The Stupid Tree

I thought this article from the Von Mises Institute was too rich to pass up, and certainly deserving a mention here at Curmudgeon Central HQ: an all-out assault on Shel Silverstein's famous children's book Giving Tree.

Given the idiotic assignation of human feelings to the tree in a story that depicts an odd man-tree friendship, it is hard to see the appeal of this book. Those drawn to it, it seems to me, tend to have a left-of-center orientation, and they like the message that it is better to spend a life giving than to spend one taking. If only the government could inculcate that value into the taxpayers! The book assumes that, surely, only the selfish would object to such a message ...

Halfway through my most recent reading of the book with my daughter, and knowing the ending, it hit me: this wasn’t a noble giving tree at all. This was a stupid tree. In giving to the boy-man at every opportunity, the tree thought it was doing right. Instead, it created a dependency relationship in his human friend that lasts his whole life and that leaves both impoverished. This is not a quality one would wish for a friend, and even more so, for one’s son or daughter entering into marriage.

Parents who raise their kids in this manner are bad parents who create selfish kids; governments that treat whole classes of people in this manner are bad governments that fashion dependency classes that cling to the State in a way similarto the way the boy-man depends on his tree-friend.

Now that is vituperation.