Genre-Bending Proposals?

There was Bastiat's "Petition of the Candlemakers," protesting unfair competition from the sun. That should be updated to make the sun pay big fines for global warming.

Dictionary publishers should copyright individual words and charge royalties from anybody who uses their words. I got dibs on "I".

"If the treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise ... to dig the notes up again...there would be no unemployment and. . . the real income of the community . . . would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is." - John Maynard Keynes

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_maynar... [Sound familiar?]

The government should regularly inspect the diaries of all teenagers. Depending on what they've written there, they could be arrested for corrupting the morals of minors (themselves).

We make people get government licenses to get married, why don't we also require a license to be born. Oh, wait, we already do that - it's called a birth certificate.

Before being allowed to conceive a child, a couple should be required to submit an environmental impact report. If they can't afford an environmental impact report, they should be sterilized.

The income tax should be replaced with a breathing tax, because everybody (except vampires and corporations) breathes, and breathing increases CO2 levels.

Embalming should be outlawed because embalmed corpses are not biodegradable. Cremation should be outlawed because it increases CO2 levels. Burial should be outlawed because it wastes land. I guess that will leave no other legal option except cannibalism. So before dying, people will be required to pass an inspection by the USDA.

In discussions about minimum wage, somebody always suggests raising it up to a thousand dollars an hour to make everybody rich.

What if they declared a war and nobody came?

Maybe the draft should apply only to old men. That might eliminate wars altogether.

Here's a poem by David Friedman:

This man 1 never saw before

At 3 A.M. breaks down the door

To tell me my aspirin is LSD.

"It says right there on the bottle,

Acetylsalicylic Acid."

I tell you doctor, honestly,

It seems like someone's after me.

I don't think fighting is what I'm made for

But this lottery ticket I never paid for

Sold by a pusher known as Sam

Has won me a ticket to Vietnam,

A twelve months, expenses paid, tropical vacation

With a funeral, free, from a grateful nation.

But the doctor says I need therapy

For thinking someone is after me.

And then there are things I just can't ignore

Like the little man in our bedroom door

Says we'll be in jail by the end of the night

Unless we turn over and do it right.

Doctor, Doctor, come and see

There's really someone after me.

Then he asks, as he rips off the sheet,

For our marriage license and tax receipt;

Says "you need a license to shoot at a duck

How come you think that it's free to . . ."

Who so blind as will not see;

The state, the state, is after me.

-

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machiner...

Some people would like to incarcerate every male in the country between the ages of 15 and 50. That would make the crime rate drop by at least 90 per cent.

All those child-abusing priests should be locked up. They are still practicing one of the most egregious forms of child sexual abuse - they're telling impressionable children that they're going to Hell because they masturbate.

To fight global warming, there should be a world-wide carbon tax. Countries with active volcanoes should have to pay the carbon tax on the CO2 emissions from their volcanoes. Some countries are lucky enough to profit from big natural resource reserves. Others are unlucky and will have to pay carbon tax on big natural polluters. C'est la vie.

Then there's the novel and movie, "The Mouse That Roared," about a small country that declared war on the U.S., expecting to lose and then be re-built with a Marshal Plan, but they accidentally won the war.

Require banks to report to the government on any transaction over ten thousand dollars. Require banks to keep records of all of everybody's bank transactions for the last 5 years. Require them to turn that information over, without a warrant, to any government agent who says it's a national security matter. Call this law the "Banking Privacy Act."

Milton Friedman wanted to "abolish the Federal Reserve and replace it with a computer," It wouldn't matter what the computer did. Its great virtue would be predictability. Humans at the Fed just inject more uncertainty and noise into the market.

The movie, Wag the Dog, - a fake war to distract attention from a sex scandal.

Dr Strangelove, Peter Sellers, wanted to launch the nukes.

Being There - Peter Sellers is a mentally-handicapped man who is mistaken for a political genius.

