Once upon a time there was a young college graduate who needed a break from his work on his doctoral thesis on economics, so he went camping. One day he saw a young deer peacefully munching on some leaves when suddenly a mountain lion pounced on the deer, killed it and ate it. He was horrified. He immediately contacted everyone he knew on his iPod and the next day they organized a conference at his campsite. After much discussion a consensus was reached and the mountain lion was captured and put in a zoo. This should put an end to this senseless violence, they said.
Well, by the next summer, the deer population had exploded. The vegetation in the forest was suffering so the local citizens banded together and formed an exploratory committee to study the problem and make recommendations to the federal government on ideas for further study of the problem. After much discussion and soul searching, a mission statement was written: “We the concerned citizens demand action by the government. Only by the immediate attention of our elected officials can this terrible problem be solved.”
It was not an election year, so there was no immediate response from the government officials. However when one young Congressman came home from his overseas fact-finding mission and trip to the Caribbean, he decided it would be a good idea to look into this pending environmental disaster he had heard about.
So Congressman Slushfund went and met with our economics student, now Dr. Onandonduh. They organized rallies and many local concerned citizens showed up with their placards. The extensive media coverage did the job. In no time, there was enough public support to get a bill passed.
The Department of Possible Disasters (DPD) was established and thousands of new jobs were created, including one for Dr. Onandonduh, the first top executive. He hired the most educated people he could find and paid them all six-figure salaries with great benefits. They had many discussion groups and wrote operation manuals and employee policy manuals and made many reports on various theories and appeared before congressional hearings.
The public was thoroughly impressed with all the work they were doing and re-elected Congressman Slushfund five times. He became chairman of three committees and had to make even more fact-finding missions and side trips.
Well by this time 10 years had passed. The DPD had grown and now had offices in all 50 states, 27,000 government employees, 500 outside consultants and an annual budget of more than $18 billion.
One day some conservatives formed a group called Code Blue and started to question their Congressman about how their tax dollars were being spent. They weren”t getting much in the way of direct answers, so they held a press conference. This wasn”t attended by the usual group of reporters who didn”t want to be excluded from the president”s press conferences, where they could pitch him softballs and get paid for it. When one of the Code Blue members asked Congressman Slushfund how much the DPD had actually accomplished, he said, “I believe they have been extremely important in our ongoing effort to manage the environment and prevent further deterioration. Studies have shown that had we not intervened, we would be having far greater problems than we”re facing now, and that the cost to the taxpayers would have been even greater in our effort to resolve the problems. In fact, I believe that they should have their budget increased for future years.”
Public support was so positive that a Congressional Committee was formed to explore the possibility of combining the Department of Possible Disasters with the Department of Economic Management. After 18 months of discussion, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives to create the Department of Economic and Environmental Management. Combining the two agencies into DEEM would save billions of dollars and streamline their efforts. So the bill passed the House and the Senate. Over the next two years the offices were combined, new department heads hired and much restructuring was done. New policy manuals were written, new mission statements, new employee manuals, new signs on all the old and new buildings, new vehicles, new printing, new furniture, etc., etc. The new Department now had 86,000 employees and an annual budget of $63 billion. Job creation was rampant and the citizens rejoiced.
Seven years passed and DEEM now had 125,000 employees and a budget of $92 billion. In seven years it spent more than $600 billion dollars and had retirement benefit commitments of $150 billion. Again, Code Blue brought up the question of what it had accomplished with all this money. After enough public protests a Congressional hearing was held. After three months of debate and presentations by government experts, it was determined that Congress had to adjourn. They were tired and many had to prepare for re-election campaigns.
Well about this time the treasurer informed the President that the country was running out of money. So while congress was not in session, they conspired to solve the problem without them. They called in the chairman of the Federal Citizens Trust and Reserve Bank. They agreed that if they printed more paper money and issued bonds that the public would be happy. After all, the pursuit of happiness is our main goal. Give ”em the old mushroom treatment, they said; keep them in the dark and feed them lots of B.S.
And low and behold when Congress came back for the next session, everyone got paid and the public was happy. The President and all the congressmen got re-elected. By the middle of their next term however, the country was running out of money again. This time the President decided to meet with the leaders of Congress and together they could solve the problem. Dr. Onandonduh was called in from DEEM to consult with them. It was decided that since DEEM had been so successful at job creation, the most logical solution was to print even more money and hire more government employees.
Well they tried it and it worked. 120,000 new government jobs were created. The public cheered and rejoiced once again.
By this time the old members of Code Blue had gotten even older. Many now had Alzheimer”s and stopped voting. The young people in society had grown up believing that government was their savior and the creator of jobs. All their teachers and professors had believed this too. Business owners were bad people, they said, only interested in making money. “Profits are evil, government is good,” became the motto of the young. Occasionally there were some rebels on campuses who said that Adam Smith made more sense than Karl Marx, but they were beaten to death. Anyway, most students had never heard of either one of them.
After several more rounds of printing money and issuing bonds, the president announced that there was a national crisis and he would have to invoke executive order #11490. This had been an existing law for 40 years but everyone had forgotten about it except for a savvy lawyer in the executive branch. This order gave the President six months of absolute power and Congress could do little about it. The federal police forces took control of the country and seized all the guns, gold and food supplies. Now you may think the public was upset about this but they weren”t.
They had grown so accustomed to the government running their lives that the change was not all that noticeable. The people went back to watching TV and playing video games and eating the snack food the government had distributed. They hardly noticed that the food was drugged.
President Onandonduh was sitting on the porch one day and his dog came running up to him, wagging his tail. The President said, “Sometimes I wonder if you”re wagging your tail or it”s wagging you.”
And the people lived drugged and happily ever after.
By the way EO#11490 is real. Look it up at the law library.
Any similarities to anyone living or brain dead is merely coincidental.
Bill Woodruff
Lake County
