DEBT-FREE?... WHY NOT FREE! FREE! FREE!
For years nowwe have been treating goods and services as if they were de facto free. It was only a matter of time before we made them free de jure. a lot of people had the same thought. And they weren’t returning their grocery carts to the cart rack or parking between the lines. In fact, somebody had backed his pickup truck through the automatic doors and was throwing cases of Samuel Adams Boston Lager into the pickup bed. He probably should have stuck to Bud in cans because the Sam Adams bottles were bursting all over the place. It was a mess. It was a worse mess inside the grocery store. Squealing children, faces smeared with chocolate, swarming the candy aisle. Housewives rooting though the produce bins, tossing bruised fruits and wilted vegetables over their shoulders. Grown men running and blocking and tackling each other: T-bone steaks were the football and the meat cooler was the line of scrimmage. All I wanted was a little cheese – a wheel of Stilton, fat wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano, large Brie de Melun, ten pounds or so each of Roquefort, Gruyère, Gorgonzola, Mozzarella di Bufala, Camembert de Normandie, and Moliterno black truffle Pecorino. You know, the kind of stuff that makes the snack tray look special. We already had saltines at home.
But I never got to the deli counter. Some old folks had commandeered the shuttle from the local retirement community. (Gosh, they were spry.) There was a pink-haired lady in a walker swinging a kielbasa. She would have been batting .400 for the Astros if she was playing Major League Baseball. Things were every bit as bad at the gas station. Tug-of-war with the pump hoses. People using the fuel nozzles like nunchucks. Then somebody started squirting high-test at other folks because they were trying to pull him away from his boat trailer where he was filling the 130-gallon fuel tank on his Bertram 24 Sport Fisherman. Good thing nobody smokes anymore. KA-BOOM!!! Well, almost nobody. Let’s not even talk about what was going on at the liquor store... though I did manage to get away with a couple of bottles of 2010 Châteauneuf-du-Pape. (The locals thought 2010 was the sell-by date.) Everywhere I looked in this heretofore peaceful, sleepy little town there was – as that gloomy old political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called it – a “war of all against all.” It made me think... Communist countries are based on the idea that everything is free. In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx says, “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” No wonder communist countries are brutal dictatorships. It would take a lot of totalitarianism and secret police and gulags
“
42 | November 2017
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker