Simon Anderson
A dickhead with a camera: the Establishment’s dissident.
Minister for Local Government Simeon Brown has a Sisyphean task ahead of him when he meets with the Green party mayor of Wokington, Tory Whanau.
His boulder is communication.
This is Marx's Capital. Despite that it is their bible, few socialists have actually read it, relying instead upon a priestly caste of ideologues to interpret doctrine for them. Not dissimilar to Christians in the Middle Ages prior to the translation of the actual bible from Latin into their local languages.
If you've followed me for a while you might have encountered my working definition of a socialist: “someone who’s read enough Marx to be impressed by it while lacking the intellectual acuity to understand it”.
This priestly class of ideologues, often employed within humanities faculties and pleased to refer to themselves as leftist intellectuals, are precisely described by this definition. The great mass of socialists haven’t, so when the ideologues tells them that Marx was trans and he delivered the only workable solution to climate change while secretly writing the Treaty of Waitangi, socialists accept these pronouncements as a matter of faith.
We see this thought-stopping compliance all the time. For example, the ideologues tell the proles to take their children to the local library for rainbow grooming time and they all do. (After unbraiding their daughters’ hair.)
But I’m getting distracted: back to the book. Anyone who’s read Capital will tell you the first nine chapters of Marx’s magnum opus are inherently missable. These chapters are gobbledegook filled with arcane formulas and esoteric mathematical equations that collectively amount to the economic theories of socialism, which have been readily dissected for their laughably crude errors and misrepresentations in countless academic treatise for – approaching – two centuries. Here’s the thing: nowhere in those nine chapters is the term – or the concept – "opportunity cost" mentioned or described.
Opportunity cost is the elementary economic principle familiar to anyone who has done the grocery shopping: if you have 10 dollars to spend on chicken and steak, and a chicken costs $10 and a steak costs $10, then purchasing the chicken comes at the opportunity cost of the steak. Simple.
Simple, but entirely unfamiliar to the people of Wokington and perhaps least of all to Comrade Whanau. Because Marx didn’t cover it.
As I suggested at the outset Minister Brown’s challenge appears insurmountable. He is meeting with the representatives of an entire city of people who simply cannot comprehend that spending all of their money on rainbow paedostrian crossings means they don’t have any money to spend on fundamental infrastructure such as the supply of drinking water. That opportunity cost is a concept entirely outside their frame of reference and he’s endeavouring to explain it to them.
Meanwhile, the ideologues preach to the socialists that Marx has the solution. “All property is theft” and fiat currency is an abstraction anyway. The solution is to increase taxation upon their class enemies, the bourgeoisie, to invest in more rainbow crossings.
Eventually comrades, with just a bit more taxation and a bit more labour under the next Five Year Plan, the rainbow crossings will produce drinking water. From each according to his rainbows, to each according to his thirst.
Drinking water for all in the People’s Republic of Wokington.
Good luck dealing with these people, Simeon.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
