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For Preventing the Unemployed People in the United States
From Being a Burden to Their Children or the Country,
And for Making Them Beneficial to the Public
It is melancholy indeed to observe the high level of unemployment in this great country. Men and women who once worked productively assembling gas-guzzling SUVs, building cookie-cutter McMansions in exurbia, or shuffling redundant loan documents in our finest mortgage and banking institutions cannot find work. Our worthy public servants in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, not to mention in the White House itself, have worked tirelessly to solve this vexing economic problem. They have courageously ignored their own ignorance in matters of commerce and finance (as few, if any, have stooped to managing a business or making a payroll), and they have unleashed a veritable cornucopia of well-intended solutions on a trusting public.
Time does not permit me to list nor does the typical mind have the capacity to comprehend the clever, complex, and fiscally ingenious schemes our political class has lavished on America’s chief economic problem. But it suffices to say that all these many efforts purported to reduce the embarrassing number of unemployed citizens and, in a happy coincidence, to resurrect at the same time the fortunes of the financial institutions that extended credit to the self-same citizens for second homes, plasma TVs, Caribbean vacations, and a lifestyle beyond their means.
Funding for all these government schemes involve either Chinese lenders or that ancient, illustrious Chinese invention, paper money, printed with the cheerful acquiescence of the Federal Reserve. We only have to note that all their laudable efforts to date have failed utterly to reduce the army of the unemployed by even a single person. Sadly, some 7.6 million unfortunates have joined their ranks since the beginning of the recession.
I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection:
It is an incontrovertible fact that vast areas of America’s High Plains are good for little except cattle grazing or, perhaps, subsidized windmills. I propose that Nowhere, Nebraska (which I am told is located convenient to a well-maintained state highway somewhere in the far western region of that great state) be the locus of my full employment enterprise.
Let me state that my sole object is to create jobs. As the eminent Lord Keynes revealed to us in his General Theory, the government’s mission must be to get purchasing power back into the hands of the unemployed by whatever means necessary. It would be a simple matter to merely mail every unemployed citizen a Federal check for $250, or $500, or perhaps even $10,000 each month. The stimulus to spending would be swift and sure. I, however, would not insult the unemployed with such transparent charity. No, indeed, they would certainly prefer to work for their sustenance just as their more fortunate neighbors who hold civil service positions do. After all, in my enterprise all the workers will be in the employ of the government.
