And why do we have to pay for bread at all? We need basic foods to survive, far more urgently than we need health insurance. Maybe it would be better if the government took over the bread industry. Think of all the money wasted on packaging and advertising, which could be saved if the State distributed Obama Bread in plain white wrappers that said RYE or WHEAT in simple block lettering. Our wise politicians could then decide if all those different varieties of bread are truly necessary.

If you have studied the history of socialism and communism around the world, you know what the inevitable results of a nationalized bread industry would be: hungry people staring at dusty shelves containing a few expensive loaves of low-quality bread. Humanity has invented few weapons that kill people more efficiently than collectivist agriculture.

It’s clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism. Only they have the combination of voting power, money, and economic self-interest to see the growth of government as undesirable, and provide effective resistance. They generally view their interactions with government in a negative light – they’ve all spent time in the Department of Motor Vehicles mausoleum, spent hours wrestling with tax forms, or been slapped with a traffic citation they don’t think they deserved. They understand the inefficiency and emotional instability of government, and instinctively resent its intrusion into their lives. A health-care takeover is the best chance collectivists will ever have of persuading the middle class to vote itself into chains… but for the better part of a century, they’ve been able to hear the hammers of the State ringing on the metal of those chains, in the forges of taxation and regulation.

On October 7th, the 13th season of South Park will resume on Comedy Central. A lot has happened since the last episode aired in April, and given that they are the only libertarian/right-leaning satire on television with any following, I am excited to see what they come up with. I don’t have any idea what they’re planning, but I was daydreaming today about some episodes I’d like to see. I am not claiming that any of these premises are particularly funny, nor have I attempted to incorporate the absurd tangents and tertiary characters that bring life to the show– I am just starved for somebody to start lampooning (in a medium other than WordPress) the collectivist insanity in Washington and the infantile, retrograde state of political discourse.

1. The engineers at General Motors, now owned and controlled by the U.S. government, are hard at work developing a line of vehicles powered by an alternative, sustainable resource– namely, Hope. (A nod here to the Simpsons episode in which Ed Begley Jr. drives a go-cart powered by his own sense of self-satisfaction.) GM becomes increasingly worried that their failure to get any of these vehicles to run is due not to bad science but rather to a mounting force that suppresses Hope– Racism. Meanwhile, German and/or Japanese engineers are watching the U.S. political climate closely, and seeking to capitalize on the mood of the nation, aggressively pursue vehicles powered by Racism.
2. Token (the only African-American student at South Park elementary) and Kyle (the only Jew, as far as I can tell) are running against each other for class president. Every opponent of Token is loudly branded a racist, while every opponent of Kyle is called an anti-Semite. The rhetoric quickly overheats and their campaign platforms (which are not altogether different) get lost in the din of partisan hatred. Late in the campaign, a third candidate emerges– Eric Cartman. Cartman openly and transparently expresses his hatred for everybody, irrespective of race, religion or national origin. A fourth grade exhausted by identity politics and baiting language elects Cartman in a landslide.
3. For the third episode, I’d like to see an allegory for the folly of collectivism, particularly with respect to putative “rights” to certain technology or resources such as expensive medical treatments, drugs and devices.  I am picturing Butters bringing his own lunch from home to school. While the other kids shuffle through the cafeteria line gathering tater tots and mystery meat, Butters sits alone quietly chowing on his homemade lunch and his mother’s special recipe– gooey Butters cake. One day, he decides to share his gooey Butters cake with a couple of kids that have been nice to him or played with him at recess. Word spreads quickly and the rest of the class begins to request, then demand, access to his delectable treat. Quite predictably, Butters soon runs out of his gooey Butters cake and everybody– including Butters– is miserable. However, now that the kids of South Park have garnered a taste for the treat, they begin to grumble about an entitlement to– indeed a right to– gooey Butters cake. The badgering and social isolation is incapacitating for Butters, so he exhorts his mother to bake enough for the entire school. She complies, and begins laboring day and night to make enough for all the kids. With the Scotch family’s budget strained, she begins to substitute ingredients (perhaps some raccoon milk?) Between the adulteration and her physical exhaustion, the product suffers and the kids are not happy. Hilarity ensues as the Scotch family descends into desperate insanity and/or poverty while the language of entitlement and the demand for more production continues to escalate.