The Alternative

Spread the Wealth

Monday is a bad day to go to town. But it seems pent up demand from the weekend drives me there nonetheless. The Chinese restaurant is closed on Mondays. Bob, the barber, is off doing something else and the Korner Bakery is closed too.

I like going to town. I feel like everyone is my friend there and I'm joining a serial party celebrating the love in our wonderful community. On days other than Mondays I can go into the Korner Bakery and get the best doughnuts in the world. After all these years going around eating doughnuts, I can't remember any quite like these. I'm bragging about the place I live and the system, or more accurately, lack of a system that makes it a great place. In fact any system can't help but make the place worse.

The people at the Korner Bakery don't receive orders from a central authority to make doughnuts or buns or bread. The Korner Bakery makes their products purely for profit. People buy them because they taste good. The same situation existed before Medicare took over most of the medical care business. These days everything is described as being part of a system, as if the chaos that gave us the greatest country on earth is somehow flawed and needs help from directors and boards to be more efficient. Aggregate supply and demand is always more accurate than guesses from bureaucrats.

Korner Bakery doesn't have a Renewable Doughnuts Standard mandating a minimum percentage of our diets be doughnuts. People actually like them and buy them. As we do errands around town we visit countless businesses who produce and sell products to please buyers and it is as simple as that. It is called capitalism.

Karl Marx invented the word capitalism and he defined it as “private ownership of the means of production.” In other words, your property is yours and not the public's. I've found lately, capitalism is used as a derogatory word. When I hear the word capitalist used nowadays, it is used with spite.

So I looked it up. Sure enough, I'm old enough to have witnessed the day where the meaning has changed in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a capitalist as “a person who has a lot of money, property, ect., and who uses those things to produce more money.” This definition obviously leads an uninformed or college indoctrinated person to believe a capitalist doesn't work for his money but acquires it through exploitation or entitlement. We are being brainwashed into being envious and resentful of people with more than we have despite the fact most of them earned their way to their position and help others do the same with the wealth they've accumulated.

Envy then leads us to justify the myth that our country, or any equitable society, is a democracy. A democracy is a system where individual rights are secondary to the “will of the people” otherwise known as mob rule. When the mob grows to 51 percent individuals will fade from productive activity beyond subsistence and we will say “Howdy!” to the dull drab vision of Marx. Innovation will become too expensive.

Socially conscious dingbats will ban doughnuts. There will be a doughnut black market. Doughnut deals gone bad will result in shoot-outs. Innocent bystanders will be hurt.

Help preserve our precious capitalism. Go to Fareway and look at those factory built hot dog buns and then go buy some really nice ones at Korner Bakery. Spread the wealth around...voluntarily.

Reach Fritz at 4selfgovernment@gmail.comor visit his website for some other fun stuff including Bob Gardiner's Oscar winning cartoon, Closed Mondays. www.alternativebyfritz.com