Winston Churchill said, "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." The school board in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio is doing their best to make the transition from Liberal to Conservative occur at an earlier age.

The Cuyahoga Falls High School Tigers Marching Band has been planning a trip to Disney World for some time. No public funds are used for the trip. The trip is paid for by student and parent-led fundraisers. All but 26 of the band's 185 members are signed up for the trip.

The marching band has been taking trips for more than 30 years. While some members' families or relatives pay the full amount of the trips, most students participate in sales, car washes, or other fundraising events to cover part (or even all) of the cost...

Cooper Tedquist, a freshman, sold entertainment books, Pampered Chef products, and candy during soccer games and worked as a pet sitter, dog walker, and litter box cleaner to earn money for the Disney World trip.

Junior Torry Breehl washed cars, participated in "dining to donate" events at local restaurants and sold items to raise money.

They were among two of the approximately 25 students and 50 parents who sat through the four-hour meeting Tuesday to find out if their work paid off.

But this year the school board has added a bit of a wrinkle. This week, the board unanimously approved the trip with a significant caveat.

If any of the 26 students who are not on the trip roster notify marching band director Brandon DuVall by Jan. 29 that they are not going because of financial hardship, the band program must find a way to pay for the student's trip. If DuVall can't come up with the money, no one goes.

The band program does not have a pot of public money on which to draw for the trip. So the students and parents who worked hard to earn money for the trip need to figure out a way to pay for the students and parents who did not work to earn money, or the trip is off.

Long before I hit my mid-twenties I had read Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper", Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Orwell's Animal Farm. I remember watching Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" in high school social studies and reading Machiavelli's The Prince in college history. My guess is some or all of that material has been filtered out of most high school and college curricula today. And even if it were still in the curriculum, many of the messages are too subtle and nuanced for young people to understand.

Not so for the members of the Cuyahoga Falls High School Tigers Marching Band. The lesson on dangers of collectivism administered this week by the local school board was about as subtle and nuanced as a punch in the nose.