Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

“Don’t eat the eggs. We put LSD in the eggs.” – The Men Who Stare At Goats

I never trust a goose journalist – too much propa-gander.

Aesop (no, not our modern one who appears to have just emerged from his self-imposed technological monkdom by solving the riddle of Aesop’s Cables– LINK) was a storyteller who died in 564 B.C.  This was long enough ago that the Greeks had yet to find the drug that stops the aging process:  hemlock.  To quote Socrates, “I drank what?”

But one of my favorite of Aesop’s stories is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

The story is very simple, though when I was a kid they tarted it out so that it was fifteen minutes long and they could keep us shut up while the film ran so our teachers could take smoke breaks.  The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg involves a farmer and his wife.  They have a goose.  Each day, the goose lays a golden egg.  I know this sounds like the details found on page 347 of Joe Biden’s economic plan, but bear with me.

11 year old me thought that was amazing!

In Greek mythology, Chiron was a half-horse, half-human doctor.  I guess he was the Centaur for Disease Control.

Current day me?

I’d sell the goose to a private equity fund for $3 billion dollars and buy myself an island and then start a podcast where I drink bourbon every week with Elon Musk and lie to our wives about when we were going to come home.  We could call it Manhattans With Musk®.  Elon and I would just sit back and laugh as the private equity fund clones the goose and then crashes the gold market with goose clone gold.

Or maybe the cloning process doesn’t work and the private equity fund then has 45,000 cloned geese that lay eggs made out of whatever fake metal the Chinese use (Chinesium®?) to make all those tiny metal statues of Bandersnatch Combersnoot.  I mean Blandercrab Clambakehatch.  Blendersnout Clumberbake?  Oh, yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch, that I bought on Ebay® after too many Manhattans.

Okay, this is actually a chocolate statue of Bunderslam Camberthatch.  We had a dog that weighed six pounds and ate a one pound bag of chocolate.  Killed him.  14 years later.

But back to Aesop.

In Aesop’s story, the stupid farmers couldn’t cope with getting a single, solid gold goose egg each day.  Nope.

An aside:  How much would a golden goose egg be worth?

The answer, at $1900 per ounce gold, is $176,640.  (For those of you playing our home game:  remember to convert to troy ounces.)

So, yeah, these greedy Greek peasants couldn’t just wait and have $176,640 a day show up out of the goose’s butt.  So?

They killed it.

What do the Irish call fool’s gold?  Shamrock.

Yes.  They killed it.  And when they took their pudgy stupid fingers and looked for gold?  They found nothing but Greek goose guts.  Oops!  Instead of having a creature that slowly made them immensely wealthy, they ended up with whatever it is you eat that’s made out of goose.  Pâté de foie gras?  It’s okay if you want your goose . . . de-livered.

I bring this up, because that’s what’s happening to Western Civilization.  I mean, not being made into pâté, but having the goose that gave Western Civilization our prosperity is being killed.

And it really is happening.

Right now.

The wonderful and amazing thing about Western Civilization is that it has produced, by far, the greatest amount of prosperity and wealth ever seen in the history of mankind.  Heck, North Korea loves western rock:  Sweet Child In A Mine is one of their favorite songs.  They love the Guns,  but said we can keep the Roses.  Regardless, there has never in the history of the world been a group as amazing as Western Civilization has been.

Ever.

Nearly every invention that’s worth mentioning has been invented by Western Civilization.  Nearly all the wealth that’s been produced in the world, has been produced through ideas started in Western Civilization.

So, we all win, right?

Well, no.

I’ve heard (years ago) propaganda that claimed that every culture is equally valid.  This is, of course, a Big Lie®.  I’m not saying that people who live in mud huts who really know how to wok a dog must move to the suburbs and eat McDonalds®.  Certainly not!  If people wish to live in mud huts and eat cât-e de foie gras?  That’s fine – I sincerely hope that they enjoy it.  Nah, I don’t – just kitten.

But they have no right to move to the suburbs in Minnesota and have people pay for their every need.

Cannibals never eat entitled kids – they always taste spoiled.

But in 2020, the idea that everyone on Earth is, somehow, entitled to live in a society that they had exactly no part in creating?  Sure!  Let’s call it a right.  They devastated their home country, so why not let them do that in Minneapolis, too?

As near as I can figure it out, the only answer as to why this happens is Leftism.  Leftism is fixated on creating a world where equality of outcome is the biggest goal.  That means that no person on Earth should have anything more than any other.

