The time came when the emperor decreed: “The people are in need; a plague is upon the land. I will give them money.”
The people had been made to believe that paper was money. So, the emperor ordered that paper bearing the government insignia be printed and distributed to the people.
Now, the people had been trained to accept paper as money, but they still hung onto the belief that even paper money required work to be considered valuable.
But the emperor reassured them that paper is money backed by the full faith and credit of government (aka paper money has value because the government can always commandeer more of the people’s work).
So, when the plague worsened, the emperor printed and distributed paper money to everyone, whether they lost their job or not.
Karl Marx and his followers smiled slyly behind covered mouths. And paper money flooded the land.
“Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney and the Bernie Bros. All the while, deficits continued to pile higher than even the dead bodies.
Until one day, the emperor made the fatal mistake of taking a stroll among his people.
Most people bowed and thanked him profusely for the wads of paper money he printed for them. But from the crowd, one young woman dared to ask, “If money can simply be created, why don’t we simply print, print, and print some more?”
“If wealth can be created de novo, why should we work at all?”
The emperor flushed but did not answer. In time, though, the illusion wore thin, and people discovered that paper is indeed paper and not money.
But this realization took time. In the beginning of the pandemic, toilet paper became scarce. Ironically, in the end, paper money no longer could buy toilet paper but became toilet paper.
Supposedly wise men stroked their chins and mused, “Why didn’t we resist before paper money became paper-mache? Why didn’t we question whether wealth could be created without work? Why were we silent?”
No one could answer. One very thin, very old man clutching his Nobel Prize in economics and one of the last copies of the New York Times offered this: “If you take the billion-dollar notes and soak them in water, they don’t chap the bottom so much.”
Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican, is the junior senator from Kentucky.
