We follow the same rules in our family, and one of them is: Always stop to buy lemonade from kids who are entrepreneurial enough to open up a little business.
My brother immediately pulled over to the side of the road and asked about the choices.
The three young girls — under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them — explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.
Then my brother asked how much each item cost.
“Oh, no,” they replied in unison, “they’re all free!”
I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: “But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I’m really thirsty!”
His fiancee smiled and commented, “Isn’t that cute. They have the spirit of giving.”
That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.
“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”
I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.
I hope no one ever clues this woman in to what goes on in kindergartens across the country. All that propaganda about sharing and cooperation, when what they really need is a Lord of the Flies-style environment to separate the producers from the parasites!
As the urban philosopher Omar Little once said, “Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.” Fucksakes, man, whatever happened to the idea of noblesse oblige? Carnegie and Rockefeller would probably look like bleeding hearts to a Randroid cultist like this, what with all that philanthropy they engaged in.
Anyway, Mrs. LifeoftheParty mentioned earlier that they were riding through her brother’s “upscale neighborhood” when they encountered this Marxist outpost. Later, she says:

Or maybe it’s the other way around: The kids are learning from the society around them. No one has ever taught them there’s no free lunch — and all they see is “free,” not the result of hard work, and saving, and scrimping.

I agree! Rich kids probably have learned from the “society around them”; namely, that you can take all the risks you want with other people’s money while creating nothing of value and still demand exorbitant rewards while standing in the smoldering wreckage you leave for other people to clean up. Private profit, public subsidy. But somehow I suspect that’s not what our Galtian heroine meant by that…