Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter Read online

  Grow your crops in the community poo. Assure yourselves that it is safe for use. Organic farming, anyone?

  Who gets bucket duty, anyway? I suppose that, following the history of collectivist action, this particular assignment probably goes to whoever has strayed from the centerline of conformance. Maybe after a few weeks of humanure duty you get to work your way up to cutting shower wood to show your newly re-educated spirit of compliance.

  By the way, that show is hosted by Morgan Spurlock. Hey, Morgan, if you wanted to host a really great episode, give me thirty days with those communists. I'm going to need a handful of waivers, and probably a blanket Presidential pardon, since I'll be bringing my 1987 Ford TLB (TractorLoader-Backhoe, for the hippies) and some other choice items. My backhoe runs on biodiesel, too. Sadly, rank-and-file communists, unlike their well-todo leadership, have very little body fat, so make sure plenty are around. Fortunately, they tend to swarm.

  According to their website, these guys also have a local currency. They call it Lettuce. Cute. Does this mean that they have a barter system in place? If so, are they tracking all barter transactions, and then reporting these earnings to the IRS, as required? I hope so, I would hate for them to get into trouble by not following the same rules which collectivists force upon the rest of us at the point of a gun. The tax dollars taken from us are probably funneled to them to pay for things like solar panels and diesel cars. And tetanus shots.

  If Spurlock picks up my episode proposal, I would probably bring along a brass pole, also. Put some of their honeys under a hot shower for a few hours and soap 'em down, two or three at a time. Then, get them some heels, lipstick, eyeshadow and some twirling lessons and they would probably catch right on. I think I will call them the Dancing Bunnies. Note to self: bring along some heads of lettuce and tuck some leaves into their eco-friendly garters if they do a good job. On the other hand, all that hepatitis and HIV humanure risk kind of takes the fun out of that.

  Now we've come full circle, as it were, back to infectious diseases. Og and Pok taught our genes to enjoy cooked meat, lest we stray at our peril. Similarly, civilization developed water purification, indoor plumbing and sanitary sewers or septic systems, toilet paper and handi-wipes because you live longer with them. Those genes then prospered, along with the memes for these concepts. Even before mankind had these modern facilities, early man at least had enough sense to not look for his food in the pile of humanure. Remarkably, genes which led their meat robot to think that this was a keen place to look for food did not do all that well. That icky feeling you get when watching this episode is there for a really good reason. Go with that feeling.

  These fixtures of modern life are not just for kicks or convenience, they are essential for life itself. And the monkeys want to take these things away from you because it makes them feel good about themselves, even if it kills you. Or forces you to watch your children die from typhus. Or kills nations off, millions at a time, from plagues and other epidemics resulting from poor hygiene. Remember, they set the ground rules, not me.

  I haven't polled each of the affected parties, but I think that somewhere around three billion people live in sanitary conditions marginally better than prancing rabbits. Without enormous amounts of aid, including food and medicines, from other people (meaning you), this number would probably be more like a half-billion. Do these people really want you to live in conditions which would, unchecked, kill off two and a half billion people? My math says that gets us another five planets right there.

  Some would say that this is an unscientific assertion, but OK, let's run an experiment. Cut off all aid for ten years, foreign and domestic, and see where the trend lines go.

  No, for the street-level collectivist, of whatever stripe, the agenda is much more simple. They don't really want you to live in these conditions. No, this would limit your ability to provide the resources they need you to contribute, whether voluntarily or otherwise. Instead, they want you to feel guilty because you don't live this way. And that makes you more pliable and more easily controlled. And so they get to drain you of value which they have not earned. This guilt-drain mechanism is highly lucrative.

  But communists aren't the only ones with that agenda. Recall that Richard Dawkins calls ideas memes, to reflect their genetic character. It turns out that modern civilization has numerous strains of a brain infection, a corrosive meme, which has spread quickly. And this brain infection is virulently communicable, creating monkey zombies by the billions.

  Part of the guilt-drain mechanism has spun out of control so fast that it threatens to take down civilization itself. After all, if an infection kills the host, then what? Og and Pok, and all their many uncountable generations of forebears, did such a great job of creating prosperity that the infection ran out of control. And long before anyone knew what was going on.

  In retrospect, the infection is easy to see, but the scar it creates leaves a blindness to itself which could not have been designed any better if anyone had tried. If we wanted to kill off humanity itself, we now have the blueprint before us. Being part of that humanity, however, I would rather save some of it, even if we have to amputate the diseased portions. The Tith cures, short of amputation, have all been exhausted.

  Recall that, long ago, I listened to a radical radio talk show host way back when I first recognized this infection in my own company. That same radical talk show host has recently proven, to his disappointment, I am sure, that the infection is so out of hand that they do, indeed, surround you.

  This situation is possible thanks to a feature of this brain infection which Og and Pok could not have possibly understood.

  Sadly, there remains only one cure. We'll dance around that cure for a few chapters, and then get back to it.

