I found this in the LDS magazine, the Ensign today. It is from a talk given by Marion G. Romney in 1982. He was quoting a story from Reader’s Digest.
“In our friendly neighbor city of St. Augustine great flocks of sea gulls are starving amid pleanty. Fishing is still good, but the gulls don’t know how to fish. For generations they have depended on the shrimp fleet to toss them scraps from the nets. Now the fleet has moved…”
“The shrimpers had created a Welfare State for the sea gulls. The big birds never bothered to learn how to fish for themselves and they never taught their children to fish. Instead they led their little ones to the shrimp nets.”
“Now the sea gulls, the fine free birds that almost symbolize liberty itself, are starving to death because they gave in to the ‘something for nothing’ lure. The sacrificed their independence for a handout.”
“A lot of people are like that, too. They see nothing wrong in picking delectable scraps from the tax nets of the U.S. Government’s ‘shrimp fleet’. But what will happen when the government runs out of goods? What about our children of generations to come?”
“Let’s not be gullible gulls. We must preserve our talents of self-suffciency, our genius for creating things for ourselves, our sense of thrift and our true love of independence.”