'Pawn Stars' Host Unloads on 'Participation Trophy' Generation, Puts an End to Socialism Debate
“Pawn Stars” icon Rick Harrison isn’t particularly a fan of the participation trophy — and, in an appearance this weekend on Mark Levin’s Fox News show, he let everyone know how he felt about the ultimate symbol of the snowflake generation and how it’s influencing the left to move toward socialism.
“We’re raising an entire generation that gets a participation trophy?” Harrison told the “Life, Liberty & Levin” host.
Levin, 60, then asked Harrison, 53, about members of their own generation who are pushing the snowflake-socialist agenda.
“I mean, Chuck Schumer, he’s our generation, Nancy Pelosi, she’s a generation beyond, but you get the point,” Levin said.
“I truly believe that if you’re older and you’re educated and you’re touting socialism, you’re either not that intelligent or you’re evil,” Harrison said. “It comes down to that.”
“Power hungry, maybe?” Levin responded.
Rick Harrison: "We're raising an entire generation that gets a participation trophy." pic.twitter.com/JXnL0mUyMT
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 6, 2018
Harrison concurred. “Which, power hungry is basically ‘evil’ in most situations. And they’re completely intellectually dishonest.”
The participation trophy is an interesting metaphor for the current movement of Democrats toward socialism.
The basic argument of the new socialists can be safely reduced to this: Stuff ought to be free (or freer), and someone ought to pay for it.
This is particularly popular among young people with college debt who don’t understand why health insurance costs are so high and blame it not on Obamacare (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act) and other damage wreaked on the free market system by the left, but on the fact that some ineffable conservative force is bent on ruining American lives.
As for college loans, while there’s no denying the cost of a degree has gone up, that’s certainly not going to be attenuated by making college “free.” The problem of spiraling costs is a lack of free market checks on the system due to constant infusions of “free” money, something that’s only going to get worse when government involvement in the financing of higher education is increased by an exponential degree.
Then there’s health care, a sordid mess created by virtually every attempt to meddle in the free market since World War II. The newest left-wing “solution” is single-payer, universal coverage, “Medicare for all” or some sort of amalgam of those approaches. How this is going to improve anything is anyone’s guess, since government created the problem in the first place — but you know, free stuff.
This is the free stuff generation. Free college. Free health care. Free trophies. Now, I’m a millennial, but only technically. Having been born in 1980, literally the earliest one can be born and still be a member, I blessedly missed most of the excesses of the snowflake generation.
I received no trophy for hitting a solid .000 in my final season of Little League. Was I devastated? No. I realized that maybe joining the cross-country team was more my speed, and that was that.
Did the fact that I was terrible baseball player in a different time prime me for realizing the benefits of the free market and the dangers of government intervention?
I’m not saying that there’s an absolute correlation. But from what I’m seeing out of those just slightly younger than me, it certainly didn’t hurt.
And apparently, experiencing the vicissitudes of life hasn’t hurt Rick Harrison either.
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