Caroline Baum notices that President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget contains money for everything, it seems, except pyramid building:
No longer will President Barack Obama be content to cite specious numbers about “jobs saved or created” as a result of last year’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus. Now he’s proposing $100 billion of new spending to “jumpstart job creation,” according to White House Budget Director Peter Orszag. It’s part of a $3.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2011, unveiled Monday, that projects a $1.3 trillion deficit next year, following a $1.6 trillion deficit this year.
Spend money to save money. Spending dressed up as a jump- starter is still spending by another name.
The only thing missing from the energy-cleansing, rural- community-assisting, climate-change-mitigating, health-food- promoting blueprint is money for pyramid building. In Chapter 10, Section VI of “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” John Maynard Keynes advocated building pyramids as a cure for unemployment.
In fact, “Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one,” he wrote in his 1936 treatise.
The reason Obama avoids mentioning pyramid building, however, has to do with the fact that Obama has political power, whereas Keynes did not have political power and did not therefore feel constrained.
"What's that?" you say. "What does that have to do with it?"
Because of what Aristotle said:
It is also advantageous for a tyranny that all those who are under it should be oppressed with poverty, that they may not be able to compose a guard; and that, being employed in procuring their daily bread, they may have no leisure to conspire against their tyrants. The Pyramids of Egypt are a proof of this, and the votive edifices of the Cyposelidse, and the temple of Jupiter Olympus, built by the Pisistratidae, and the works of Polycrates at Samos; for all these produced one end, the keeping the people poor.
Obama wouldn't want to put any strange ideas in anyone's mind, now, would he?
