When the weather became unbearably cold, the leaders decided to ease the people’s pain by outlawing clothing. When the people grew hostile, the leaders led them to a lifeless land and loaded them onto wooden rafts on a river of molten lava.
The people warmed.
At first amused—remember, they were naked—the people’s good humor evaporated along with the moisture in their bodies. Rafts burned, flames licked sweaty, frightened masses, and outcries drove the leaders to more action. The enlightened ones fashioned anvils from the products of their enlightened minds, gave one to each raft-rider, and tried to ignore the resulting panic when the armada sank deeper into the lava. But the leaders could not ignore the cries.
So the leaders acted again.
The naked throng noticed trucks parked beside the lava flow, drivers emerging, tossing grappling hooks, and pulling the rafts to shore. But many people were incinerated before landfall, their blazing rafts no longer intact. Herded into pens, survivors saw workers unloading new rafts made of paper—a shimmery, really quite pretty paper. The malodorous rafters, each still carrying an anvil, formed a queue, wherein a second anvil wrapped in golden ribbon was plopped into their arms before boarding the already disintegrating paper vessels.
Much of the flotilla was immediately consumed while other parts traveled some distance before flaming away. Still others drifted quite far before puffs of steam signaled their end. A tiny few floated out of sight beyond some rocks.
On a far-away lawn, sipping cold martinis and nibbling roasted pork, the intensely proud leaders viewed the spectacle by video, praising one another for the nobleness of their actions. Members of a ruling class such as they deserve the privilege, nay the right, to lead unevolved and yea, normal humans. Having dispatched the pathetic horde and its problems, with which the horde would certainly have struggled alone, the leaders now sought new challenges. The world awaited the next catastrophe in anticipation of the leaders’ newest solutions.
Step 1: Create problem.
Subprime crisis: Pass a “Community Reinvestment Act” forcing lenders to lend to no-income, no-down-payment minorities. Brag of “increasing minority home ownership” while ignoring that you’ve caused an artificial housing boom of mythical proportion.
Free money: Allow the Federal Reserve (Alan Greenspan) to ridiculously reduce interest rates and facilitate, in economist Steven Horwitz’s words, a mass of “excess loanable funds” with which to fuel the lending firestorm.
Profit from ignorance: Investment houses attract naïve investors with doomed-to-fail instruments that will vaporize their wealth—while wise leaders watch.
Recession: When people stop repaying mortgages which they never could afford, the castle falls from the sky.
Step 2: Provide life-rafts and anvils.
Bail-outs: Use $700 billion (plus interest), which the people no longer have, to salvage failed financial institutions and then take over those institutions.
More bail-outs: Apply this genius to walking-dead auto makers that would be better off euthanized.
Stimulus: Lie to the people as you waste another 787 billion non-existent dollars in the dead-false belief that government can end a recession with drunken spending. Ignore that massive debt invites massive inflation through printing massive amounts of less valuable money.
Budget insanity: Act out your biggest lie yet. Repeat the “stimulus” process, this time with 3.5 trillion wet-ink dollars and label the boondoggle a “budget” that “invests in the future.”
Cap-and-tax: Over-the-top treachery. During the worst recession in seven decades, pass the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which emulates Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s Great Depression-inducing strategy: raising taxes. But call this tax that makes everything more expensive something other than a tax, something other than a job killer or forced wealth reallocation. Base you claims on junk science by dogmatists seeking to prop up their wind and solar buddies who can’t generate energy at costs competitive with fossil fuel methods—methods that release a gas loved by plants, exhaled by animals and humans, and which at 10 times our industrial emissions would not cause “global warming.”
Nationalized health care: Destroy more trillions in wealth to institute a system which has created low quality, long queues, slow innovation, and defunct private sector care wherever tried.
Make the Federal Reserve omnipotent: So investors feel “safer,” give the Fed greater private sector control than the “fairness” fanatics wielded when they created the current recession.
Ignite inflation: Economic term—monetize the debt. Refer to the first five “solutions,” which necessitate flooding the economy with un-backed, freshly-printed dollars which will drive up prices unless sucked from circulation by dramatically higher taxes.
Raise income taxes: If the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, Obama and the Democrats will have enabled prosperity-killing Hooverism/FDRism. The President will then keep his promise to raise taxes still higher on “the wealthy.”
Step 3: Repeat steps 1 and 2.
Keep going until you kill the country or get voted from office.
