Be careful what you wish for.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Frank's Fables #4 - "Your wish is granted".

Once upon a time there was a small kingdom called 'Happy Valley'. It was called Happy Valley because it was prosperous and people there were content. Well, most were content but some of the citizens of the valley would meet and complain that they did not have as much money as their neighbors so they formed a group and went to see the King'.

The King listened to the complaints and said “Are you sure that you want everyone in the kingdom to have exactly the same wealth?”. The citizens said yes.

The king was having a birthday the following day and on his birthday he always granted a wish to his subjects, so he said, “Your wish is granted, tomorrow you will all wake up and find a bundle of money on your doorstep. All of the wealth in my kingdom will be collected while you sleep and then divided exactly evenly for each person. It should be about $100,000”.

Sure enough, next morning everyone found a package on their doorstep with $100,000 inside, but strangely there was no newspaper, however, the citizens were elated. The first thing they did was to call their friends and neighbors, but the phones did not work, next they turned on the radio to see why the phones did not work, but the radio did not work either.

What was going on? There was no electricity or water or morning newspaper or anything. Some tried to drive their cars to the gas station to fill up. The stations were closed. Their world was in chaos. How could this be?

The citizens ran to the king and demanded an explanation. The king said “Oh you foolish citizens, the people who supply you with electricity, phone service, food, water, gasoline and everything else didn't go to work today. They have all of the money that wanted, why should they go to work?”. Of course all of the citizens of “Happy Valley” died from dehydration and starvation.

The moral of the story is if there were no rich people to hire the poor people, money would be worthless and no one would have anything. So yes, we could tax our achievers out of business and tax ourselves out of work and food and water and...........

Third world countries don't have many rich people. Do you really want imitate them and have everything equal even when equal is zero? Money is only an IOU for work done, without work behind it money is just piece of printed paper.

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