The first step in solving economic problems is to understand what effects the production and transfer of wealth. The “Tapeworm Analogy” is a start. Money, in “The Tapeworm Analogy”, is the host’s blood.
The head of the tapeworm is attached to an intestinal wall where it draws blood from the host to feed its segments. When too much blood is withdrawn, the host dies.
As a tapeworm adds segments, its host must either become stronger so that it can support the tapeworm. That just makes the tapeworm add segments, and the host grown weaker. If the host is too weakened, it dies. Then, the tapeworm and all the living cells in its segments die, as well.
The head of the tapeworm has little control over the demands of the segments. We do know that every cell of every segment is always demanding “More!”. The head is there to gratify those demands. While it may know that the host is weakening, and that its own death is imminent, it can’t make that reality clear to the cells in its segments. They are deaf to any higher reality than the fact that they aren’t getting “More!”
How bad can a tapeworm be?
Googling “longest tapeworm” gives us an astonishing fact: ” The longest tapeworm was 37 ft. (It was) pulled from Sally Mae Wallace’s mouth on September 5th 1991.”
With an average segment length of half an inch, Sally Mae’s body was supporting 888 segments. How many segments can a body politic support?
Many bureaucracies are not content with being connected to the head. They want to be “independent”, at least as “independent” as such beings can be. So, they work to get direct access to the host’s bloodflow.
While a body may have one “major tapeworm”, lots of similar beings, like roundworms, can also be filling whatever parts of the body they can, each one draining the body that supports it. There may be a hundred roundworms, each laying a quarter of a million eggs a day, in a single host. The worst are heartworms. Living in the throbbing heart of a body politic, a few heartworms can kill the body and all the other worms in it.
Sometimes, those feeding on the host fight among themselves. Many politicians know this, and encourage such battles for funding. It does little good. When one worm devours another, the host’s worm-weight remains the same. The only thing that helps is having fewer worms and segments.