Wage-earners and businessmen are required to submit tax forms to the government to prove they aren't violating tax laws. Why don't we also make people submit forms to the government to prove that they're not violating any other laws?

To protect people from harming themselves by smoking pot, the government should locate marijuana fields and spray them with poison. Call the poison "paraquat." This is guaranteed to reduce the number of pot smokers - one way or another.

Children aren't mature enough to handle the truth. It should be against the law to teach anything to anybody under 30. Older people are safe because most of them are immune to the truth.

We should have patrols stopping people at random to check if they are citizens. If they aren't carrying documents to prove their citizenship, they should be deported to Mexico. I know we're already doing that, but it should apply to everybody, not just brown-skinned people.

Currently, in most states, drivers are required to have liablilty insurance to pay damages in case they get in an accident (except rich people are allowed to be "self-insured"). By the same logic, we should require everybody (drivers or not) to have murder insurance to pay damages in case they murder somebody. The damages would be huge if you happened to murder a CEO with an 8- or 9-digit salary, so the premiums for murder insurance would be substantial. But if you can't afford murder insurance, then you got no business running loose - go straight to jail. Living without murder insurance is a serious offense.

We need more borders. Robert Frost (or was it his neighbor?) said good fences make good neighbors. We need a border, with barbed-wire, landmines, and machine guns, between California and Arizona, to keep out those jerks from that other state. Come to think of it we need a border between the south side of town and the north side. Maybe I need a border inside my head to keep these thoughts on the dark side.

Old jokes:

(1) "I'm a second-degree vegetarian - I only eat vegetarian animals."

(2) " If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?"

(3) Then there's the one about tacos.

We need a merit system in this country. Make everybody take an IQ test, then give everything to the winner. I think her name is Marilyn vos Savant.

(I'll try to sneak this one in. It once got me a Yahoo violation. What if J. C. (you know Who) returned, but to the U.S., instead of Israel. Would He be deported as an illegal alien?)

There should be a big government project to identify criminal genes. Anybody with criminal genes would be sterilized.

Let's start a new political party, the "War and Discipline Party." Its mission would be to protect the equal rights of all the better sort of people. Everybody would be free to do the Right Thing. To protect that freedom, the government would tell people exactly what the Right Thing is.

Married couples, whether gay or straight, should be subject to random bed checks. If they're not actually having sex, their marital benefits should be revoked.

I should be allowed to deduct the wages I pay myself as a business expense. I pay myself everything I make, so my net profit is zero, so I shouldn't have to pay any income tax. Or looking at it another way, I trade $X worth of labor for $X in wages. It's an even trade, with no profit on either side. No profit = no income = no tax. Why can't this damn auditor understand that?

The United States has about two million people in prison, but only about half a million have committed violent crimes. So get a list of those half million violent criminals. Then pick somebody, anybody in the world, who you don't like. It doesn't matter how respectable and honored he is. It could be the President or the Pope, if that's who you happen to dislike. Make a new list, consisting of the half-million violent prisoners plus the one guy that you don't like. Then point out that your enemy is a member of a group (defined by your list) where the odds of being innocent are one in 500,000. You have just proved beyond a reasonable doubt that your enemy is a violent criminal.

- Ray Smith

Sardonic is the key here. If you are working with High Schoolers, you need to push them way out of the normal box. Take the daily newspaper- The LA Times had a cover story today about how we are killing Afghans by mistake because war is difficult. So get sardonic- we should be knocking on the doors in the villages- excuse me, are you Taliban? because if you are, we need to ask you to stay while the good innocent folks are evacuated so we can bomb the bejesus out of you. This was what Swift and Orwell were trying to do. What do you think their good grandparents thought about the firebombing of Dresden? (Slaughterhouse 5) Or Lenny Bruce or that poor stupid professor that compared the twin tower victims to Adolf Eichmann? I'm not sure this can be taught.

Primary Colors perhaps.

there is animal farm, fahrenheit 451, and a few others. i was told that the old man and the sea was a metaphor, i mean the whole book was one metaphor for life.