The Good Tax
Once upon a time in the land of Yor were a very peaceful and wealthy people who were mostly not very quarrelsome but for one controversy. The king had placed a tax on the sale of Cows. Anyone who sold a cow had to give the king 90% of the proceeds of the sale. As a result while there was a lot of demand for meat, as hardly anyone sold their cow, and many who were tired of caring and feeding their cow very much resented the tax on selling it.
Now anyone who had a cow could sell the milk, and many who did not actually own a cow usually got paid a percentage that milk, or occasionally they would get a calf. The tax on a calf was high but calves were cheap and abundant so the king's percentage was not a lot in total money, and when cows got old and stopped producing milk, there was nothing for it but to sell it to the butcher and pay the kings price, though the percentage was reduced for very old cattle.
In the end all the cattle ended up with the butcher, just not until they were very old, so meat had a price that allowed the butcher a living, but he felt that if he got all the proceeds, he could live like a king. Now the king had an evil twin that had been banished, and headed up a Gang Of Pirates beyond the Pale, but he made a deal with the butchers, that if they overthrew the old king the twin would eliminate the hated Cow Tax.
So the butchers, with the help of those folk who were tired of caring for their cattle, or resented the percentage of the milk taken by those who did, got together and overthrew the old king. The new king, being evil after all, turned to his Gang Of Pirates to buy the cattle as they had the gold, and the butchers could get their cattle at well under the market price and on credit to the pirates, that was paid off as the meat sold.
At first things looked very good, meat became very abundant and cheap, the butchers were making killings at a tremendous clip, and becoming almost as wealthy as the Pirates, though with the falling price of meat and the Pirates percentages not as well as expected. Those who sold the cattle felt suddenly wealthy and loaned the pirates their money on the promise it would make more than they made from the milk. Only those who had made their living actually caring for the cattle felt left out as the numbers of cattle to care for became far fewer, while their own numbers and needs did not.
As the number of cattle became less there were fewer calvs as well and their price went up dramatically. The Pirates offered an easily solution by loaning the money to buy the calves, and noted that the price would be very much higher if there was still a Cow Tax, but the loans would be very short so the cattle would have to be sold for meat at a very young age when the note came due, and of course the pirates had it written that they got the cow as payment.
Over a bit ot time the excess meat was consumed, and the price went to an all time high, as there were far less cattle about. Milk that was once plentiful and cheap also became much more expensive. Those who cared for the cattle had to do so for far less of a percentage of the milk as there were far more caretakers than cattle now. Between the fewer cattle and the percentages paid to the Pirates who were now the primary cattle owners, the butchers were also not much better if at all than before.
Those formerly caring for cattle began to steal and rob out of desperation, so the evil king blamed them for all the troubles, even as he hired some of their numbers as guards, that were mostly used to come down very harshly on anyone who commented on how much better things were under the old king, holding fake show trials calling these folk the leaders of the criminals.
Eventually the people rose up and threw out the evil king, but the now very wealthy Pirates had moved on to ply their trade to Hither and to Yon, the palace already looted, and the people were left hating the Cow Tax as the cause of their misery, and the land of Yor never again became a place anyone wanted to be like.
Fetching! I think the metaphor could benefit from the introduction of cow-hands and cow-maids, who fed, cleaned, watered and milked the cows of Yor.
ReplyDeleteThen those who tended to the beloved cows' health and well-being could have been shown to have little control over each cow's ultimate fate. And because the allure of a short-term sale grew quickly under the evil twin's low-tax regime, farm-owners cared much less about a cow's long-term health and its production of high-quality milk. These issues became secondary to keeping near-term costs low in order to make a larger, quick profit at the butcher shop.
Thus, long-term approaches to cow health came to be viewed as amateur and passe. Quick-fix, facade-improving efforts were regularized, like repeated oiling of mangy skin, bleaching the teeth, tongues and scleras, and high-fat diets (to yield more weight on the butcher's scale, but detrimental to a cow's health). Many hard-working cow-hands and cow-maids had no choice but to watch as their beloved cows, one by one, deteriorated before being shipped to bloody butcher blocks.
All of this, before many farms were shut down, and those farmers lived large off the earnings.
If you follow the reality behind the metaphor the farmers of those cash cows did not do so well at the end either, a big hit when the cow was sold ( and for less that it would appear before hand) but interest on cash is nowhere near as profitable as a cash cow, and with the games practiced by the Gang Of Pirates (Enron was famous but only a tiny part) that dream of living large fades very quickly as well. The big players of American industry are off to China, but many midrange businessmen are near as bad off as their workers, and as the part about the calves went, cannot easily start a new business due to a lack of infrastructure of other small businesses that would have provided parts and materials in the past.
ReplyDeleteTo see a very detailed description of the Gang Of Pirates in action the BBC did a great blow by blow in their TV miniseries the Matfair set
ReplyDelete