A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

For Preventing the Poor People 
in Missouri from Being a Burden on the Public

It is most unfortunate that those who visit any of the emergency rooms in my home state, Missouri, can hardly find a good place to sit down. The emergency rooms are filled with poor people sniveling about their headaches and other trivial ailments. Some of these poor people, instead of being able to work for an honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time dreaming up ways to bleed the U.S. government of all of its resources. Most of these heathens use the emergency room as a substitute for primary care, as if they don’t know there are such things as private physicians and doctor offices.

I think it is agreed by all parties, certainly the Tea Party, that the prodigious number of poor people in want of medical care in the USA is deplorable; and therefore whoever can find a fair, cheap and easy method of making these poor people sound and useful members of society would deserve to have his or her statue set up for saving the USA, which is on the brink of collapsing.

But my intention is very far from being confined to providing only for the poor people in Missouri who are too lazy to get their own health insurance; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take into account anyone in the USA who ever took advantage of any kind of public health resource. Not only that, my plan is to provide for the entire citizenry, that is, to provide relief for every US citizen who ever made use of any government service.

As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed other experts’ ideas, I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation. It is true, according to the World Health Organization that “the United States spent more on health care per capita ($8,608), and more on health care as percentage of its GDP (17.9%), than any other nation in 2011,” but that is nothing compared to what the United States spends per capita on defense, education, transportation, and all sorts of other things.  Health care expenditure certainly is not the primary problem.

You will see that there are several advantages to my proposal, which aims to address a much larger problem: My scheme will prevent school dropouts, it will do away with slaving over tax returns, it will eliminate the irritating noise of sirens, it will dispense with waiting in long lines to get into national parks, it will get rid of library fines, and all sorts of other things.

I am assured by John Fleming, Mick Mulvaney, Jim Jordan, and others that the cost of running a federal government is simply much too much; in fact, the word “government” is a word I hesitate to use at all. I really detest the idea of “government.” It is something quite monstrous and evil.

I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope you will not find too objectionable.

I have been assured by a very knowing person that it is unbelievably expensive to pay not only for the Attorney General, but also the Supreme Court and the whole racket known as the federal judicial system; it’s even more expensive to pay for everything overseen by the Departments of Defense, State, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury and don’t let me forget, Education. We spend way too much money on public education, from primary school to university, and we support ridiculous agencies like the National Science Foundation that fund the silliest research projects. You know, there really is no such thing as the “common good” except in the imaginations of dreamers and the very people who want to bleed us to death with taxes.

I do therefore humbly suggest that we just get ride of the monstrous US federal budget—why our 3.8 trillion dollar federal budget is simply obscene. We should get rid of the whole budget—and the whole damned federal government. Who needs it?

I grant this will be somewhat difficult, but the Republican Party has helped us get started.

I have proposed, then, to liberate all US citizens from the burden of having a federal government. We're better off without one, especially we who are somewhat well fed and well cared for. I will remind you that Herbert Spencer hinted back in the nineteenth century that rich people are rich because they are morally superior and entitled to everything they have, and that poor people are weak, lazy, stupid, and morally inferior. If someone cannot afford his or her own medical insurance, then something must be not only mentally, but also spiritually wrong with him or her. There is nothing that the government can do to change that state of affairs.

As for schools, the public schools are wretched. They have perpetuated specious ideas about evolution and other nonsense. If we just get rid of public education altogether, we will have solved the problem of dropouts. We don’t really need education anyway. It just gives people fancy ideas. As far as public transportation goes, it may be inconvenient to have a few failing bridges and highways, but people of means will find a way to get where they need to go. As for emergency services such as fire departments and police departments, they tend to be run by local governments, but we don’t really need them. Bad luck doesn’t usually strike good people. Without a federal government and its useless services, we will be spared the burden of ever having to pay another red cent in taxes.

I am running out of room, so I will spare you having to listen to all of the advantages of my plan. I have a list of at least ten more.

But, let me assure you of one thing:  Even though I am indeed a government employee, I am not motivated to make my proposal based on the desire simply to have a vacation. Please believe me: I have no ulterior motive in suggesting that the US government shut down for good. It is true that I only make about two hundred dollars a month as a Peace Corps volunteer and that I teach English to scores and scores of Chinese university students, but I insist that I am not looking for a vacation. I simply believe that the US government has no business interfering in people’s lives—it has no business nosing around in people’s educations and legal affairs, and there is no need to offer any safety, security or health plans. Certainly not Obamacare.

The US Government should simply close down for good, and we can all go back to living peacefully as morally upright, gun-toting people capable of solving all of our own problems without Uncle Sam telling us what to do or bleeding us to death.