PESSIMISTIC PONTIFICATING

A disgruntled employee in a top flight company walks up to his chief boss’ office to demand a fair remuneration by way of salary increment. The patient boss listens to the employee’s recital of good deeds in the company and then says: “You have a point there. I will increase your salary by 20%. Effective from the last quarter. Will that make you happy?” The excited employee nods gratefully and walks back to his cubicle still unable to believe how smooth the process had been. But as he gets to his seat, his employer’s last sentence rings in his head. A typical question which he has heard hundreds of times, but he can’t shake it off his mind. The ringing question follows him back home and he spends the entire night tossing around with it. The next morning he goes to work and submits his resignation letter, at the bottom of the letter he had added “Effective since I first started here”.

Philosophers over the ages have tackled the question of happiness. A salary increment will not make most people happy—yet they slave for it. Neither will a car, a house, nor a million dollars. Happiness is a vagabond, no sooner do you get what gives it to you than it develops wings and fly. A passing caption on the internet: ”At the side of every attractive woman is a bored looking man who once would have killed to do anything for her”

Joy? Joy has a slender body that breaks too soon.

AMAZING STUNT

(Sung to the tune of Amazing Grace)

Amazing stunt!

Come see the man

Who wants to score our minds

He once was king, but now he’ll see:

We’ll dribble I-B-B.

He spread the dough

And bought some folks

And gap-toothed a smile

We smile and watch and let him be

We’ll dribble I-B-B.

We have the facts

He bombed our votes

Bought a Minna home

He plays the game from his balcony

But we’ll dribble I-B-B.

NONSENSE LINES TOO

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

The ice-cream man didn’t add the banana trim!

A QUICK FIX

“Our national problems” are beyond economical; they are also political and psychological (including religious and moral hypocrisy). We need to tackle the political issue of our supposed nationality and the relevance of our imposed constitution before anything else.

Thus is the call for a Sovereign National Conference via a systematic level of representation from each homestead up to the national level. Once we have established whether we want to continue as one or not, we shall then recreate a constitution based on individual freedom, one that strips the government of its powers and instead recreates a government of a fixed tenure of no more than a year and with ample opportunity for every able person in the polity to hold office. The government shall uphold the rule of law and separation of powers shall be adhered to.

However, no person should desire to govern his fellow man. The base man seeks to govern and impose himself on others, the moral man doesn’t.

Therefore, the office of government should be made a burden and not a reward. Government will carry out no projects, no roads, bridges, etc. What the people cannot achieve by themselves, they do not want or need. Government will only maintain a limited security force (composed of volunteers), represent the polity in diplomatic and international issues, arbitrate contracts and tort and punish crime.

The constitution should strip the existence of a standing army and a police state. The people should police themselves, everyone should be free to keep and bear arms. Should a standing army become necessary in a state of war, no one should be made a professional soldier nor be allowed to treat soldiering as a permanent job; instead everyone should have a turn at serving in the armed forces. Violence will not be tolerated except in retaliation, never initiation.

Principles of religion and morality should not be allowed in the limited government that we will set up. Every man should be free to believe what he chooses. The constitution and the laws shall override every religious belief.

The next step is the economy. Capitalism shall be the economic ideology. There shall be a free market. Everyone shall do what he/she finds to do in what manner he/she pleases and shall be entitled to the full profits. Regulations shall be kept to the minimum, and these shall not be restrictive. The government has no business in business. Government interference in business shall be to settle contractual disputes through the courts of law. The judges will be elected on a rotary basis.

There shall neither be prisons nor death sentence. Except for physically-destructive and violent activity, the individual shall have priority over the government. Every individual of age shall be given a chance to ratify the constitution of the polity. Any individual who refuses to be bound by the constitution and laws of the polity shall be regarded as outside the jurisdiction of the polity in whatever ramification. Anyone who refuses to pay a fine to the person he offends (in tort or contract) or for the crime he commits should be expelled physically.

There shall only be two forms of law: civil and criminal. Civil law will be subdivided into administrative/constitutional; tort and contract. Every other form of law (procedural and substantive) is irrelevant and an excess. Lawyers should not be allowed to complicate the law for the people.