Sin of the Month • Abby
Bardi |
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Beans
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Every January, people all around the world make New Year’s resolutions that they can’t possibly keep. We vow to eat right, exercise more, clean our closets, be nicer to other people—things we end up slacking off on by mid-February. This year, I decided to make resolutions that were more practical, things I could stick to.
With that in mind, I have decided to:
1. Bring about World Peace, and
2. Come to understand the science of Economics.
Back to World Peace in a moment.
About Economics—last month, when President Bush fired his Chief Economic Advisor and Secretary of the Treasury, it occurred to me that I might apply for the job, if only I knew a little more about the scientific principles that make our economy tick. The fact that I have never taken an Economics course in my life and, until now, have shown very little interest in the subject did not deter me from my ambition. I began to picture myself in the Cabinet, and I started to warm to the idea.
When the husband of one of my best friends was in President Clinton’s cabinet, he was allowed to use the Presidential Box at the Kennedy Center.
They took me to the opera once, and I got to:
• Sit right next to Placido Domingo
• Hover above the stage in a seat so good it was like dangling in heaven
• Smuggle out a little bottle of compli-mentary millennium champagne (I don’t drink, but I kept it as a souvenir)
• Eat an entire tin of Presidential jellybeans and some Presidential M&Ms (your tax dollars at work).
All in all, I am pretty sure that I would enjoy being in the Cabinet, even though it might mean that I’d have to talk to President Bush regularly. The problem is that I dislike him so much that every time I see him on TV, campaigning for some reactionary pal of his instead of governing, I change the channel, and it took about a year of his administration before I stopped drawing moustaches and dunce caps on his picture in the newspaper. But heck, when he’s off-duty, on the ranch, he seems like a nice enough guy, and I’m sure I could learn to work with him.
So I figure all I have to do is learn how Economics operates, and I can begin to apply seriously for the position.
I decided to start with beans. Here’s what I figure: you take a group of, oh, 20 people or so, and you give them each the same number of beans. What kind? Okay, let’s say they’re dried pinto beans. Everyone in the group gets 20 beans—that’s called Leveling the Playing Field.
Here is how it works. First of all, people need beans, so some of the people in the group sell their beans to those people. Some people sell them for a fair price; some mark them up way over cost. (The beans were free, so it doesn’t seem nice to gouge for them, but some bean-sellers are like that.) They are paid in beans, which they use to buy more beans. Depending on how sales go, almost immediately, some bean-sellers will have more beans than others.
How are we doing so far?
Now things start to get complicated. Some people think of great concepts for their beans—they create a demand for them by running advertisements that say “Beans. Just eat ‘em.” “Got beans?” " Beans—They’re Good for your Heart.” etc. So some people’s beans start selling like hotcakes. (We’ll deal with Hotcake Economics in tomorrow’s lesson.) Somehow, because of the crazy way things work, some sellers’ bean sales are through the roof, whereas others are sluggish. Some bean-sellers start to develop a corner on the market; others start to deplete their bean supply because they can’t compete. The more beans someone has, the better able he or she is to afford slick print ads, TV spots, bean placement in some of the better movies, which makes sales even better....Whereas some bean sellers begin to teeter on the verge of bankruptcy.....
We could go on like this, but I think you see what I’m getting at here: no matter how long we play the game with this group of 20 bean-sellers, we always have the same number of beans in the game unless some-one decides to use them to make frijoles.
Surely, this is how Economics functions in the larger sense. When we spent 60 billion dollars on Homeland Security, we’re not just building a giant bonfire and throwing 60 billion pieces of paper on it: someone gets that money—we are buying some kind of goods and/or services with it. So whoever gets that money should be heading down to Home Depot and building themselves a new deck, which in turn means that Home Depot does well, and its stockholders (does Home Depot have stockholders? I have no idea! But that won’t stop me from making an excellent Economic Advisor to President Bush) will make dividends. The only thing that can go wrong with the American economy is if we actually start sending money overseas—then the beans, as it were, are leaving the room. However, if we loan people beans—I mean money—and charge them exorbi-tant interest, we get all the beans—I mean money—back, as well as more beans....
So I guess my question now is, when the economy is not doing well—and as we all know, it isn’t—where do all the beans go? Oh, I know, some of the beans are imaginary—when President Bush told us two years ago that the economy was start-ing to slide, before there were clear indica-tors that this was the case, the stock market began to slide, too, and suddenly, panic over the lack of beans became real, and caused the bean futures market to spiral downwards.
But when I look around us, I see a country full of people who are, overall, by world standards, incredibly fortunate—most of us have warm places to sleep; we don’t have to lug polluted water from a well miles away; we are not, for the most part, covered in flies. As a nation, we have plenty of beans. The top 1% of the population has most of the beans, and the Bush administration seems interested in perpetuating that, but the rest of us have beans, too. You and I may not have as many beans as we want, but when it comes to beans, we are basically okay—indeed, we have enough beans that we can easily share beans with other people who have fewer beans, by paying taxes, i.e., contributing some of our beans to benefit the rest of humankind. It’s not clear to me why some people are so opposed to this, but then, I really don’t know beans about Economics.
So, if you happen to talk to President Bush, please ask him to hire me. Okay, I’m not a Republican, and I don’t like him, but I think I could probably do a better job than guys who run huge corporations and don’t care about anything but the bottom line.
THE BEAN MANIFESTO
• DON’T HOARD BEANS.
• PLANT THEM.
• SEND BEANS OVERSEAS AND PLANT THEM THERE, TOO. (This is what former President Clinton said recently: if you help other countries’ economies, they make the world richer. There is plenty for everyone.)
• DON’T CHARGE EXORBITANT INTEREST ON BEANS.
• MAKE SURE THAT PEOPLE WITH INSUFFICIENT BEANS HAVE FOOD AND MEDICAL CARE.
• BEANS NOT BOMBS!
• PRESIDENTIAL JELLYBEANS FOR ALL!
To return to World Peace for a moment, it seems to me that the Bean Manifesto will wrap that up easily enough.
All I know is, I really want to sit in that Presidential Box at the Kennedy Center again, and unless the Democrats come up with a good candidate for 2004, it may be a long time before I’m back there. Yes, President Bush and I may not be the warmest of friends—but as everyone knows, the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
The Politics of Beans:
Democrats Grow the beans
Republicans Eat all the beans
Greens Plant the beans and protect them
Socialists Share the beans
Communists Nationalize the bean industry and then go
broke combatting the bean embargo
Larouchites Hang around airports complaining about
the bean conspiracy
