Essays in Idleness

Among my objections to “capitalism” — a specialized form of socialism, practised in the West — is the many kinds of tyranny that the “capitalists” adopt to annoy me. One might suppose they had another motive, perhaps the desire to get rich. But this is another proof of socialism, for most investors soon surrender their money. Indeed, enough “capitalists” lose their shirts, that I suspect this is the government’s real priority. It assists them in compelling obedience from some of the natural troublemakers.

A good example is the supply of door-slammers, installed probably by law throughout apartment buildings. The slamming of doors is a constant distraction to all forms of intelligent life. What was designed as a way to help bankrupt the landlords, doubles as a method to keep tenants on their toes with anxiety.

Or, the back-up warnings on every commercial vehicle, which offer a continuous irritation on waste-collection days. In a free society, anyone genuinely without the wit to get out of the way of a monstrous truck should be sacrificed on Darwinian principles. Ditto, delete the rest of health and safety regulations, which were created by the capitalist communists to, for instance, mix poisons into supermarket bread. The idea was to eliminate the many millions of little family bakeries that used to be, and, I understand, still exist in Europe. This meant enabling central distribution of bread from industrial soviets, and thus the use of poisons to preserve the loaves. Indeed, all other groceries are now warehoused in this way. No government can abide free trade, and detailed regulations are imposed to prevent it.

Which is not to say that regulations, per se, are unnecessary. It is simply wrong to allow huge governments to make the rules. They should be written for the municipal markets, by distinguished, appointive characters in the trade. But thanks to national and international permission structures, the whole world has become pre-diabetic.  A corrupt bureaucratic inspectorate, having no familiarity with anything at all, is “democratically” put in charge of everything.

I’m sure leaf-blowers can be traced to some government directive, for the idea of them is so outrageously stupid. They blow leaves around pointlessly in the fall, replacing old-fashioned lawn rakes; which are anyway still required to remove the leaf piles. This job could have been done by children, entirely without high technology, before the State began to phase children out, or washed the survivors’ little brains with communism in the public schools. The purpose of the leaf blowers is to necessitate the importation of iIllicit immigrants — working in teams, to operate the head-splittingly loud machines, that redistribute our autumn leaves to nowhere in particular. Everyone should see this was a communist plot. Though I haven’t yet been able to discern how this was legislatively imposed, some reader will surely tip me off.