  Before proceeding, let me give a shout out to my boys, Og and Pok. These guys, whatever their real names were, laid the foundation for all the rest of us to live a high quality of life. So high, in fact, that we forget how much it would suck to throw it all away. Fellas, this book is dedicated to you and your friends.

  Chapter 6, The Font of Value

  Earlier we followed our friends Og, Pok and the tribe about on their economic adventures. Throughout that chapter the same principles kept popping up, but in different forms. These principles are valid today, but often disguised underneath a veil of obstacles designed to suck value out of you and feed it to various classes of monkeys.

  The Four Resources

  Stripping away these obstacles reveals that value, and thus money or other resources, comes from four resources available to each of us:

  Stuff

  Push

  Time

  Ideas

  Let's examine each of these in detail.

  Stuff

  Stuff includes all those things available for your use. For Og, given his strength, wood was readily available. For Pok, given his stealth and cunning, squirrels were readily available. To each, their respective stuff was less valuable than the stuff of the other, which meant that by trading stuff they each obtained more valuable other stuff.

  Different stuff thus has different value to different individuals, at different places, and at different times. A resource of stuff in one area, such as gravel in a gravel pit, has less value to the owner of the pit than it does to the farmer on his access road.

  One great feature about stuff is that you can pile up many kinds of it for later use. This allows you to gather a bunch of it up when easy to do so. And then, you have the flexibility to dribble it out later at times and places of higher value, or in times of shortage. Og, for example, might collect more wood than he could trade in the summertime. By piling it carefully and shielding the top against rain, he could trade it for more goods in the winter than it would bring in the summer. And in so doing, keep others from freezing in the winter cold.

  Note that monkeys have taken to calling this practice hoarding and cast it as a civil sin, or in many cases, an actual crime. This term appears, for example, when a ga
s station owner invests in larger tanks to be able to supply more product during a period of shortage. If that gas station owner then attempts to recoup that investment through higher prices during shortages, monkeys call this practice price gouging. Even though he would be supplying them with something they couldn't otherwise get at any price.

  I lived through such a fuel shortage in Atlanta in late 2008. I think I would have rather paid the higher price to reward the forward-thinking station owner to make that resource available. But instead, I waited all night and most of the day in a gas line. However, Governor Purdue, on paper a Republican conservative who should have known better, chose to bow to the monkey collective. He decreed these market forces illegal, and so the city just simply ran out. Thanks. At least no one overpaid. Pull that trick sometime in a rural area during a harvest season and let's see how well that turns out.

  The miracle of the free market is that it efficiently allocates stuff to the right places, especially in time of shortage. In the 2008 Atlanta gas shortage, if prices had been allowed to float as the market demanded, many who didn't need to make that trip to see Grandma might decide not to buy any gasoline at all. Some who would otherwise top off their tank might choose to avoid the higher price by waiting a week or so to see how things turned out. These individual decisions would leave some fuel, albeit at a higher price, available for those who needed to take care of a loved one in a hospital, perhaps. And reward the station owner who invested in larger tanks, causing others to consider doing the same, limiting the effect of future threatened shortages.

  The Governor could have taken a different approach. He could have instead seized the crisis as a teachable moment, and addressed the citizens of the State. With their attention, he could have assured them that the shortage was temporary but the higher prices were merely the market allocating the limited supply more efficiently. And that prices would return to normal after the shortage had been resolved. Of course, he would have been lambasted by the press, but he did ask for the job.

  In the long term, another benefit would have arisen. Other station owners would watch our enterprising hero charge $8.00 per gallon for a week. Seeing his work lauded, or at least not punished by the Governor, they would formulate plans of their own. Perhaps they would order extra fuel at each approaching storm in the Gulf. Or perhaps they might invest in adding extra tank capacity. Regardless, during the next crisis they would be ready. When that new crisis arrived, so many stations would have extra fuel that the shortage might not materialize at all. But if it did, because more stations would have more reserve, the price they would demand, in their competition with each other, might drop to $7.00, or less.

  Fuel suppliers in other states might get in on the act, and arrange to deliver more fuel to neighboring states in a crisis, in exchange for an extra dollar per gallon, perhaps. Assuming that this wasn't prevented by special formulations demanded by each state or the EPA, of course. And assuming that the suppliers were certain that they wouldn't be punished for their assistance.

  Individuals would also act. Knowing that the Governor would not pamper them in his rush to exchange destruction for political capital, they would perhaps watch the storms approaching, and fill their tanks or cans beforehand with $4.00 gasoline. And in so doing implement yet another layer of reserve. Or these individuals might look around them and prepare in other ways. Perhaps they might stock a little more of Super Choco-Bites in their pantry to avoid that extra trip to the store when gas might be tight. Businessmen might prepare plans and infrastructure to enable work-athome during crises by rerouting business lines to employee's homes, allowing them to stay off the road.

  So, when that next disaster arrived, fewer citizens would be at the pump demanding that resource, and so the crisis price might drop to $6.00. Such is the miracle of market forces when each individual is allowed, or even encouraged, to act in his own selfish interest.

