An economics professor at a local college claimed that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich—a great equalizer.

The professor responded by proposing an experiment in which his class would be run like Obama's plan. All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the third test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor explained that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.

— Attributed to Cecil Greicke.

"A playful life," writes Dr. Stuart Brown, "contributes directly to the capacity to approach and solve complex life problems."

Here's an excerpt from Krista Tippett's conversation with Dr. Brown on Speaking of Faith that was posted today:

If you're living a life without it, yeah, you're life can go on OK. You're going to survive, you're not going to die if you don't play. But it's kind of an endurance contest. Some of the essence of life is being missed. And that's one thing and that's important to me. And probably, the other thing that we haven't talked about but which has really struck me since I have been a student of play is looking at the biological design of being human.

I'll give you an analogy. A Labrador retriever plays through its lifetime and dies a child. A wolf sort of gives up childish thing, double-scent marks, has alpha behavior, governs its reproduction, and is a very successful animal if it isn't killed off by humans — but doesn't play much.

But if you look at the human and look at our nervous systems and our, what I would call our physiognomy, the way we look and the way we're designed, we really are designed to retain immature playful-like attributes throughout our life cycle. That's a fundamental part of our design. We know that human beings are now capable of neurogenesis, of new neural development throughout the lifetime, whereas most other creatures cannot. That's a design part of being human.

Now take that into policy matters. Do we parent that way? Do we teach our kids in school that way? Do we take advantage of the design? Do we also see that there are hazards? The permanent adolescence of the human being means we may be subject to irrational, impulsive behavior. Maybe our laws and our institutions should help reflect that a bit more. If we don't play, what are the consequences? We're more reptilian. We're more savage. We're more — we lack some of those features that I've mentioned earlier in the program.

Even as a trained psychiatrist, I couldn't really figure out where [play] came from, why it's there. But when you see animals and humans who are deprived of it, they are fixed and rigid in their responses to complex stimuli. They don't have a repertoire of choices that are as broad as their intelligence should allow them to have. And they don't seek out novelty and newness, which is part of an essential aspect of play, both in animals and humans.

So if you look at the human situation, at least for the last 200,000 years or so, our capacity as a species to adapt, whether we're in the Arctic or the tropics, the desert or a rain forest, appears to me to be related significantly to our capacity and, as developing creatures, to play. And then if you look more closely at the human being, you find that the human being really is designed biologically to play throughout the life cycle. And that, and from my standpoint as a clinician, when one really doesn't play at all or very little in adulthood, there are consequences: rigidities, depression, lack of adaptability, no irony — you know, things that are pretty important, that enable us to cope in a world of many demands.

I think we know a lot about it through the wonderful laboratory rat. They make a particular squeak, that's inaudible to humans, as a signal that they want to play. They then wrestle with each other and pin each other, particularly during their juvenile times. They engage in what a number of investigators call hardwired rough-and-tumble play.

And the outcome of that is quite striking, because if the laboratory investigator stops the rats specifically from playing, there are some dire consequences. They do not socialize normally. They can't recognize friend from foe. And there are other very specific kinds of outcomes, which to my way of thinking, to some degree, match some of the human outcomes. But, of course, they're in rat language and human outcomes are much more intricate.

None of the murderers I studied engaged in normal rough-and-tumble play. Absolutely none. And if you extrapolate the rough-and-tumble play backwards into animals, they also appear to need it to be able to properly find their place in the troop or the tribe or the pack and develop a social reality to meet their needs.