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First, I don't believe this for a second. This sounds a lot more like something you'd read in a forwarded email than something that would actually happen. No educated economist would deem any policy that's come from the Obama administration to constitute socialism, and no self-respecting teacher would let their political beliefs have any sway in their grading, or set their students up to fail just to make a point. If this story is true, then as a teacher I'm embarrassed to belong to the same profession as this instructor. And of course while we're on the subject, there's no such thing as a community college instructor who has never failed a student.

So let's say this actually happened. There certainly are community college instructors out there who are opinionated and unprofessional enough to do something like this after all. First there are flaws in the model - with grades we're not working with a finite resource. There are enough points to go around for everyone to get an A, whereas there's not enough money to go around for everyone to be a millionaire. Likewise in the instructor's experiment there was equality across the board with respect to high and low performers - An F student slacking could have a negative impact that was far disproportional to that of an A student working hard. By comparison, you could enact every single policy Obama has ever recommended and the resultant effect would still be the opposite in the real world - the middle and top of the socio-economic food chain generate far more of a positive impact to GDP than the poor and destitute draw from it.

Finally the five truths that this fictional faulty experiment claims to prove are fundamentally flawed and/or irrelevant:

1. No one wants to legislate the poor into prosperity. There is however a strong desire to legislate the poor into opportunity, and the cost of doing so is not so high that it would somehow make the wealthy no longer prosperous.
2. This statement assumes that all recipients of social benefits that are aimed to get them "back on their feet" are permanent, and it likewise fails to take into account the drain that the destitute place on all of us, including the wealthy.
3. The people from whom money is "taken" won't miss it. When we talk about having a 35% tax bracket we're talking about $250k plus earners (less than the amount that Mitt Romney describes as "not much") paying less than $10k more than they currently do... which oddly enough is the same amount of money Romney was happy lay down on a bet with Rick Perry.
4. You also cannot increase overall wealth and prosperity by concentrating it in the hands of a relative few, particularly when that relative few have a tendency to save money rather than spend it, and when they do spend it they often do so overseas.
5. The real-life scenarios in which social programs keep someone afloat are far from glamorous. When there is a upward mobility at all levels of the food chain, it's a rare few who are actually content to live on government cheese. If anything the opposite is true: the rest of us work harder because we don't want to be the guy on food stamps or unemployment.

So allow me to show you what a real teacher does when there's a class in this situation - say you have 20 students: 4 are getting A's, 4 are getting B's, 4 have C's, 4 D's, and 4 F's. A good teacher will certainly cultivate those A's and B's and continue to challenge them. But there's also an amount of outreach that a good teacher will do to the D's and F's... not to the extent that the higher performers are ignored mind you. In fact, a good teacher will engage the A and B students in ways that the D and F students are brought into play as well - as it so happens, peer learning is an incredibly effective technique because forcing oneself to explain an understood concept to another actually increases the level of understanding of both people involved. But also a good teacher over time won't distribute their time and energy evenly among those D and F students. An important part of teaching is identifying the ones who don't give a crap, and spending more time with the ones who aren't lost causes. Helping those who hel themselves. The ones who have given up? Well there's still a bare minimum that they get - you grade their tests and you inform them that continued lack of performance will result in them failing the class (the food stamps of teaching, if you will). But the ones who demonstrate a willingness to work hard and dig themselves out of their hole? They're the ones who deserve more time and energy so that you create for them an opportunity to succeed.

And that's all anyone's talking about here - equality of opportunity.

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