Something called McSweeney’s Internet Tendency has put up a post so clever by half that it has broken the signal to noise ratio at Memerorandum.com:
I’d like to start by saying that I don’t get into belligerent shouting matches at the playground very often. The Tot Lot, by its very nature, can be an extremely volatile place—a veritable powder keg of different and sometimes contradictory parenting styles—and this fact alone is usually enough to keep everyone, parents and tots alike, acting as courteous and deferential as possible. The argument we had earlier today didn’t need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I’m deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.
Now let me explain why your son was wrong.
When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, “Have a ball, peas [sic]?” And I’m sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.
To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, “No! Looter!” right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.
The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously. We conspicuously reward ourselves for our own hard work, we never give to charity, and we only pay our taxes very, very begrudgingly.
It goes on and on in the same tendentious and self-congratulatory form.
Let us assume a normal distribution of human capital on the playground, where native talent, environment, ambition, risk tolerance and drive are sorted in a population where n=100.
Let us assume that little Johanna, whether because of her talent or because she was cleverly raised – more likely some combination of the two – occupies the thin right tail of that distribution. She works hard, gets a good education, applies herself and manages through her efforts to garner for herself a ball. It’s a lovely ball, and she thinks that two balls would be even better.
So she goes to a bank and mortgages her ball, risking her precious possession on the wherewithal to create a second. Little Aiden, meanwhile, draws aimless scribbles in the sand, admiring the way that his diaper is ripening in the growing heat of the day.
Johanna’s risk pays off! The capital loaned her from the bank allows her to invest in the capacity to make additional balls, and now she is rewarded with two, and then three. The bank, meanwhile, profits from Johanna’s endeavors through interest payments which allow it to reward its own employees and expand its toy making outreach to other Johannapreneurs.
Johanna sells her third ball on the open market to a Frisbee maker who also occupies the thin right tail of our normal distribution, and who believes her offering price is fair, considering that he would prefer to fabricate and sell his own Frisbees rather than invest in ball making, the ins and outs of which he is inexpert at. The Frisbee maker packages his Frisbee and Johanna’s ball into an offering for a street side vendor, who sells the combination to an eager bank employee, resulting in a mutually rewarding experience. The bank employee gets his toys, and street side vendor achieves a tidy little profit, which he is free to spend on balls, Frisbee or even Popsicles, should the whim for a Popsicle strike him. Aiden glances over, but finds nothing in their transactions that appeal to him. Apart from Johanna’s ball. Which really is quite lovely.
Johanna performs a brief market survey and recognizes that there is a unanswered need for playground balls which she has the expertise to create at prices which would justify the hiring of new employees. She re-mortgages her two balls, using the leverage for material improvements, helping not only the bank to increase its payout to its own employees, but rewarding the ball making equipment vendors and their laborers who develop quality ball making gear at fair market prices. Everybody wins, apart from Aiden. Who just wants someone else’s ball.
Johanna’s ball making enterprise grows and grows, until the point where she feels justified adding management staff to supervise the efforts of the industrious ball making workers on the line. The sandbox is a very attractive place to other kids, who see all of the toymaking and come over to join in the fun, swiftly diving into the effort. Soon the population grows to 200, and then a thousand, and then mirabile dictu! – 10,000 kids! Everyone gets the chance to sell their labor in the marketplace in order to create a mutual exchange of value, and some of the cleverer and harder working managers learn enough at Johanna’s side to eventually branch out and seek their own toy making opportunities. Everyone but Aiden, who sadly lacks the sense or ambition to go out and acquire his own ball.
Aiden grows envious.
At 10,000 kids, rules have to be made, or otherwise the place will become one big diaper bag. The kids form together to select a governance board to make sure that the sand lot is not despoiled, that the free exchange of labor for balls (or Frisbees or Popsicles) is conducted fairly, and that none of the bigger kids plays the bully and snatches someone’s ball. It’s as close as you can get to a paradise on this side of the veil.
