[Swiftwater Gazette] Politics and Pigs

[Brad Haslett]

Here's an interesting parable I ran across in the morning reading -


......A professor in a large college had some exchange students in the
class. One day while the class was in the lab the Professor noticed
one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and
stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student
told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while
fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow
his country's government and install a new communist regime.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a
strange question. He asked, 'Do you know how to catch wild pigs?'

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The
young man said this was no joke. 'You catch wild pigs by finding a
suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs
find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are
used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place
where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they
begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.

They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you
have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The
pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to
eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and
around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to
eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten
how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their
captivity......


We are eyewitnesses to the largest generational theft act in the
history of our nation.  There's a good chance most of us will be dead
before the gate is finally closed, or maybe not. The Germans were
initially excited when Hitler started building autobahns.  Chinese
peasants loved Chairman Mao when he confiscated land from landowners.
And we're excited about exactly what?  Decisions have consequences.
Any of you who have been involved in the process of big ticket capital
expenditures know how the process works. For example, my wife works in
the Operations Research department of my employer.  When billions of
dollars are spent for aircraft acquisitions it is only after months,
sometimes years of number crunching.  If an inexperienced MBA walked
into a conference and proposed an idea without hard data that he or
she could rigorously defend, they would be laughed out of the room if
not fired.  But, we're going to spend/borrow over a TRILLION dollars
because we HOPE it does some good with very little debate.  Forget
history, forget economics.  We're just going to do it!

I've had the pleasure of meeting a number of elderly Chinese who left
the United States in the early 50's because they believed in Hope and
Change in their homeland.  Twenty years later, after the universities
were closed and they were working as farmers, they realized their
error.  You think I'm being too dramatic?  Re-read the parable of the
pigs.

Brad