The people at NASA have said that looking out into space, they discovered a planet resembling Earth so closely that it can sustain life. Well, let me tell you something, my friends, this is not the whole story because the truth is that NASA has known about this planet for a number of years now. It knows for certain that life does exist on it, and knows what sort of life it is because what is out there has come from here. Yes, what happened was that real people – earthlings like you and me -- were sent on a secret voyage of discovery when the warp engine was developed and a starship was built.
The people from Earth settled on the new planet and called for more people to go there taking with them tools, construction machines and transportation equipment. NASA and the US government informed a number of other nations what was happening, and they all agreed to keep the project secret for a while. Upon this, a number of expeditions were sent to the new planet with people from several places on Earth. They built villages in several locations and connected them with a network of roads and highways. They built an electric grid to take power to the villages, some of which had grown to become towns. They also installed an electronic highway to transport digital and audio-visual signals to every location where people live.
They grow the food, exploit the quarries and mine the grounds for metals and minerals. They have established a number of light manufacturing industries and some heavy ones too, including the making of spare parts for the machines and the equipment they brought from Earth. After a while, the elders in charge of the Planet determined that they had what it takes to erect an auto assembly plant and so they did. They put one up for which they designed a car and made it nicely suited for the Planet's terrain and atmosphere. They hired young workers and got the old assemblers from Earth to teach them how to assemble cars. The Elders in charge then ordered the modification of the factories that were making spare parts to now make parts for the car and feed the assembly plant with parts.
While doing all this, the people also managed to establish a central bank and started to print a currency they call the dollar which they back with gold at the fixed rate of 100 dollars per gram of gold. But given that they lived for a time on spaceships and in settlements where the daily routine was planned and executed by specialists, few of them – especially the younger ones -- had seen money, had felt the necessity to fend for themselves or had the experience of wheeling and dealing with other people. For these reasons and a few other ones, the Elders decided at a meeting of the Council of Elders to educate the public as to the ways and the merits of the free market system which they decided will only be implemented gradually. The Elders chose this method over the one suggested by someone whose idea was to administer the “shock therapy” that was tried on Earth and was proven to be a failure. In fact, the approach would have forced a system on a people that was not ready for it, the way that things were done in Russia when the Soviet regime was overthrown.
In fact, the reason for the voyage of discovery in the first place was that Ronald Reagan, the American President at the time, had predicted that the Soviet Union will soon be out of its misery because his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) -- better known as “Star Wars” -- was going to work like a charm and force the Soviets to surrender. As it turned out, SDI did not work but the Soviet Union collapsed anyway. Something else happened in the meantime, however, as a result of the activities associated with SDI. It is that the scientists working on it discovered the secret of the warp engine by a lucky accident and were able to build a prototype that worked. This gave the Americans the idea of rounding up the Soviet leaders and sending them to a far away planet where they could not contaminate Earth with their screwy communist ideas.
None of that happened, of course. Instead, Russia struggled and failed more often than not to become as capitalist as the green dollar bill while “Red China” stayed as politically red as ever but managed to turn itself into an economic giant that is forever preoccupied at covering itself with America's green bills. Then came the fateful year of 2008 when the whole system collapsed under its own weight and proved to be as fake as a three-dollar bill. And this made it so that no economic system could be trusted to deliver the good life on a sustained basis.
For this reason among the other reasons, the Elders on the new planet decided to experiment with a system they will develop as they go. They said that for now, each working person will be paid an amount of money proportionate to the value of the work they do during the week. To this end, the central bank will open a number of branches, each of which will have a regular staff that includes a person they call “wage and salary officer” whose job will be to liaise with the business owners that keep an account with the branch. The officers and the business owners will meet from time to time to review and to set a monetary value for the work done by each class of workers below the managerial level, be they blue collar workers or white collar ones. Thus, having a wage level and a salary level set for each class of employees, the timekeepers and the bookkeepers in every company will do the math each week and issue the checks.
