Why Government Matters
A parable about squirrels (Part 1)
There is a saying about Blind Squirrels. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while. So what if you have a forest full of blind squirrels? You will expect a lot of collisions in the search for acorns. There will be a lot of fighting and frustration. Yet all the blood and (squirrel) tears will be spilled for nothing. The net effect is that there will be less effort diverted to acorn search. Welcome to anarchy. The fighting is usually unplanned yet totally expected. This is where our story starts. A group of angry blind squirrels tired of collisions.
Teamwork
But these blind squirrels are not stupid. So at the next forest floor meeting, a brilliant blind squirrel devised a solution. Every squirrel will form a group of threes. Each team will carry a stick horizontally. One squirrel at each end of the stick. And a middle squirrel. The middle squirrel was important since he¹ was the leader. His job was to decide a pattern of combing the forest floor without repeat the same path.
Legislation
The stick trick works as the blind squirrels started expanding their search area. There was now a new problem. The head on collisions were fewer. This was replaced by more painful stick on squirrel collisions. A moving stick that was carried by three squirrels pack a more painful knock on a single squirrel. But these are not dumb critters. By the next forest floor meeting, the brilliant squirrel had a new solution. Sonar. The middle squirrel had to call his team’s name every five minutes. Any team that heard a different team’s name being called out had to change direction and keep calling until the team could no longer hear another team’s name.
Experiments
Did I say that the squirrels were not dumb? Well, that is true. But the squirrels also had self interest. As the number of acorns found increased, more squirrels had to cache their finds as they could not eat all the acorns. This when the tale grows darker.
Communism or Commune
These teams of three squirrels shared everything. They could combine their finds every night and distributed their rations equally. No squirrel had more, no squirrel had less. The team even rotated the duties of middle squirrel so that every squirrel could cover for middle squirrel if he had a sore throat. Sometimes they even choose to go on holidays. At the end of the day, nobody starved.²
Capitalism or Enterprising
To call these squirrels a team would be a little misleading. There was a hierarchy. You see the middleman found that he had power. The team had to work as long as he wanted them to work. If he could not find enough daily acorns, everybody worked until he did. So the tired squirrels on the team had to bribe him with their surplus acorns.
If there were no surplus acorns because taxation is pretty profitable, the middle squirrel found that he could reduce his work. Instead of carrying the stick, he merely laid a paw on the stick during the search. There was always a squirrel getting the short end of the stick. Some middleman even got the stick bearer to do the name calling. This multi tasking duty was then rebranded as Advertisement. Strangely, those middleman often looked fatter. And those teams always needed new members.
This is where the first part of my story must end. I am not saying that government is the solution to all issues in society. If it was true, Trump would be serving his second term. I am only pointing out why we need to have a group of (relatively) incorruptible people to be in charged.
Take the Covid-19 crisis. If people all wore masks and did not purchase hydroxychloroquine, the crisis would have turn out differently. Some people say that if Dr Fauci was in charged of everything, the crisis would be smaller. This is only partially true. If there was less incompetent government interference, more energy could be diverted to better use. But as the blind squirrels parable highlights, a good idea can easily be exploited by a self-serving intermediary.
Moral:
When there is a person telling you about how his or her actions could benefit you or how if you follow their directions, it could benefit yourself, ask yourself what is it in for them. Are they look for guinea pigs? Or beast of burden? Or their next meal at your expense? Ask these questions as a blind squirrels never gets the full picture.
My reason for writing this is for people to stop creating tragic headlines in newspaper.
¹ They are all males because we know that females would have figure a better solution.
² I expect some readers to start arguing that Communism will always lead to people starving. My answer is simple. Read Animal Farm. If there was an animal starving, there was a pig getting fat or human getting richer. Venezuela? Look at Maduro’s waist line. I am not fat shaming corrupt leaders. Their loot could be distributed to their relatives, benefactors, cronies or kept in offshore accounts. In this day and age, there are body shaping solutions like liposuction. I am still waiting to hear about an incorruptible leader who starved to death while in office.