Lots of people are worried about what is going on around them. Businesses are laying off workers, taxes are going up, foreclosures are increasing, values are dropping, and jobs are disappearing. Gleeful promises of “bailouts” fill the air. Longer lines of people with their hands out are appearing at the first sight of money, justifying their own reasons to be bailed out.
The problem, in a nutshell, is institutionalized fraud. We can understand the fraud and its effects by comparing fraud to tumors. We imagine an animal, (the squirrel in a prior column comes to mind), and can visualize its living body as “an economy”. It has to eat, drink, maintain body temperature, and reproduce. All the while, it has to fight parasitic enemies within and predators without.
If a squirrel has a tumor, it becomes weaker as the tumor grows. Its tumor, like its host, is a living being that wants to survive. Tumors in that they are organisms that lack the self-control to reduce their own growth in order to help the body in which they live to survive. If it grows excessively, it will kill the animal in which it lives. If the tumor grows to the size of an acorn, the squirrel will no longer be able to run and jump fast and far enough to escape the weasels that prey on it. The tumor will die with the squirrel whose death it caused. If that tumor could talk, its dying words would be to blame the squirrel for what went wrong.
When we understand that basic principle, we turn from the squirrel to consider the far larger elephant. An elephant could carry a hundred, a thousand, maybe five thousand tumors of the size that killed the squirrel. As each of those tumors grows within it, and the tumors do try to destroy each other, the seemingly healthy elephant reaches a “tipping point”. Suddenly, it is gone, either killed by its own internal collapse or so weakened that it becomes easy prey for poachers, predators, or other elephants.
A “body politic” is so named because any political organization has similarities to a living body. The only difference between a parasitic tumor in a body politic and one that is in the squirrel or elephant is that the tumor in the body politic can talk and lie. As long as the “talking tumors” can keep people from the painful operations that are needed to remove them, they will grow until the body politic dies from their accumulated drains upon it.