Except, of course, for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaires like Bill Gates and important people in Washington D.C. like the guy who writes the tax code.  I sincerely hope that Leonardo DiCaprio never gets injured in a car accident on a Star Wars® movie – I would hate it if he were Han DiCaprio.

The answer is always famine.

But to a Leftist, a murderer in prison is due the same physical comforts and opportunities as an upstanding member of the community that has worked 2500 hour years for decades and saved their money for retirement.  Of course, the irony is that when everyone has the right to move to the United States, it ends with no one having any rights at all.  Except for Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and that guy who writes the tax code.

This is the reality of Leftism in the West:  Leftists feel that prosperity comes from (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) luck.  Except when they win, in which case it was completely deserved.  Leftists believe that since prosperity is unequally distributed, they can just redistribute it at will because prosperity isn’t earned.

This is the same idea that led to walls around the communist countries in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s:  People are the property of the state.  Differences in outcomes aren’t the result of cultural differences.  Differences in outcomes must be a mistake, right?

According to Leftists, yes.

As I write these words, the West is facing a crossroads in every single Western country.  The idea corrupting it is simple and insidious:   that Western achievement is based on nothing but theft and lies, and that all men on Earth should be able to move to Western countries because everyone on Earth is owed the same lifestyle as people in Western countries have.

Used with permission.

This, my friends, is killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg as Aesop described over 2,500 years ago. The major theme of Leftism in 2020 is that cultures that exists on a pre-technological level, and that the residents of said culture should have the right to not only live in, but live in and direct the cultures of Western culture.

For whatever reason, the cultures of many nations have failed to produce a society that is capable of producing Western Civilization levels of comfort and wealth.  It’s beyond this post to describe why that is.  I’m sure that a culture producing wealth and prosperity is all random.  Speaking of random, what’s the difference between a Leftist and a random word generator?  Sometimes the random word generator tells the truth.

But hey, at least we’ll still have hemlock.

Right?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

34 thoughts on “Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg”

  1. This is a complicated and intertwined topic that I cannot possibly summerize adequately. So here goes.

    To me, when you talk about making gold, you’re talking about making things – manufacturing.

    330 million Americans make up 4% of the world population. Only 13 million Americans have manufacturing jobs, 4% of our citizens. They have an average wage of $25 per hour so around $50K per year, and make around 2 trillion dollars worth of goods per year.

    1,490 million Chinese make up 19% of the world population. Over 112 million Chinese have manufacturing jobs, 7.5% of their citizens. They have an average wage of 75,000 yuan per year so around $11K per year, and make around 4 trillion dollars worth of goods per year.

    There’s two ways of looking at this. One American can produce as much manufactured output as 5 Chinese workers – hooray! Five Chinese workers can be hired for the cost of one American – d’oh.

    Place your bets – in years to come, which country is gonna become more efficient and increase their productivity?

    And news flash – the Chinese are losing manufacturing jobs to lower wage countries.

    But 90% of the American economy is NOT manufacturing. It’s mostly jobs that anybody can do. American or not.

    https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_chart.htm#

    Bottom line, globalization and the quest for lower wages is what is killing the golden goose in America. All the outsourcing of high value manufacturing and the influx of low wage immigrants have us between a rock and a hard place. But hey – that’s competition capitalism, baby! You wanna truly earn your keep the old fashioned way, you gotta produce something worthwhile and that’s not creating some fancy new credit default swap or asking if you want fries with that.

    The 0.1% guys with 99% of the capital are happy to see immigrant labor pushing wages down in this country. And the leftists are happy to stick those same immigrants – and unemployed – in voting booths and in crowds on the streets in their current bid for power. For the rich and the leftists who hate them, it’s win-win !

    Just not for you and me.

    1. Not only can just about anyone do 90% of jobs but worse no one needs to be or should be doing those jobs in the first place. Most jobs are just swirling the same pool of “money” around in a giant circle.

    2. Natzsofast.

      1 American can sit down with a $10 ream of paper and a $400 computer, and turn that investment into $1B out of thin air.
      Not by printing fiat bux, but by typing , e.g., a screenplay called Titanic.
      Americans (natural-born and adopted) have been doing that for over a century.
      In fact, we’ve mastered both the art form, and the business surrounding it.
      China hasn’t pulled it off even once, let alone mastered the process, because it relies on raw talent, creativity, and giving individuals the freedom to throw 200 pizzas against the wall until they find one that will stick.

      That’s simply a feat that hasn’t been in their cultural DNA since…ever.
      “China” in the same sentence as “individual” and “freedom” is a total non-sequitir orgy of mutually incompatible concepts.

      And when Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, or Belize will manufacture things cheaper than China (in about 15 minutes’ time, culturally), the latter will become simply a more populous version of Sovietistan: a rusted, hyper-polluted toxic swamp standing as an ages-long monument to the stupidity of centrally planned economy, which is three lies for the price of one, much like “Meals Ready To Eat”.

      QED

  2. We aren’t allowed to talk about Western civilization being demonstrably better than any other civilization because everyone knows what Western civilization is synonymous with. Western civilization was not driven by geography but rather demography and saying that makes people sad and/or murderously angry.

    For all of his myriad faults, at least Trump said things that indicated that unlike the vast majority of Republicans and basically all Democrats, he doesn’t see the American people as interchangeable with Guatemalans and Somalis.

    Whatever one thinks of the Bible, it contains lots of wisdom.

    “Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1 Corinthians 5:6)

    In a more earthy sense, if you put a nugget of poo in a pudding, it doesn’t make the poo taste like pudding, it makes the pudding taste like poo. Likewise when you add people who have shown no ability to form a functional society into an existing functional society, it makes no sense to assume they will suddenly become engineers and physicists. There is no magic dirt.

    When you bring in a few people from the Third World, they can be generally absorbed into society although they might never really assimilate. When you bring them in by the tens of millions? They are going to swamp the system and this is the plan. Biden’s puppetmasters are planning on giving 11-22 million illegals a “path to citizenship” and that is the ballgame because those new “Americans” will vote for Democrats in perpetuity.

    The goose has been poisoned and the end is nigh, whether Trump wins next week or not.

    1. That’s part of the problem. Bring in Mexico? You get Mexico. Bring in Somalia? You get Somalia.

      Who would have guessed?

  3. The multi-culturalist proponents spout their mantra that “Diversity is Strength” which soothes the masses but is really just a call to Communism.

    The one great thing America accomplished was that while we had diversity among Judeo-Christians, we had unity in a religious basis for our form of government and the legal concepts that flowed from that shared culture, the Mosiac and Christian teachings on how mankind should treat each other.

    Immigration for the sake of immigration destroys the cultural cohesion which makes a nation sustainable.

    2020, all five years of it so far, or so it seems, will be looked at in only a matter of months as…THE GOOD OLD DAYS !!

    Get your skis on.. it is all downhill from here ……

    Xin Loi, G.I. !

    1. There is no such thing as a “Judeo-Christian”. Jews and Christians have very different and incompatible views of who Jesus Christ is.

      America was founded by various religious groups with three things in common.

      1) They all had “trust issues” with authority. Any authority.
      2) Each group hated the other groups
      3) No group assimilated with the natives

      As a result, nobody wanted a government with any power lest their faction lose control and inadvertently be ruled over by a hated faction.

      Strangely, this worked. If members of your faction didn’t step up and produce, your faction lost out and eventually turned Amish. It shouldn’t have worked at all, but Americans had one other huge advantage. The disaffected could pack up and move somewhere else. It took us almost 250 years until there was nowhere else to move to, and here we are.

    2. No, diversity is diversity. And strength is strength. And, generally, unity is strength.

      I’ll echo the later comments about Judeo-Christians. It’s really Christianity, which is Western.

      1. Monotheism.
        The Ten Commandments.

        Mad major bonus points for explaining which one of these Christianity has, and Judeo doesn’t.
        Or vice versa.
        (Yes, I know it’s Judaism, not Judeo. I was being artistically ungrammatical. Ogden Nash and Mark Twain said to say hello.)

        Double bonus points for explaining how every (or any) other religion has them too, especially antecedent cultures and religions.

        This a sledgehammer-subtle hint to re-think the entire nonsensical “There is no such thing as Judeo-Christian anything” premise.
        Christianity without the foundation of Judaism is like trying to string telephone lines without telephone poles.

        What was it Inspector Wang said in Murder By Death?
        Train without wheels, soon get nowhere.

        It’s generally a theory propounded by people who can’t recollect that Jesus was Jewish, nor that Paul was a rabbi, FWIW.

        To Whom It May Concern:
        Don’t Be That Guy.

