Back to the Pigs and Berries

The world used to be a simple place. Nothing complicated, nothing confusing. People thought about two things: survival and reproduction. (Not always in that order). You see ... we weren’t all that different from the “wild animals” that inhabit our woods today. We hunted and gathered and bred. That was it. No stomach problems, no stocks to crash, no slow business to concern ourselves with, no meetings or quarterly reports to prepare for. Life was what life was intended to be. Life.
In a simple sort of way, life was still like a business … you still had to plan. Let’s say that you’re a “primitive” person living in a cave somewhere. In this cave, you’ve got your little family: a couple of greasy-haired, dirty-knee children running around in coyote skins and some beautiful wife with dirt streaks on her forehead and bad teeth. Life is good and, as the “man of the cave”, you’ve got a responsibility, (though you don’t have a language so you don’t think about it … you just sort of grunt thoughts through your mind). The grunts, however, come together to remind you of the things that you have to do – you have to get food … everyday.
As complex creatures, we likely started out by budgeting. If you stumbled upon a particularly large berry patch on a Tuesday, you likely would have filled whatever pack or skid you had and brought home enough berries to last your family for several days. If you were lucky – and the berries weren’t poisonous – you had enough to feed your family through Saturday. Knowing that, you had no worries for the next several days. You sat in your cave, eating berries with juice staining your beard from sun-up to sundown until maybe Thursday. Then you went out hunting again.
Things really got exciting when you were lucky enough to catch something alive and bring it back to the cave, like a pig, for instance. Once you had the live pig, you had a safety net – a little nest egg to call on if times got tough. This nest egg eased the burden of life and allowed you to hunt and gather more at ease. Much like a salesman today, you sell more with money in your pocket because desperation does not show through. The pig, while not in your pocket, allowed you to hunt more freely and pay attention to the details of sneaking up on things and follow the steps that make you hunt more effectively.
Somewhere along the line, capitalism also worked its way into society. Say, for example, you’ve got a stockpile of nuts, berries, pterodactyl eggs on ice and your pet pig. The guy in the next cave, however, has none of these things, but he’s got two piglets – a male and a female. Well, knowing that you’ve got enough to eat for a while, and that he’s starving, you quickly figure out that you can take advantage of that situation to profit. If you had the piglets, you could eat your other stuff until they were old enough to breed, which would make you more pigs – even less worry for the future. Your neighbor Ugh, however, is starving. He’s considering how much meat might actually be on those piglets. So, one day you go to Ugh’s cave and offer to trade your full-grown pig for his two piglets. Ugh takes the deal, you become a long-term investor for a return and Ugh’s family begins eating your pet pig right away. Everyone is happy, (well, except maybe your original pig).
Now, some tens-of-thousands of years later, we seem to have progressed quite far, indeed. Instead of being able to catch and keep a pig – to trade it for future pigs (plural), and feed your family, we’ve decided to form a government to handle things for us. Each year, the government takes nearly half of the nuts and berries that we collect, they take half of our pigs, and in turn, they give it to Ugh and his family so that they don’t have to trade their piglets, but still get to eat. In fact, they give so much to Ugh, that they are no longer even giving real pigs. They’re giving pretend pigs – borrowed from the Chinese and the middle-eastern countries, which in-turn, want nothing more than to come and take all of our pigs and kick us out of our caves. Somehow, our government figures that they’ll eventually pay back the Chinese and the Middle-Easterners by collecting enough nuts and berries and future pigs from us, and yet we’ll still have enough to eat. The problem is, we don’t manufacture pigs here anymore. We buy all of our pigs and berries from the Chinese and the Middle-Easterners. Which I guess means, that we’ll have to buy the pigs from them with money borrowed from them in order to pay them back for the pigs and berries that we borrowed. Am I missing something here?
Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to encourage our own people to start manufacturing our own pigs and berries – thus creating jobs so that Ugh could afford to supply his own family with pigs and berries from market, thereby providing money to the marketer to supply his family with pigs and berries and still buy more pigs and berries to sell to others? Then, we could pay back the pigs and berries debt owed to the Chinese and the Middle East, without going further into debt.
Of course, it doesn’t seem that we’re real interested in doing that, yet. Instead, we want to build new bridges over which to haul the borrowed pigs and berries, to build new tennis courts and water slides upon which we can occupy our time doing anything other than produce pigs and berries – AND we want to pay pig farmers not to farm pigs; berry farmers not to farm berries and give money to the big cave lenders so that they can afford to kick us all out of our caves.
Personally, I think we were better off with the hunt/gather/pig thing. At least we had less stress back then. (I’m sure the pigs would disagree). However, since we’re obviously not going to go back to the days of old, I think that we should consider evening up the bill with China and the Middle East right away. Pay them off and start fresh. How? Give them California, (all of it – except Disney Land, however). Look, half of the bad ideas in government management come out of that State, (they’ve been on the verge of bankruptcy for the past 9,000-years, it seems), and besides, if we keep Disney Land, the price of admission alone would pay for enough pigs and berries to feed the remaining 49-States for at least another 38,000 generations.