Painting the Leaves

Our leaders truly are incredibly intelligent. When they see brown leaves, they simply paint them green.

Our doctors are often able to correctly diagnose thousands of different illness types. Plus, they know all the medications and procedures that are commonly prescribed to treat those maladies. They are incredibly bright. Point taken, it is marginally sad that most of them have no clue what actually really caused those diseases. Why else would they structurally medicate the hell out of their patients? But forgive them, they cannot all be a Herbert Shelton.

Our political leaders are keenly able to name the illnesses of modern society: economic depression, violence, illiteracy, poverty, disease. There is no end to their inventiveness when it comes to vomiting out new laws, rules, regulations, and public entities in a relentless effort for the government to control all the evils of the world. That, in itself, is a fantastic accomplishment. Sure, it is a smidgeon sad that they have no clue why their policies are not working. Why else would they be spending the taxpayers’ money on bailing out the banks? But go easy on them, they cannot all be a Ron Paul.

Our business leaders have taken MBA’s and know a thousand details about production planning, logistics, marketing, and human resource motivation programs. OK, it is somewhat sad that most of them only focus on short-term results and have no idea how to really build steadfast organizations that structurally build quality products and provide meaningful service. Why else would they keep discounting and brand extending their products to death? Yet keep in mind, they cannot all be a Steve Jobs or a Jack Trout.

Our economists are brilliant at naming, measuring and analyzing a plethora of economic variables such as GDPs, inflation rates, stock indices, earning reports, consumer leverage ratios, bond yields, and so on. Yes, obviously it is a tad sad that they keep thinking their centrally planned tinkering is stronger than the market. If not, why else do they continuously meddle with interest rates, money supplies, taxation, currency band widths, public spending, and all the other tools of the Keynesian bag of tricks? But relax a little please, they cannot all be a Ludwig von Mises.

Many trees have thousands of leaves. Sometimes, these leaves turn brown. Sometimes they fall. Nature can be cruel that way. Fortunately, in their infinite wisdom, our leaders do not accept that. They know better than going with nature. Fortunately also, they have studied leaf science and therefore know how to tape leaves to their twigs and paint them in - almost - natural looking hues. It does not exactly always work perfectly, but why wait for next spring if you may have green leaves year-round? Why nurture the roots with fertile soils, if a paint job is that much faster and cheaper? Our leaders are truly quite brilliant. To solve our issues, all we need is more painters.