        1. Agreed, on all points! That whole “Old Testament ” was a spoiler.

          The points you mention are intrinsic to Christianity. But without the Greek and Roman philosophies extant at the time, you perhaps get a different critter.

          So, should we then call it Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian? In my mind it’s getting cumbersome at that point, so just Christian works. In general we know what that means the same way we would have known since Nicea.

          In my mind, it’s more a call to clarity.

          To continue with Twain, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

          So, does Judeo-Christian generally (when talking about philosophical foundations of Western Civ) mean anything different than plain old Christian?

          If not, the modification is redundant.

          1. Also worth noting, Judeo-Christian isn’t a term used for…well for virtually all of the history of Christianity up until fairly recently. In fact most Christian theology prior to the latter half of the twentieth century would be considered “antisemitic”.

            Islam is also monotheistic and shares many of the historical roots of both Judaism and Christianity but no one talks about Islamo-Christianity. In short, one can be Jewish (religiously, not ethnically) or one can be Christian but not both so it is absurd to conflate the two. The difference between the Old and New Covenant is the central theological issue that separates the two religious systems.

            I no longer have a direct interest in the issue but accuracy is still important.

  4. Even as children, we understood that there was no equality of outcomes. Some kids ran faster than others and excelled in races. Others absorbed and processed information better than others and excelled in academics. Some had natural artistic talent, some had natural musical talent. No one got it all, but everyone got some.

    It had nothing whatever to do with skin tone, gender, sexual orientation or where your parents came from. If you sucked at something, you could work at it and eventually suck a little less. But no amount of practice was going to turn one into a violinist like Itzhak Perlman or a sprinter like Usain Bolt, minus divine providence.

    We used to be okay with that in this country. Until, that is, someone got the bright idea that they could whip up the mass of lesser mediocrities into a froth by convincing them that they were cheated, somehow (“gypped”, to resurrect a thoroughly déclassé idiom from my youth that would likely get me tossed into the gulag today, should I let it slip anywhere else but on John Wilder’s blog). That same enterprising someone understood that fomenting unrest by assigning each of us to a notch on the oppressed/oppressor scale could open the door wide to Marxism/socialism, by which a tiny elite of manipulative SOBs would become personally enriched, at the expense of everyone else.

    Woe betide he who occupies the top spot on the ‘oppressor’ end of the spectrum, as it is defined. And that is precisely where ‘Western Civilization’ resides, according to the popular narrative. Popular, that is, with those on the chronically underachieving end of the yardstick.

    Without so much as the common sense of children we therefore blunder forward toward our own inevitable collapse. How else to explain the impossible selection of Biden/Harris as the BEST that the democratic left could muster? Interesting times we live in. Interesting times.

  5. If you wanna know what REALLY killed the Goose That Laid The Golden Egg:

    https://thesaker.is/what-the-great-reset-architects-dont-want-you-to-understand-about-economics/

    As per their speech excerpts in paragraphs 6-10 from the article above, Lincoln in 1859 and Xi in 2016 “get it” – but most of today’s Americans have forgotten. Leftists and Immigrants are side shows. They are currently critical side shows, to be sure, but never forget that We Did This To Ourselves by Forgetting HOW The Goose Lays Golden Eggs.

    PS – “2020, all five years of it so far…”. Good one. 🙂

    https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/342783-there-are-decades-where-nothing-happens-and-there-are-weeks

    1. As my moniker suggests, I really prefer to live where nothing really happens. The universe provides all of the variety I want, without human beans needing to invent more.

  6. Great article, as always. The evisceration of the United States is a complex topic. Ricky’s comment raises a valid point about capitalism and the quest for the lowest wages. But even that is too simple. What we see is a globalist elite that is above the fray of everyday politics that have essentially engaged in “vulture capitalism” to maximize profits and their income and power. The easiest way to see this is to look at median wages which, for American men, have remained stagnant for the past 40+ years even though worker productivity has increased at double the rate (https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UJH1c6oya1IJ:https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-the-fleecing-of-the-american-worker/). The excess has been kept by the elite because wages have been kept down by importing cheap labor and/or exporting jobs overseas. Similarly, the elite have taken the knowledge and skills developed by the United States and sold them overseas–whether we are talking about transferring manufacturing technology to China, or software coding to India. It isn’t that they can do them more efficiently–try spending an hour on the phone with a call center in India, or consider Boeing’s disastrous 737 software failures due to outsourcing to an Indian firm–but that the sale of the technology can be used to immediately enrich the elites.

