Leadership in Action – AUNZ English – 201809

You Can Have It If You Want It!

A MESSAGE FROM CEO FRANK VANDERSLOOT

A lot is being said these days about the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I think pretty much everyone would agree—that’s not a good thing! Nations in various societies have used various methodologies to address this very issue over the past century. Marxism, communism, and various forms of socialism have come up with programs that basically consist of taking assets from the rich and giving them to the poor. This process is called “redistributing the wealth.” This approach has never been successful. It might sound great to those who are poor, but throughout history such endeavours have failed miserably. Taking assets from the rich and giving those assets to the poor has always ended up in disaster—causing those societies who have tried it to spiral into various levels of nationwide poverty. At Melaleuca, we believe we have a better way—in fact a much more successful way—of solving the problem. We are indeed champions of the “little guy.” But we realize that just taking from the haves and giving it to the have-nots will never be successful because it rewards failure and penalizes success. It’s a universal principle that whatever you reward you will get more of, and what you penalize you will get less of. So rewarding failure and penalizing success only gets you more failure and less success. The Soviet Union, East Germany, communist China, and Cuba are economies that tried various forms of socialism and ended up in dismal failures. So we are not advocates of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. But we are advocates of a much better and much more successful endeavour. We believe the answer lies not in redistributing wealth, but in redistributing opportunity. In other words, we know that simply taking assets from the wealthy and giving to the poor will always end in failure, so we simply propose levelling out the playing field by giving the poor a much bigger opportunity. Clearly, in all societies, the wealthy have much more opportunity than the poor. And they capitalize on those opportunities which create more wealth for them. So Melaleuca is engaged in redistributing the opportunity for wealth—making it possible for average Americans and Canadians to

“…Melaleuca is engaged in redistributing the

opportunity for wealth—making it possible for average Americans and Canadians to compete successfully with corporate conglomerates…”

2 SEPTEMBER 2018 | MELALEUCA.COM

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