  This rational approach would have been political suicide, of course. The monkey collective, in its overwhelming number, demands only immediate gratification, and refuses to think about the consequences of its demands. I present as evidence that, to the best of my knowledge, not one state governor, in the midst of a crisis, has ever bothered to explain the benefit of market forces to the citizenry. Instead, each rattles the mailed fist of populist force to threaten those who are in a position to help the most.

  The Governor's actions, as does all price-fixing by a collective, ensured that the shortage worsened. Atlantans rushed to the pumps by the thousands, each fearing a complete outage. Since there was no price incentive to stay away or to limit purchases, everyone bought as much as they could. So gas completely disappeared from the scene. And removed any reason for any station to install tanks larger than that required for the normal business flow. This rationale ensured that similar shortages would be as equally bad, or worse, in the future.

  Push

  Push, or equivalently pull, is the amount of effort you can expend toward a goal. Og, being stronger, was able to easily break off branches of a fall, and thus get more wood than Pok. Pok was more wiry, and was thus enabled to chase or snare squirrels better than Og. Each man then applied his own variety of specialized push to affect his environment, ultimately to obtain more stuff in less time.

  Engineers call this quantity potential energy when it is waiting to be used, or kinetic energy when it is actually in use. More specifically, when you push an object you use potential energy to create force, which causes acceleration of the object in question. As it moves faster, it gains kinetic energy. The potential energy of Og's muscles, provided by the digestion of that squirrel, is applied to a branch to move it until it breaks.

  Work is closely related to push. The engineering definition of work is the application of push over a distance. Note that this means that you can push on a brick wall all day long, but if nothing moves, you haven't done any work. This implies that unless you get something done, you haven't worked. You may have expended an enormous amount of energy in the process, though.

  Along these lines, a monkey sitting in a cubicle all day is not working. Neither is a monkey scampering around underfoot at the office or in the shop. But both are consuming enormous amounts of resources which have to come from somewhere. And if either of these creatures is getting in your way, they are not only not doing work, they are removing your opportunity to work. This effect could be considered as negative work. So, if you spend your day dealing with monkey-based issues, you aren't working either.

  Time

  We all have some time available to us, although metaphysically this quantity is uncertain. But, assuming your plan isn't to just sit around waiting to die, you typically decide throughout each day how you will spend your time. Time is one of those "use it or lose it" quantities. For about a third of our lives, the best way to use your time is sleeping, providing rest so that you can do a better job of more efficient or well-planned push later. Or, use some of your time thinking, as our heroes often did by the stream.

  Ideas

  Of all the quantities we have discussed thus far, ideas are by far the most powerful resource at our disposal. I often combine time, ideas, and rest, thinking as I drift back and forth on the edge of sleep.

  Others choose to meditate or pray to achieve the same result: a plan of action. Contrast this with those classes of prayer which amount to spiritual welfare ("help me Jesus"), often implemented as spiritual chain letters ("our Internet-based prayer circle will bombard God with so much worship spam He will have to act"). Or, equivalently, spiritual barter ("pray for me and I'll pray for you"). More on this topic in a later chapter.

  Some, and I do this myself depending on my mood, enjoy a menial task while the mind is free to think. Choose whatever approach works for you.

  Pok Jr. didn't like chasing squirrels all day, and so he decided that raising bunnies in hutches was a much more efficient application of his available push. His idea manifested itself in using push to gather some sticks, and then pushed t
hem around until he wove his little bunny hutches and bunny fences. And then pushed some bunnies inside them, and fed them grasses he pushed into their hutches and pasture.

  Pok Jr.'s idea and these little bits of push became magnified over time by the availability of bunnies, which provided a given amount of food with less overall work. Or provided a given amount of wood, when trading with Og, with less overall work. The idea itself increased the output, whether either directly consumed or further magnified with trade.

  Quality of Life

  For the purposes of this text, an individual's ability to obtain a given quality of life is determined by his use of these four resources, stuff, push, time and ideas. And most importantly, by the value he places on each of these. Some may say that they can "live on love", or similar nonsense. Try that when your children are freezing in a winter rainstorm and you'll quickly come to the conclusion that some stuff, like shelter or a nice fire, is probably necessary after all. Og and Pok knew better, which is why they and their tribe spent a lot of their time going after stuff and pushing and thinking to get rid of these privations.

  I am continually amazed at the amount of references in popular culture to a successful guy having to give up his opportunities and career ambitions to prove to some chick that he loves her. That sounds like a great plan. Taken to the extreme, the logical conclusion of this ethic would be to give it all up and run off into the forest and rub noses like bunnies. All day, rain or shine, season after season. In reality, of course, if a guy tried that approach, after the first missed meal she would just divorce or otherwise dump him and demand some kind of support payments. And then move on to destroy some new sap's life.

  And yet, this sort of foolishness prevails in the collective ethic. But, this foolishness would not see the light of day if women didn't know that there was this gigantic safety net strung underneath them. A net sewn into the backs of all the producers who pay into these systems.