The Grasshoppers, The Gnats, and the Ever-Suffering Ants

Once, there was a group of inventive grasshoppers who came up with an idea to manufacture grasshopper automobiles. Soon, they had planned and created a company, Grasshopper Motors, that had the potential to become one of the biggest corporations the insect world has ever known. But, as anyone who has ever read a fable can tell you, grasshoppers make better managers than workers, and they very quickly realized that they would need a source of labor if their venture was going to continue to flourish.

The grasshoppers headed to a colony of gnats who lived comfortably but simply on the surface of the pond down behind the old stone wall. The grasshoppers had a proposal: the gnats would work for the grasshoppers, building grasshoppermobiles, and, in return, the grasshoppers would always provide food and shelter for the gnats, even when they became so old their wings could barely buzz. The gnats, who were sick of being eaten by frogs anyhow, decided this was an alright plan, and they entered into a contract to work for the grasshoppers. Secretly, the grasshoppers knew that the lifespan of a gnat was only a few days anyhow, and they didn't expect that they'd have to put much out after the gnats were too old to work. The grasshoppers immediately began to skim food for themselves off the top of the storage supplies for the gnats, and, before long the top began to look more and more like the middle.

But, because the gnats quickly died after retirement, this arrangement worked for many, many years. The grasshopper managers of Grasshopper Motors got their grasshoppermobiles built and the gnats worked hard for most of their lives, then had a few hours of peaceful rest before being eaten by birds. But the beetle researchers were busy making medical discoveries under the big rock in the corner field and, over time, the lifespan of the gnats began to get longer through advances in medication and health care, first to four days, then to a week, and finally almost two weeks. The grasshoppers found themselves in the position of supporting more and more old gnats with less and less food.

Finally, when it came time to pay the increasing population of old gnats the food that had been promised them, the grasshoppers realized that there was nothing left; the little bit that had been saved had now been eaten by the grasshoppers themselves. "Whoops!" the grasshoppers said to the gnats, "Remember how we had promised we'd always take care of you? Well, now we can't!" And, with that, the grasshoppers packed up the Grasshopper Motors offices and moved the whole shebang to the southern part of the field, where the insects were so enslaved, impoverished, and broken that they didn't even ask for lifelong care, just a pitiful morsel of food to split between their starving families. This allowed the grasshoppers to eat even more themselves while saving absolutely nothing.

Meanwhile, the gnats were now angry, left with little to show for their long days of hard work building grasshoppermobiles outside of boarded up logs and out-of-business nests, plus increasing gnat on gnat crime. They complained and complained, even threatening to take the grasshoppers to the Butterfly Court in an attempt to get the care they had worked so many hours to receive. "Listen here," the grasshopper managers said, calling from their pool floats in the sunny, warm water puddle of the southern field, "We don't have to give you gnats anything, really. But, because we care, we're gonna set you up so that you won't starve."

The grasshoppers called the ants, who Grasshopper Motors had supplied with two or three crumbs a year for allowing them to sell grasshoppermobiles in their field, knowing that the ants had a system of public care for their aged population already set up. And, even though the ant's system was already swollen and about to collapse under its own weight, it was still better than the nothing the grasshoppers had left the gnats. "Listen here, ants," the grasshoppers said, drinking grasshopperitas and dancing all night in the grasshopper-only clubs at the southern field, "You're gonna take on these gnats in your public ant system or our whole Grasshopper Motors will go under and we'll quit sending back the couple crumbs we send once a year, and you'll be in even worse shape than you are now. And, we'll come back and eat all of you, too."

Now the ants saw little other choice, since they did indeed receive two or three crumbs a year from Grasshopper Motors, and they couldn't let the increasingly pitiful gnats starve out by the pond. So the ants welcomed the gnats into their public system of food distribution, which promptly collapsed and caused massive starvation anyhow. And, that year, when the grasshoppers brought their crumbs up from the southern field, the ant population was so decimated (and the gnats were wiped out entirely), that they couldn't even fight back when the grasshoppers ate those of them that were left.

Moral: Hope I die before I get old.

