nce again the American presidential elections have descended into chaos. Republicans
have discovered that Democrats may have been actually telling the truth when they said
they were planning to commit voter fraud. Democrats have discovered that six months of
rioting and arson weren't enough to convince voters to vote for their candidate.
Voting is so popular in America that even the dead rise from their graves to vote.
We have to choose between a party that waits until problems are too late to fix and then complains about them and a party that deliberately creates problems because they provide an excuse to make government even bigger. The potential for vote fraud is an example. The Democrats telegraphed their intentions for years, yet the Republicans sat around when they had the chance to fix it, and now it has bitten them. They face an uphill battle: there's wisdom in the old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
It's clear, then, that all of our problems stem from the simple fact that there is such a thing as a federal government, and there is a simple solution: abolish it.
This might sound like maybe a bit radical, but it's a well-tested strategy in medicine: if some part of the body has a problem, send the patient to surgery and have the entire organ removed. Everyone agrees that all branches of the federal government, including the presidency, House of Representatives, Senate, FBI, IRS, and CIA are terminally ill. Defund them!
The US Constitution says that the sole purpose of the federal government is to ratify international treaties, resolve disputes among the states, and decide upon the weights and measures. Even this is too much for them: the first time there was a conflict between the states, boycotts had not yet been perfected and there was no such thing as Twitter, so the federal government got involved at a cost of 700,000 lives. As for international treaties, I have two words: Paris. NAFTA.
The Feds even bungled the weights and measures. Every sane country in the world except ours now uses the metric system. We still have drams, ounces, pounds, inches, and furlongs. How many drams in an ounce? How many pecks in a bushel? How many rods in a furlong? Cups in a gallon? Why are there 12 ounces in a pound for some things but 16 for everything else? And why are there two different kinds of gallons, one slightly bigger than the other? Who the hell knows?
Once a year the citizens go through the trauma of trying to figure out how much they're supposed to pay in taxes. The feds have made the tax laws so complicated that we must use sophisticated computer programs to estimate them, and it still takes two hair-pulling days. We send in our returns knowing that neither we nor the federal bureaucrats have any idea what the correct amount should be.
Every four years we go through a month-long nightmare, in which two rich people spend 2.4 billion dollars trying to convince us what we already know: that their opponents are slime. The Republicans depend on something called a primary, in which the residents of New Hampshire and Iowa vote first. The hundred or so candidates who don't win promptly give up, leaving everyone in the other 48 states twiddling their thumbs. The Democrats have streamlined this even further: in their primaries, all the candidates are ordained to lose. The candidate who is hated the most is then revealed as the winner by a secret cabal which decided the winner months earlier.
It's clear where all this confusion originates. Eliminating the government would solve all of these problems. Even the Europeans would finally admire us for adhering to the libertarian principles that made our country great.
Now, I hear a few straggling voices saying things like: but, but, but how will we create—I mean defeat—systemic racism without a federal government? How will we bring our country to the brink of civil war with murderous hatred every four years? And how will we ever manage to crush our economy under a burden of confiscatory taxation, wasteful and destructive government boondoggles, mindless panic over every crisis and pandemic, endless pointless wars, and a national deficit equal to the GNP of Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and Denmark put together? Most importantly, without a federal government, what will the news media lie about?
I admit it will be hard at first. The only winners will be the bloggers. We educated the world for three months about coronaviruses. Now we may have a chance to educate the world about dementia. A recent survey found that 59% of the voters believe Biden would be lucky to make it to Inauguration Day. Half of them voted for him anyway. As for the news media, I'm confident they can find something to lie about. Their experience will help them cover up the bigger conspiracy that may be coming. In the meantime, we'll have to decide whether we prefer to be called dementia deniers or dementia conspiracy theorists.
* For the benefit of any humor-impaired readers, this is not intended as a practical policy initiative. There is no resemblance between the politicians smeared here and any real politicians who may or may not have smeared themselves or each other.
nov 07 2020, 7:33 am