Governance requires enforcement, so the board hires some of the bigger kids to help enforce the rules and prevent chaos. It’s not an easy job, and those kids won’t work for free, so the board imposes a tax on other peoples’ toys to pay them. Skimming a little off the top seems a fair exchange for the Johannas of the world and her employees. It keeps things regular: No break ins, and no kids from other playgrounds coming over to raid the store, taking the fruits of their labor with them.
Most of the kids on the left hand side of the curve are satisfied, they’re getting paid what they’re due, and through industry and careful savings, if not risk tolerance, they move steadily up a different normal distribution, this one of wealth. In time, an uneven distribution of the wealth may occur. Some of the risk-taking kids are getting proportionally more balls than others, although everyone gets more than their parents had, and the ball-rich are investing their proceeds in such a way that the banks can lend to new and innovative toy makers. Of course, many of the risk-taking kids crash and burn, but no one really wants to talk about that – it’s sad.
But some kids don’t want to work for their own balls. Some aren’t clever enough to and some don’t see why they should have to, what with Johanna over there holding three of them.
Not everyone on the board agrees with the unequal distribution of playground toys. Some think that the board should get more involved in the redistribution of balls. They go out and tell Aidan that he’s getting the shaft. They get some kids from the very right end of the distribution, kids who are long on theory but short on personal experience, to agree with them. The more people like Aidan they can get on side, the more power their faction wields. Some people on the right hand side of the curve – barely – feel guilty about their relative success compared to Aidan, and they’re a little uncertain about their own position on the wealth curve. They kind of agree that Aiden is getting the shaft, and if it could happen to him it could happen to anybody. They all bond together, the Aidens, the elite, the guilty, the frightened, and the non-producing intellectuals to convince almost all of the left hand side of the curve that Aidan is getting the shaft. Now the left hand side of the curve is angry. By making them angry, certain board members get to vault to political pre-eminence. The new board majority is giddy with its new found power, which only increases its members’ hunger for even more. One way to do so is to frighten people or make them angry. The power to tax being the power to destroy, Johanna mostly keeps quiet, and maybe sends a few balls to the board members under the table, just to keep them off her back.
The balls thus supplied to the board should have gone to answer a market need, but now they are written off. With profits reduced, and with those profits the incentive to take additional risk, some ball making employees have become redundant and are let go. The board will take care of them.
Aiden can’t make a living in the marketplace, so he gets a nice, safe job with the Ball Redistribution Agency. And when he finally wanders over to Johanna and asks for a ball, he doesn’t say, “Have a ball, peas?” he says, “I’ll be taking those balls, missus.” On on either flank, he will have a couple of bigger kids with sticks, thumping them in their palms menacingly.
Johanna was a clever kid, and she saw this coming some weeks before. She has stashed a supply of balls in the Caymans, and when Aidan comes and takes all her balls but one, she picks up that ball and goes to her new home in the islands. Her workers are thrown out on the streets, her factory is shuttered, the board loses access to the taxes their output and wages once yielded and is forced to take care of the laid off workers, spending money that the board doesn’t have. The kids in the playground see all this and grow restless. Now they don’t know who to trust.
Now running at a significant deficit relative to predictions, the board turns its eyes to the Frisbee maker…
A classic, Lex! BTW, those clicking on your provided link might want to subsequently click on the “Zeitoun” link. It is a book about a Syrian-American house-painter from New Orleans that stayed behind during Katrina and his subsequent mistaken arrest while trying to help out, and his ensuing trials and tribulations. Point is, I KNOW THE GUY! He and his brother are two of the better house-painter’s in New Orleans (competing firms) and (pre-Katrina) he personally bid the job and his crew painted our house! A good read!
Yup….. so simple a caveman can understand it. Which leads to some interesting questions about the lineage of those who DON’T get it.
As the old wag says: “If the opposite of Pro is Con, then the opposite of Progress is Congress.”
Tim, you’re selling us short. We here may be knuckle-dragging cavemen, but we are “enlightened” cavemen.
