Send Them Pork

Well. I thought I ought to write about our pig business. I was raised by a woman who never let me leave anything on my plate. Even though she was a terrible cook she made us eat it all. Nancie and I lived through it. There's a difference between over-cooked pork chops and poison. Leaving nothing on my plate was efficient.

As I drove around the countryside I constantly saw hog feeders in farmyards where the pigs were bedded down in feed that was rooted out of the troughs by playful pigs, and never eaten. Most of these feeders were cylindrical with a row of doors around the bottom. There was an adjustment so the opening could be narrowed enough that it was too much work for the pigs to play with the feed. They ate all they could lick out.

I wondered why these farmers wouldn't adjust their feeders and give the money they saved to their wives so they could buy more shoes, or even buy a pickup that didn't splash sand through the floor when it rained. Efficiency is the name of the game. The incentive of shoes or a solid pickup floor are the surest path to efficiency.

I remember hearing that there were posters by each classroom door at the high school emphasizing the importance of a college education. The students bought into it. Federal student loans distorted future plans. Why wouldn't someone with an underdeveloped (under 25-year old) brain opt for the comfort of regimented school life with parties every weekend? Now you have to have an emergency to get a plumber or an electrician. President Biden is having the efficient people pay for those degrees. They call it debt forgiveness. Forgiveness is fine but Moses heard from God and this sort of forgiveness, called theft, was condemned on those tablets. I agree with the tablets, a road map to a civil society.

The systematic deviation from consequences is turning our world into those hog lots full of wasted feed. If there was anything I learned during my one quarter at Iowa State it was “opportunity cost.” That would be where money saved in one place can be used somewhere else. That feed used as bedding, could have fed a few more pigs and Willy could have done something constructive instead of whining about how unfair farming is at a Farm Aid concert. The same goes for all this wasteful recreational tillage, by the way.

Meanwhile, the story out of the Middle East is even more blatantly disgusting. Western powers had the expertise to extract oil so they thought they were entitled to it, and to divvy up the land for their benefit, locals be damned. Guilt bloomed after the Holocaust and the Zionists convinced the powers-that-be that the Bible justifies a new state of Israel. The story varies wildly by source but there's no disputing the fact that the Palestinians' border in Gaza is controlled by Israel. Objectively that would define a prison. So here we are today: Israel leads by a score of 30,000 to 1,200, quite a blow-out compared to the Iowa /Nebraska game on Sunday.

A million people digging holes only to fill them back in can't rival the insanity there. We slaves known as taxpayers give Israel weapons of mass destruction, then fret about how to help those who we have helped devastate. In his State of the Union address President Biden told of plans to take two months to build a multi-billion dollar pier for unloading multi-billions of dollars worth of aid for the people he's helping bomb. This is good though, as it will help avoid such things as the five children killed by a falling aid package whose chute failed to open.

Not that it is our business, but to be consistent, let's send them pork.

Comments are always welcome as a letter to the editor or directly to me at: 4selfgovernment@gmail.com