Cow-Onomics:
Learning how to distinguish
economic theories, with the assistance of ... Cows.
rev. 03.24.2013 Back to Lessons

Here, for your continued Education in Economics.......... with help from cows around the country and around the world....

Note: there are some VERY "Politically Incorrect" and "stereotypical" comments below. If that may be offensive to you, click your "back" button right now!

On the other hand, You do not have a right to not be offended ...


It all began with...

Capitalism: (1)
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.

That was clarified,
for the less intellectually-endowed, to read as follows ...

Capitalism: (1a)
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.


But then, many realized that there were
lots of other economic philosophies that could be
described by cow-onomics...

Republican:
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

Democrat: (1)
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none. 
You feel guilty for being successful.

Democrat: (2)
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
You vote people into office who put a tax on your cows, forcing you to sell one to raise money to pay the tax.
The people you voted for then take the tax money, buy a cow and give it to your neighbor.
You feel righteous.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

Communism: (1)
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

Communism: (2)
You have two cows.
Your neighbors help take care of them and you share the milk.

Dictatorship:
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
The government takes both, then shoots you.

Fascism:
You have two cows.
The government allows you to keep your cows, but tells you when, where, to whom, and for how much you may sell the milk, and you may not sell your cows without government permission.

Fascism: (2)
You have two cows.
The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.

Feudalism:
You have two cows.
Your lord takes some of the milk.

Obamism:

You have two cows.


Obama takes them both, gives them to an inner city dweller, along with a new phone he forced you to pay for, and tells you it is fair because you had so much and he had so little.
Obama bills you for housing your two cows because the inner city dweller has no idea what to do with cows and no land to keep them on.
Obama charges you with the crime of allowing your two cows to shit on your land which is really his land because he declared it to be a wetland (your cows also peed on it).
Obama throws you off your land to protect it from you.
Obama sends you to prison for your heinous crimes against nature and you are forced to care for government animals as part of your sentence... two cows.
Obama threatens to send your family members to prison too because they raised money to hire a lawyer to defend you.
The EPA fines you $50,000 per day until you reduce carbon emissions from your cows' flatulence.
The DOE then fines you $100,000 for operating a natural gas plant without a license.
The Dept. of Labor gets a court to issue an injunction prohibiting your kids under 18 from tending the cows.
Then Obama's newly minted Cow Czar issues 5,000 pages of regulations on size of stalls, types of cow feed, cow bathing requirements, and so forth.
Finally, PETA pickets your farm until you agree not to slaughter the cows, allow "free-range" grazing, and return the border collie you bought to herd the cows to the animal shelter.

Socialism:
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

Surrealism
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons

Terrorism
You have 2 cows.
Terrorists come up to you and blow themselves up, killing you and both of the cows.
Israel is blamed for the deaths.

Totalitarianism:
You have two cows.
The government takes them both and denies they ever existed and drafts you into the army.
Milk is banned.


Around the USA some new types began to appear....

American Corporation:
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows.
You are surprised when one cow drops dead.
You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

Arkansas Cows:
You have two cows.
That one on the left is kinda cute...

California: (1)
You have two cows.
The state has previously told you how to milk your cows, when to milk your cows, how much to milk your cows and the most that you can charge for the milk.
The state now leads you to believe that you will be allowed to actually manage your cows yourself.
You propose a plan to do so, but the state insists on continuing to tell you how much you can charge for the milk.
You agree, since under the plan, you'll still make a profit.
However, the price of feed skyrockets and you go broke.
The state spends millions buying feed on your behalf, and blames you for the current milk shortage.