I’ll have you know that I’m considered by the local feminists and/or leftists to be a Neanderthal, and NOT some stupid caveman. Thank you very much.
heh…….
Well, yes, but I always thought I favored the Cro-magnon side of the family myself, Tim.
I prefer the Filet-Mignon side myself…
Hmmm. I thought you would probably be busy today. Apparently not.
But an outstanding post nonetheless.
Ayn Rand for kids. It’s true at every scale.
“Now running at a significant deficit relative to predictions” – now there is an understatement. Lesse with the economy “growing” at 1.7% instead of the predicted 4-5%, it means we’re only 80-100 BILLION short per month. So what’s another 100 billion deficit per month?
captain PeeBO, of the USS Ameri-Titanic, walks the promenade deck reassuring nervous passengers that all is well. Just a little scrape on the hull. Had Petty Officer Bush been a better lockout we would not have hit. This ship is, after all, unsinkable.”
Meanwhile, 8 decks below, the snipes realize all is lost and start heading topside.
Make sure the gold/silver is stashed someplace safe, away from government seizure.
Were it so simple. In reality it is much more complicated. All the balls for the robber barons and left (pun intended) overs for the average person working for their share of the American dream.
“She re-mortgages her two balls”
That statement strikes me a little funny.
Else brilliant.
[...] That post in, and of itself, was enough to make me warm and fuzzy inside. But then Lex came in with something even better: [...]
“The kids form together to select a governance board to make sure that the sand lot is not despoiled, that the free exchange of labor for balls…It keeps things regular: No break ins, and no kids from other playgrounds coming over to raid the store, taking the fruits of their labor with them.” This part gets overlooked so often” You got this part out of order. Without this little bit, nobody gets more than two balls and most end up with less. The state of nature does not equal the market.
OK, Lex, now you’ve just got me totally PO’d. First you write that achingly beautiful piece “Sacred Oak”, and now this exquisitely simple Rand-like piece. I tend to think of myself as a fair writer when I’m on my game, but YOU make me insanely jealous of your flair for elegant prose combined with cogent thought. I bow before the Master. Keep it up. . . .I’m hooked.
Zipper
Cap’n? Do the Kat and the Biscuit ever run up to you, jump up on you and hug you, and say “Dad, I just read yer last blog post and it is so awesomely cool!”? If they don’t, they should.
This brings up a question I always think of about bloggers. Do your kids read your blog? Or, do your parents read your blog?
I think of Lawdog, a Sheriff’s deputy out in Texas, who has had to edit out some cussing in some posts because his Mom reads his blog.
“A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.” Matt. 13:57
I know the feeling…a couple of nights ago, I was shopping with my wife. We ran up on one of the welders where I work with who first complemented my wife on her loveliness and then told her that I did a hell of a job and if it wasn’t for me, he’d never had passed his entry weld test. At home, as you say, not so much. The truth, Lex, is that they don’t see you as a premier blogger and incredibly great author of lyrical prose, but as a husband and father who gave his all for his country. That in and of itself is more than enough for any man.
Okay, couple this comment with Diplopious’s above.
Diplopious wrote: ‘The state of nature does not equal the market.’ Yes. Without awareness of his Divine input, man is but another animal. We need awareness, understanding and appreciation of morality and human dignity. These are strictly spiritual in nature and require faith and reverence towards it. These must be taught.
Our host’s piece mentioned: ‘the non-producing intellectuals’. There’s a big part of the problem. They are the ones who not only don’t teach the above, they work tirelessly to teach the opposite- they promote the denial of faith and a Biblical (ethical mono-theistic) Creator’s design. By their devotion to denying that we are created in G-d’s image, they reveal their true and faithful devotion to the forces opposed to that Creator (evil). As Bob Dylan put it, ‘You gotta serve somebody’. Man is a spiritual being; we are receptive to spiritual forces, by inherent design.
Those ‘non-producing intellectuals’ are working very hard, mostly in education, where they dominate. This helps explain the present state of America, and even the present world society. The instant we understand that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, it is as instantly obvious that these people are fools, or worse.