The Council of Elders also decided that the launch of the auto plant should mark the start of the Planet's industrial age and be the point at which they will begin to introduce changes to the system of governance. The aim will be to alter the culture and get the Planet closer to having a true democracy not a fake one, and to install an economic system that is free for everyone not only for the charlatans. The Elders met several more times and took up the business of writing down the principles that will guide the wage and salary officers when they sit with the business owners to determine the pay level of the various workers. They also wrote down the principles that will guide the heads of enterprises when they negotiate a compensation package with an applicant that seeks a position at the managerial level.
The Elders then discussed the overhauling of the system of financial institutions, and this is where the background of each of them played a role in determining how the discussion proceeded. Among the group, some were chief executive officers (CEOs) on Earth, some were bank managers and some were blue collar industrial workers. The focus of the discussion narrowed down to the definition of the role that ought to be played by the financial institutions. In this regard, the Elders decided that the central bank will divest itself of its branches so that the latter may go their separate ways and become a stand alone institution or merge with other institutions thus become the sort of bank they want to be. For example, they could turn themselves into a credit union, a small local bank, a household finance or an investment bank. And if they wanted, they could offer new services such as insurance or brokerage or anything financial.
This done, the Elders began an abstract philosophical discussion that touched on several subjects. They discussed the wage gap that existed in some places on Earth between the pay levels of those who determined their own compensation package and the pay levels of those whose income was set by someone else. They also discussed the subject of the gap that existed between the pay of the CEOs who run the financial institutions and the pay of their underlings. And they discussed a sticking point that took time to exhaust: the pay gap that existed between the auto assemblers and the CEOs of the financial institutions. To illustrate this last point, an elderly gentleman told of his own experience on Earth, a story that set the tone as to how the rest of the discussion proceeded.
He said he dropped out of high school. He started to work at the age of 16 as a material handler in a factory that made car parts where he stayed for two years and learned a great deal about many industrial processes as well as life itself and what it takes to make it a success. He then worked for a car assembly plant where he assembled cars by day and went to school by night. Twelve years later he had been promoted to plant manager overseeing 3,000 workers, and had become the holder of a master's degree in business administration. He left the car assembly plant to work for an investment bank where he was promoted several times over the years to attain the position of CEO.
Betrayed by the hint of a guilty feeling, he told his fellow Elders with a heartfelt sadness that was evident in his voice about the time when he made 180 million dollars a year in salary, bonuses and perks for making not one decision that his secretary could not have made in her sleep. And he revealed that this sum of money was equal to the wages paid to the 3,000 workers at the car assembly plant when these people were making 60,000 dollars a year. And he went on to say that this was not the whole story because what happened after that was that the wages of these people were cut in half, a move that management asked for and the workers accepted to save the plant from bankruptcy and save the jobs because the plant was burning money faster than it was taking in. More than ever, he felt that a situation like this was so grotesque, it must never be allowed to happen on this Planet. By the time he was finished telling the story, the other Elders had adopted him in their hearts as their eminent Elder Statesman.
But how to prevent something like this from happening and still move toward the free market system that everyone agreed must be adopted? His answer was that given the nature of their society, it will be a while before a situation like this developed here. Thus, they had enough time to think about and to adopt a Constitution that will set the right balance between the work of the invisible hand of the marketplace and the heavy hand of the law. To this end, he put on the table a number of points which he invited them to think about and debate for as long as they needed to.
First, he said, we must accept that human beings will never devise a system so flawless that it can never fail. Second, because of that, it must be recognized that a Constitution is never a perfect document despite the adoption of amendments meant to improve on it. Third, it must be understood that the invisible hand of the marketplace is not a supernatural occurrence operating in a vacuum. Rather, it is a phenomenon that takes place inside the imperfect system we devise for it. Fourth, it should be possible to suspend any provision of the Constitution without having to amend it if and when a case comes up that may not be illegal but that the public regards as being grossly unfair. Fifth, when such a case comes up, a referendum will be called and voted on. If passed, the decision becomes a law to apply only in this one case without ever becoming a precedent to guide future cases.
To incorporate the philosophy of fairness into the culture, the Elders realized that they must start to ingrain into the consciousness of the population a number of principles. The most important of these being that if an individual is found to receive an income beyond what is reasonable, it does not mean that this person is above everyone else or that the situation cannot be changed. Rather, it should be viewed as a signal that the system has failed precisely because it was devised by human beings who are themselves imperfect and prone to failure. The natural thing to do under the circumstance is not to say that the invisible hand of the marketplace cannot be contradicted but to take the necessary measures that will allow reason to triumph over dogma and thus reverse the situation.
