economy; and second, that lower government spending hurts the economy.  Neither is true, of course.

CBO also fails to factor in unexpected wars and expensive foreign entanglements, and we should not assign too much validity to predictive models based on peace. Judging from the actions and rhetoric coming from both parties in Washington, new military entanglements in Syria and Iran may well spike military spending in coming years.

Despite these sobering budget realities, the CBO report suggests that a solution is possible with merely a few minor adjustments in the way Congress handles economic issues. But what we need are not minor adjustments, but rather a fundamental shift in our philosophy of government.  If we could come to our senses about the proper role of government in America, and what level of government interference is appropriate in a free economy, we would quickly find that there is no reason for government to spend so much, borrow so much, and tax so much.

If we simply allowed markets to work free of governmental or Federal Reserve interference, bad debt would be liquidated relatively quickly and malinvestment would be curtailed. Scaled-back regulations would encourage businesses to expand. Lower taxes would jump start investment and spur job creation.

This is not rocket science, it is Economics 101. All it would take is for government to get out of the way. There would be some short term pain, of course, but only by allowing the bubble to burst and bad debt to liquidate can we ever hope to begin building a real economy again.

The CBO report was alarming to most simply because they know neither party will take the steps necessary to avoid eventual fiscal calamity. Instead, despite their rhetoric, both parties want to maintain the fantasy that “deficits don’t matter.” But the CBO report, combined with what is happening in Greece and the European Union, should finally make the undeniable case that economic realities apply even to industrialized first world economies. We must take concrete steps today to avoid having America become the next Greece.

Representative Ron Paul (R – TX), MD, is a Republican candidate for U. S. President. See his Congressional webpage and his official campaign website. 

This article has been released by Dr. Paul into the public domain and may be republished by anyone in any manner.