It’s difficult to understand liberals when you don’t live in their sheltered cocoon of participation trophies, faux caring and feel-good lies.

Those of us who labor in the real world – who built this country, who make it work and who defend it – deal with reality. Most liberals don’t. And that can be baffling, because when they speak they sound like visitors from the planet Nimrod.

Now, some liberals do understand the real world. They are the cynical liberal icons, the ones who know their entire ideology is a scam designed to wring power and wealth from the gullible.

They are the rich ones who cry about poverty and racism then gleefully consign poor and minority kids to public school failure factories by doing the bidding of their unionized teacher partners and torpedoing educational choice. Their own kids wouldn’t get within a mile of an inner city public school, except maybe to swing by in the Mercedes C-Class they got for their 16th birthday to buy some weed from the gangbangers infesting it.

These liberals are the ones who demand we double energy prices and trade in our cars for seats on scuzzy busses driven by union drones because of global warming. The fact that it never actually gets any warmer won’t stop a liberal from hopping into his private jet and flying off to ink a deal to sell his network to some Mideast oil sheik for a zillion petro dollars.

Hard Truth Number 1: If you are a liberal who really believes that your liberal heroes actually believe in liberalism, you are a sucker and a fool. Maybe even foolish enough to let your daughter take a drive with one across a bridge.

Hard Truth Number 2 concerns the minimum wage and the delusion that labor should be valued not between those who provide it and those who pay for it, but by you based upon your own subjective notion of “fairness.” The hard truth is that you are worth precisely what an employer will pay for you, and nothing more.

Take it from someone who employs a bunch of people – if I have to pay more for you at the unskilled bottom of the ladder, assuming I don’t cut low-end positions, that money is coming out of everyone else’s raises. Yeah, you warm, wonderful, caring, and compassionate paternalists supporting raising the minimum wage are going to pay for it, because I’m sure as hell not.

Unlike many of you liberals, I started out flipping burgers at the Foster City Carls, Jr., for $3.10 an hour. I didn’t have one of those fake internships or create one of those bogus charities high school kids today manufacture to impress the admissions flunkies at overpriced, underworthy colleges. I worked. I hated it, but I learned valuable skills. These skills made it so that today I don’t have to bag fries, mop out toilets or toil as Michael Moore’s muffin wrangler.

Here’s Hard Truth Number 3: If you need government to set you a “living wage,” it’s because you have failed to make yourself worth a living wage. A higher minimum wage is merely a subsidy to ensure you don’t have to put in the effort necessary to earn what you want. I’m unclear why your failure to work hard, gain skills and not do the stupid things that lead a 30 year old to be making minimum wage morally compels me to give you my money.

Next is Hard Truth Number 4: You shouldn’t have kids if you can’t afford them. A corollary to this self-evident concept is that you shouldn’t have sex unless you can pay for your own birth control. Those of us who don’t choose to live lives of chaos should not have to be taxed money from our kids so the government can give it to your kids because you are too lazy, stupid and/or drug-addled to support them yourself.

That brings us to Hard Truth Number 5: Liberalism depends on a huge number of Americans being losers who can’t support themselves. Broken or nonexistent families are the root of most of society’s pathologies, and they are also essential to the Democrat demographic model. The party’s very existence depends on there being a pool of serfs desperate for handouts distributed by Democrat overlords. If 90% of Americans were self-sufficient and refused to trade their dignity for a few scraps in the form of various welfare payouts, there would be no modern Democrat Party.

In other words, your party must keep you poor, ignorant and helpless to survive. The Democrat mascot shouldn’t be the donkey; it should be the tick.

Here’s Hard Truth Number 6: Your biggest problem is you. Now, a lot of people resent this truth – they say it’s “blaming the victim.” But most of the time, the purported “victim” is to blame. Did you drop out of school? Choose to use drugs? Have a couple kids with a couple losers? See, if so, you aren’t a victim of circumstance. A victim of circumstance is someone struck by lightning or attacked by a gang of thugs in a Democrat-run city. You’re a recipient of consequences.

It’s not a tragedy when bad things happen to people who make bad choices. It’s a tragedy when we lie to them by validating their failures and then try to ameliorate those consequences by taking money from people who did all the right things.

And that leads to Hard Truth Number 7: This can’t go on.

Lady Thatcher famously formulated that, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.” And you will. The most amusing argument for raising the minimum wage is that all this new money paid to people who aren’t worth it will get spent and gin up the economy. But the problem with this private sector stimulus idea is a foundational one: Where does the money come from to pay all these higher wages? From the magic dollar tree behind Mr. Pennybags’s mansion?

Liberalism is magical thinking promulgated by cynical exploiters upon the eternally gullible and the chronically lazy. It’s a political Ponzi scheme, and today’s participants are the unlucky marks coming in at the end of the grift.

Liberalism will collapse of its own dead weight. And when it does, you true believers better be ready for the hard truth that there is no such thing as a free lunch.