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Peter, you make a fine point. I’d add that there are two sides to Our Creator. There’s the side that gave us free will and the Good Book and all that such that we might have awareness of his input, the understanding of morality and to value the life he has bestowed upon all creatures.
There’s also the side that created the gravitational force, the nuclear force, and for that matter the electrical force. Doesn’t much matter how hard you believe or how much you pray, when you fall off a ledge or try to breathe water or get struck by lightening those forces are going to treat you the same way each and every time, which is to say poorly if you happen to be the one falling off the ledge and well if you’re the one walking about not wanting to float off into space. I believe this is why in the Declaration we refer to the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.
Markets follow these precepts. By their very nature markets act the same as these forces of nature. Supply and demand curves equate to for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Atoms attempting to find their lowest electron shell energy level by forming bonds with other atoms is no different than markets seeking to achieve a market price — some go higher, some go lower, depending upon outside factors, but in aggregate we know the overall energy level of the majority.
Clearly God was thinking of a market-driven economy when He laid down the 10th Commandment.
And P. J. O’Rourke says it best.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-19n4-5.html
I’m betting that Reverend Wright isn’t preaching this in his church. I’m also betting the leaders of our Congress assembled are not consulting this bit of Biblical interpretation. In fact, I can’t think of a time I’ve actually heard this preached outside of talk radio.
Spread the word, brother. Spread the word.
– Max
My attempt to link is a dismal failure. Copy and paste into your browser instead.
Sorry.
“To understand the meaning and motives of egalitarianism, project it into the field of medicine. Suppose a doctor is called to help a man with a broken leg and, instead of setting it, proceeds to break the legs of ten other men, explaining that this would make the patient feel better; when all these men become crippled for life, the doctor advocates the passage of a law compelling everyone to walk on crutches—in order to make the cripples feel better and equalize the “unfairness” of nature.
If this is unspeakable, how does it acquire an aura of morality—or even the benefit of a moral doubt—when practiced in regard to man’s mind?”
- Ayn Rand
Oh come on! You established a bank before you established government. That bank would have been robbed a long time ago. Johanna obviously acquired and secured the second ball, as there was no regulation, by force. I don’t know if it was throwing a tempertantrum or using those puppy-dog eyes. Maybe both. She established slave labor like conditions for the rubber makers and Elmo sketch artists, giving them just enough apple juice to survive. All the while assuming an “amoral philosphy”. The “I didn’t know any better, I’m only 2 years old” defense ain’t gonna fly. The sad thing is this class warfare was perpetuated by her parents who enabled her sense of entitlement by constantly calling her “princess.”
Besides, at a certain point, I think you have made enough Elmo balls. Johanna is obviously not a patriot.
Remembering the infamous insight given America during the election campaign
Johanna’s got balls and someone else does not, so, somehow, taking Johanna’s balls will have to suffice for someone else not
growingproviding their own pair. Then, later, with not enough balls to go around, fairness dictates that all balls should be removed. The age old notion of “Let them all be equal”.Hmmm, I get it. It’s better that way, really. In the end, no balls all around.
Lovely analogy. Wish I’d thought of it. As a society, we’ve grown tremendously. But not balls, mind you. For, to have balls is bad. V.I. Lenin would be so proud!
This post, and the comments contained herein, is the funniest and the best thing I’ve seen in a month, at least. And regarding being perceived as a prophet everywhere but in one’s own house is now the story of my life.
“How dumb can I get???!!!111!” is now the wager amongst the family. So I am moving to another country (literally) and then will attempt to build a reputation completely from scratch that will someday make Mom again proud of me. Like that’s ever going to happen before the grave.
Keep up the good work, Lex. I love reading your posts every single day.
Subsunk
Excellent material, this. Puts me to mind of an essay from several years ago by another favorite blogist, Mr. Whittle, from whom we can extract the following gem:
“The slow runners cannot do better than their best. The only way to achieve equality of result – the world of ‘justice’ that so many leftists long for – is to pull down everyone to the level of the slowest runner.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/2007/11/