The Fox, The Farmer, and The Spector of Utility Deregulation

Once there was a farmer who had a hen house. The farmer didn't ask much from his hens, only some eggs for breakfast on Sunday, a nice chicken dinner for Christmas Eve, and a few dollars profit for any extra sold at the farmer's market each weekend. Now, in the fields and woods around the farmer's land, there lived a wily old fox who occasionally, when someone forgot to close the gate, or maybe a tree damaged the barnyard fence, would get into the hen house and steal a chicken or two. But the fox could not get into the hen house that often, not as often as he would have liked, and it was difficult to get the chickens out of the barnyard, even with a damaged fence or an open door. He had to settle for lucky breaks when he could get them. The occasional raid on the hen house by the fox continued on for many years, but, in the end, the fox was little more than a nuisance to the farmer.

The fox, however, was powerful hungry and really didn't want to work that hard for a meal, so he came up with a plan. One day, when the farmer was tilling his fields, the fox called out to him. "Farmer!" the fox called, "I have a great idea for the both of us that will make your hens that much safer!"

Now the farmer was suspicious, both because he had never before heard a fox speak and because he doubted the fox would really want to make his hens safer. But the farmer was a polite man and he figured there would be no harm in entertaining the fox's suggestion, even though he expected it to be laughably horrible, so he nodded him on.

"Okay," said the fox, "As you and I both know, every once in a while, I happen to get into your hen house and steal a few of your chickens. This, no doubt, is irritating to you, as a farmer who has worked his whole life for his chickens, and I expect you would like it to stop. So I propose to you that, if you leave both the gate and the hen house door open, it will attract foxes from all over the county, rushing to your hen house to get your chickens. This mass of foxes will cause such a fox fight that, in the competition, none of us will ever get into the hen house to steal your chickens, and you will lose chickens no more. By opening up the access to your hen house, you will essentially prevent any chickens from ever being taken again."

Now the farmer laughed and laughed at this suggestion, expecting it to be even less stupid than it was, and he followed his laughter up by trying to run over the fox with his tiller. But the fox, as noted in the first paragraph, was wily, and he knew that the farmer's land was not actually owned by the farmer, but that the deed was held by a board of pig bankers in town. So the fox journeyed to town and made a presentation, using his limited but inventive fox knowledge of PowerPoint. He craftily explained to the pig bankers the benefits of leaving the hen house door open so that foxes would compete, which, in turn, would make the farmer's land all the more valuable.

The pig bankers paid very little attention to the fox as they were more interested in an upcoming acquisition of their bank by the corporate wolf bank that was working its way through the sham regulatory commissions for the sake of appearing like it was being regulated. So they snorted for a while, and rolled around on the floor, and generally acted like pigs, until one finally said to the fox, "So whatta you want us to do about it?"

"You own the deed to the land," said the fox, "Get the farmer to open up the door to his hen house and begin fox competition that will increase the value of the hens, therefore increasing the value of your land."

Now the pigs liked increased value so, with no further questions, one of the largest of the pigs, a big boar who had won the blue ribbon at the county fair two years running, headed out to the farm to advise the farmer to open his gate and his hen house door so that the foxes would compete with themselves and leave the chickens alone. And, if the farmer did not comply with these steps that the fox guaranteed would increase the value of the land, then the pig bank would be forced to call up the deed.

The farmer, seeing little choice, opened his gate, opened the hen house door, and went to bed.

Of course, the fox strolled right into the hen house and began to eat the hens in a bloodbath of fowl proportions. When he could no longer stand the squawking, he began to steal the hens, breaking their necks and carrying the whole bunch of them, in groups of three, back to his fox den. Finally, the fox ate as many eggs as he could. As morning approached, tired and stuffed and on the verge of diarrhea, the fox smashed whatever eggs were left on the floor of the hen house so the farmer and his family wouldn't even have those, and he crawled, belly dragging the ground, back to his den, where he promptly vomited and passed out in a gluttonous stupor.

When the farmer awoke the next morning, of course, he had no chickens and not one egg left, and, of course, with nothing left, no other foxes ever came for competition. Without the extra money from the chickens and eggs at the farmer's market, the farmer promptly missed two mortgage payments and the pig bank foreclosed on his farm, leaving the farmer and his family homeless. The pig bank did see the increased value of the farm by simply leasing it back to itself at 300 times the value, instantly increasing its leased income and driving up the price per share that the wolf bank had to pay for the acquisition.

The fox, meanwhile, ate the rest of the chickens over the next few days, abandoned his den, and moved on to another farmer's place down the road to extol the virtue of leaving the hen house door open to fox competition.

Moral: If a fox asks you to leave a hen house door open in the name of competition and you do it, you are stupid. If the State does it for you, you are experiencing the thrill of a free market economy.