The Elders then shifted their attention to the fiscal and monetary principles that will guide the Planet to the future they had envisaged for it. After long debates, they reached a number of principles which they wrote down. First, in order to give everyone the chance to start their own enterprise, credit must remain easy at all time regardless of the inflationary pressures that may be evident. Second, to diminish the probability that inflation will rise, money will be lent only to the producers of goods or services, and to the consuming public. Third, although speculation will not be criminalized, it will be illegal to borrow money for the purpose. Measures will be introduced to detect such activities and prosecute the culpable. Fourth, if inflation rises anyway, money will be drained from the system by raising the taxes and not the interest rates. Fifth, those who are deemed to be a credit risk will not have to pay a higher interest rate when they borrow money. However, they may be asked to make higher payments at the beginning. But as long as they do not default, the payments they make will be reduced month after month so that when the loan is paid out, it would have cost them no more than anyone else.
When a number of years had passed and the system proved to work well on that far away Planet, the people on Earth asked for details with the view of duplicating it here. This is why NASA decided that the time had come to break to the world the news that a life sustaining planet existed out there. But this is not where the big drama is unfolding. It so happened that during the exchange of messages between Earth and the new Planet, it was determined that as long as America had the system, the Congress and the political class that it has, nothing good will come out of the attempt to duplicate the system here. For this reason, it was decided to round up the members of Congress and send them into a hellish sort of exile the way that the Reagan people wanted to do with the Soviet leaders.
Upon hearing this, the Elders of the Planet told of the moon around their planet that is about to leave its orbit and crash into the sun. They suggested tongue-in-cheek that maybe the moon could be packed with members of the Congress and the rest of them to then send them tumbling into a place as hot as hell itself. But on second thought, it was decided that because this is the Christmas season when people are supposed to be good to each other, it will be enough to pick one person to represent the entire political class of America, and send him alone to that hellish fate.
They studied the record and came up with the name of the GOP presidential wannabe Rick Perry who said the most outrageous thing so far. He said that the current President, Barack Obama had declared war on the Christian religion (including Christmas) when in fact, he was the one to sell his soul to the Jewish organizations like a shameless low life, criminally insane male hooker. These were the organizations that severely damaged Christmas, that plotted to kill it and that worked to replace it with Hanukah and the Festival of Lights when they were caught red handed and stopped at the last minute. I know this to be true because I was the one that stopped them.
Here is what happened. Some time during the mid-Nineties, it came to my attention a month or so before Christmas that building on the Bertolt Brecht play 'The Rise of Arturo Ui' in which a character said something to the effect that: The bastard may have been dealt with but the bitch that bore him is hot again, the Jewish organizations were preparing to blanket North America with the notion that: Something evil is lurking in the belly of the bitch on her way to Bethlehem. They wanted to signal by this campaign their extreme dislike of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus whose crucifixion has been causing them suffering for two thousand years.
The Jewish organizations were preparing this campaign while stressing in every way they could the need to do away with the word Christmas and to replace it with the word holiday. They also fought to ban the representation of Christian motifs in public places, especial baby Jesus, the holy family, the nativity scenes and the Christmas tree. And while savagely attacking those Christian symbols in every way they could, the Jewish organizations lobbied the US Congress to press the post office to issue a stamp bearing the menorah so as to celebrate the Jewish symbol which they were now associating with the Festival of Lights.
Upon learning of this plot, I alerted the world as to what was happening, and the Jewish organizations stopped doing what they were doing. But since these characters never drop for ever the evil they take up once, they changed their tactic and possessed the body of Rick Perry like a devil would do. And they got him to mouth their evil pronouncements for them.
There are those who say only a fire as hot as the sun will exorcise the evil spirits out of Rick Perry's body. If we put him on that moon and we let him crash into the sun, he may perish for ever or he may be set free of their hold on him. All we can do now is pray for him while they prey on him.
Time for me to take a vacation. Merry Christmas everyone and a happy New Year. See you next year.