California: (2)

You have a cow and a bull.
The bull is depressed.
It has spent its life living a lie.
It goes away for two weeks.
It comes back after a taxpayer-paid sex-change operation.
You now have two cows.
One makes milk; the other doesn't.
You try to sell the transgender cow.
Its lawyer sues you for discrimination.
You lose in court.
You sell the milk-generating cow to pay the damages.
You now have one rich, transgender, non-milk-producing cow.
You change your business to beef. PETA pickets your farm.
Jesse Jackson makes a speech in your driveway.
Cruz Bustamante calls for higher farm taxes to help "working cows".
Hillary Clinton calls for the nationalization of 1/7 of your farm "for the children".
Gray Davis signs a law giving your farm to Mexico.
The L.A. Times quotes five anonymous cows claiming you groped their teats.
You declare bankruptcy and shut down all operations.
The cow starves to death.
The L.A. Times' analysis shows your business failure is Bush's fault.

California: (3)
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegal.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

California: (4)
You have lots of cows.
You crowd a herd of happy fun loving cows into a small dirt lot.
You feed cows weeds.
You hire Hollywood to show commercial of HAPPY COWS in green pastures.
You smoke weed left over from cow feeding.
You make millions selling "Happy Milk."

Enron Venture Capitalism:
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on six more.
To get away with murder, you get the White House involved and hire million dollar paper shredders.
When shit hits the fan, you hire experts to eliminate witness with accidents and heart attacks.
The public buys your bull.
Now do you see why a company with $62 billion in assets is declaring bankruptcy?

Florida Corporation:
You have two cows.
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who like the brown one best vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the best looking one.

New York Corporation:
You have two cows.

You have fifteen million cows.
You have to choose which one will be the leader of the herd, so you pick some fat cow from Arkansas.

Democracy, American Style:
You have two cows.
The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government.

Bureaucracy, American Style:
You have two cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, then pours the milk down the drain.


Then other countries around the world
developed their own, somewhat unique styles....

Australia:
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

Belgium:
You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.

China:
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the numbers.

France:
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot and block the roads because you want three cows.
You go to lunch. Life is good.

Germany:
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they:
  • live for 100 years
  • eat once a month
  • milk themselves
  • are all blond
  • drink lots of beer
  • give excellent quality milk and
  • run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

Great Britain:
You have two cows.
Both are mad.
You feed them warm beer. Unexpectedly they produce milk not tea. You turn the paddock into a cricket pitch. Life is jolly good.

Greece: (1)
You have two cows borrowed from French and German banks.
You eat both of them.
The banks call to collect their milk, but you cannot deliver, so you call the IMF.
The IMF loans you two cows. You eat both of them.
The banks and the IMF call to collect their cows/milk.
You are out getting a haircut.

Greece: (2)
You have two cows.
You borrow lots of Euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds, dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds.
You still only have two cows but owe millions.

Iraq: (1)
You have two cows.
They go in hiding.
They send radio and video tapes of their mooing.

Iraq: (2)
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the shit out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of a Democracy....

India/Hindu:
You have two cows.
You worship them.

Israel:
So, there are these two Jewish cows, right?
They open a milk factory, an ice cream store, and then sell the movie rights.
They send their calves to Harvard to become doctors.
So, who needs people?

Italy:
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

Japan:
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.
You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them world-wide.

New Zealand:
You don't have any cows. You have a hundred million sheep.
That one on the left is kinda cute...

Poland:
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

Russia:
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have 5 cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 12 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.
You produce your tenth 5-year plan in the last 3 months.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

Singapore:
You have two cows.
You hide them and tell everybody you are homeless,
have nothing to eat and can they spare some change for milk.

Switzerland:
You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

Taliban:
(although not exactly a country, right?)
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which is two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
At night when no one is looking, you have sex with both of them.
Then you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the hospital.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.


And now for another lesson... 01.26.2008.....

There was a Chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Prof noticed one young man ( an exchange student) who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line. The young man said this was no joke.

"You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in The last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity."

 

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America. The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, free medical, etc. while we continually lose our freedoms - just a little at a time.

 

One should always remember "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!" [ TANSTAAFL! ]
Also, a politician can never provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

Also, if you see that all of this wonderful government "help" is a problem confronting the future of democracy in America, you might want to forward a link to this page to your friends. If you think the free ride is essential to your way of life then you will not save this link or you'll delete the email what brought it to you, but God help you when the gate slams shut!

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."

........ Thomas Jefferson