    Below this group are the unwashed masses, which have to be tricked into going along with all of this. So, on the political right, we are told that it is simply free market capitalism that demands that national loyalties be damned and our country be sold off to the highest bidder. And on the left, it is socialism and cultural Marxism that demands that national loyalties be damned and that it is only fair that our country be sold off to the highest bidder.

    As many have noted, including Vox Day, the proper way to look at the political divide is not left vs. right, but globalist vs. nationalist.

  7. Unfortunately, Western Civilization caught a virus in the mid 19th century, and we’re still having a rough time dealing with it in spite of how often it has failed around the world.

    But envy doesn’t require any particular sophistication or level of education, and the virus spreads easily.

    Our collective immune system is weak right now because of multiple assaults (TV, poor K-12 education, exhaustion due to worldwide labor arbitrage, gold standard exit, robotic automation, etc.), and we have to build it up.

  8. As crucial as the ideas of Western Civilization were and are, you’re in for a rude surprise if you don’t also recognize the importance of the fertile soil of North America, the untapped ores (iron, copper, silver), the underground energy wealth, rich fisheries, and long navigable rivers. Democracy and capitalism could be considered “emergent phenomena”. When you can only expect the next 500 years of peasant farming to look like the last 500 years of peasant farming, feudal society is what you get. When I have an iron mine and you have a coal mine and he has a railroad and that guy has a thousand acres of productive farmland, then we all play nicely together … as long as our resources can be exploited. Whether Western Civilization can respond peacefully and productively to depleting resources is the challenge of our era. Watching decline with an “as God wills it” attitude is an experiment that we’ve seen before, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

    1. Africa has an embarrassment of natural resources and has never developed a functional society. It is more than just fertile soil and fresh water in play.

      1. ‘zackly.

        Any 50 Donald Trumps from Queens would succeed and become rich on the surface of the moon.
        Any 50 ignorant, lazy tribesmen from any Sh*tholia or Trashcanistan would starve to death in the Garden of Eden.

        Anyone, compare and contrast proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Venezuela with those in Pennsylvania, Texas, and California, and get back to us on which are the better places to live.
        Natural resources may put gas in the tank of the car, but gas isn’t the engine. Nor the driver.

    2. It’s more the ingenuity of the people – look at Japan. Resources are a primary economy. What you do with them? That’s the key.

      1. Japan has virtually no resources, except its people.

        If Japan swapped homes with Nigeria, they’d outdo China in a generation, while Japan peopled by Nigerians would more likely become a nature park with almost no human life in a year or three.

        More proof of the pudding: Israelis joke that Moses led the Israelites into the only patch of dirt in the Middle East without oil, yet their country, alone amongst countries with the oil that runs the world, and enemies that outnumber them dozens to one, is the green one, and the only one with a near peer first-world military.

        1. I had two minutes of laptop battery at this point . . . You are correct – that was where I was going.

  9. Great article as usual. The sale of America has been ongoing for decades, unfortunately. It is a form of “vulture capitalism” that is selling off American know-how and expertise by shipping manufacturing and other technology overseas, and monetizing the increase in worker productivity in the United States via mass immigration–prior to the mid-1970s, increases in worker wages mirrored increases in productivity; starting in the mid-1970s, the two split, and worker wages (adjusted for inflation) have been pretty much stagnant since.

    At the level of the elites, there is no Left/Right, conservative/liberal dichotomy because it is simply them against the rest of humanity. The key issue is to get the unwashed masses to accept the loss of borders, concentration of power, and coordination between government and big business (particularly the financial sector). This is the religion of the “progressive left”, so no worries there. The conservative right is trickier. While the mantra “free markets” is enough to satisfy the big-L Libertarians, it hasn’t been enough for conservatives that still see themselves as a nation. Particularly now that there is enough evidence to show the hollowness of the elite’s promises of the benefits of free trade. (I maintain that the alt-right of Cernovich and Vox Day is evidence-based politics, which is anathema to the elites and the Left). Thus we see the doubling down on conservatives by dissolving their nation, shaming them, and silencing their voices.

    1. I did sit in one smoke-filled room, once upon a time.

      Yup. It was what was good for right then and there. Not my cup of tea.

      The dinner and wine were top notch, though.

  10. It’s illegal to allow hemlock on your land, but there’s always green potatoes. Better, if you decide to live, they’re super tasty and nutritious.

    There’s probably a lesson there somewhere, but I need more coffee.

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