"Bad Habits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

Fungus On The Economy

I don’t know about you, but I was ever so grateful when President Reagan and several other top leaders got together recently and straightened out the world economy. I had been meaning to do something about it myself, but I never found the time on account of we’ve had a lot of rain lately, which has caused these fungal growths to sprout all over the lawn.

I am not talking here about toadstools. I am talking about organisms reminiscent of the one that nearly ate the diner in the Ingmar Bergman film The Blob before Steve McQueen subdued it with a fire extinguisher. Of course Steve had to deal with just the one lone, isolated growth, whereas I have several dozen, and I couldn’t possibly extinguish them all if they attacked in unison. Eventually they’re going to figure this out. I mean, they may be fungal growths, but they’re not stupid.

Anyway, with all this on my mind I’ve had very little time to spend on the world economy, which is why I was so glad to hear that the leaders of the economic bloc known to economists as the Big Rich Western Nations with Indoor Plumbing and Places That Sell Cheeseburgers met in Williamsburg to straighten things out. Williamsburg is an authentic colonial restored place in Virginia where people in authentic uncomfortable clothing demonstrate how horrible it was to live in historical colonial times. Back then, if you wanted one crummy bar of soap, you had to spend the better part of a week melting beeswax and rending pigs and all the other degrading things people did before the invention of the supermarket. This is how people still live in a lot of wretched little Third World nations with names like Koala Paroondi, whose leaders were not invited to Williamsburg because the Western leaders were afraid they’d eat all the food.

The economic summit cost something like eight million dollars, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize it lasted almost four days. The reason it took the leaders so long to straighten out the world economy is that they had to wrestle with some very complex issues. For example, I read in Newsweek that French President Mitterand does not like white sauces, and West German Chancellor Kohl does not like seafood, and so on. These high-level food differences often resulted in Frank Exchanges of Views during the summit meals:

FRENCH PRESIDENT MITTERAND: Please pass the tiny lobsters dish.

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER THATCHER: Those are not “tiny lobsters.” Those are crayfish.

MITTERAND: Fish? Do not make me laugh. I represent the greatest food snots in the world, and I know what is the fish and what is not the fish, and this is not the fish. Regard: it has the claws. Does this fish of the cray have the claws?

THATCHER: Yes, you twit. It’s a crustacean.

MITTERAND: Perhaps I am a twit, but at least I am not wearing the tweedy British clothings of such monumental dowdiness that a dog would be reluctant to relieve itself upon them.

Another problem was interest rates. Interest rates are very high, and the leaders spent a lot of time during their high-level meals trying to come up with a solution. Finally—and this just goes to show you why these people are world leaders and you are a mere taxpayer—they decided that interest rates ought to come down. It’s a radical plan, but it just might work.

From the United States’ point of view, the big issue at Williamsburg was unfair foreign competition, which means any competition that involves foreigners. At one time, the foreigners competed fairly: they made chocolates and little carved-wood figurines, and we made everything else. Then, without warning, foreigners began making reasonably priced, well-made, technologically advanced cars, television sets, shoes, mushrooms, etc., and they forced Americans to buy these things at gunpoint. President Reagan discussed this problem at Williamsburg with Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, and they hammered out an agreement under which the Japanese will continue to send us cars, but they’ll start putting defects in them. We’re going to give them technical assistance: we’re going to send people over there to train Japanese factory workers to be hostile and alienated and put the transmission in wrong and stuff like that.

At the end of the summit, the leaders issued a major economic-policy statement that nobody read except the editors of the New York Times, and everybody went home. The world economy began to improve almost immediately. Even as you read these words, the yen is rising vs. the franc. Or else it’s failing. You may rest assured that the yen is doing whatever it does vs. the franc when things are improving. Also the other day my son ran his tricycle over one of the growths, and the growth let him off with only a sharp reprimand. So things are really looking up.