The Obama Economics Lesson

"Man, they didn't have chalkboards like this back in Kenya, where I was bor- Wait! Shit! No!"

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a student before, but had recently failed an entire class. Now, ordinarily a statement like this would raise a few eyebrows, because one has to expect that in the course of his career any self-respecting college professor would hand out at least a few Fs to people who never showed up to class or slept through the final, but this was a tenured professor with a fairly serious alcohol problem, and the administration at Local College University figured it was just less of a hassle to keep him on the payroll.

The class he’d failed, though, had roiled him out of his booze-induced indolence by insisting that Obama’s socialism worked and that nobody would be poor and nobody would be rich, a great equalizer. The students were either stupid or just really bad at keeping up on current events, as Obama’s 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would make him arguably one of the worst socialist conspirators of all time. However, Local College University was not known for the intelligence of its student body or the factuality of the statements made by its professors – it was, however, remarkable in its ability to fill classes with students who all unanimously supported radical agendas with no internal dissent.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.” (Substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all.)

Some of the students in class were unaware of what ‘Obama’s plan’ was, having never heard anything about some radical wealth-redistribution agenda from the guy who could barely get Congress to agree on a budget to run the country. The professor, you see, was referring to House Resolution 3798, or the Take All The Money From Rich White Republicans, Use It To Build A Gigantic Spaceborne Electromagnet Which, When Turned On, Will Remove Everyone’s Guns From Their Homes, And Then Give The Remaining Money To Black People And Abortion Doctors Act of 2012, which was introduced in a double super ultra maxi top secret session of Congress by Barney Frank and Dennis Kucinich, both of whom were completely stoned on medical marijuana at the time.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. At no point did any of the students who studied hard think to tell the administration that one of the professors was endangering the academic standing of a large number of students in order to prove a political point.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. Antisemetic graffiti began to appear on the walls between classes. Desks were overturned and set on fire. A bunch of Chinese exchange students started cooking meth and selling it during class, but one day they cooked a bad batch by accident and this one girl OD’d and had to go to the hospital, but by the time she got there she was braindead, so her boyfriend (who was on the Local College University football team) got a bunch of his friends and went to beat up the Chinese kids, but one of them, thinking ahead, had bought a Glock from some dude selling them out of the trunk of his car out on County Road 9, so when the football players showed up there was this huge bloodbath and the courts spent like five years trying to straighten the whole thing out, eventually agreeing that all this strife could be tied back to the class’s enthusiastic support of Barack Obama’s socialist agenda.

To the class’s great surprise, EVERYBODY FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. It could not be any simpler than that. Remember, there IS a test coming up. The 2012 elections. He then listed the following points:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

One of the remaining students who had not been killed or driven mad by the effects of Obama’s socialism raised his hand. He was an atheist with great hair, and had skipped all of the previous classes because he was taking the class pass/no pass and just needed a C- or above on the final to get a P.

“Question.” He said. “If socialism will ultimately fail, how do you account for countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland? The governments there – which are some of the least corrupt in the world – provide a wide range of social services, ranging from full healthcare to college tuition and rent assistance, and citizens there are considered some of the happiest, most contented people on Earth. I mean, I visited Denmark, and it seemed great – their public infrastructure greatly outpaced that of America’s, everyone seemed pretty happy, and the women were uniformly gorgeous! I mean, there were clearly some people who had more money than others, but nobody was going around trying to redistribute it and enforce some sort of government mandated equality – the high tax rates funded a higher standard of living for everybody, and the money they spent in taxes was money that they would’ve spent on healthcare or other things the government provided.

“Furthermore,” he said, brushing his hair out of his face as was his nervous habit. “Are you really trying to tell us that there’s somebody running against President Obama in 2012 who can fix the economy? Are you saying Mitt Romney, a serial liar, is going to look out for the little guy if he gets elected? Or Newt Gingrich, who sucks so hard that he was more or less forcibly removed from the government in the mid 1990s? And, I mean, does Rick Santorum even have economic policy? I think his entire stimulus plan consists of putting half the country to work printing Bibles and the other half to work making bricks to throw at gay people.

“Hey, I’ve got a brilliant fucking idea, you stupid goddamn hypothetical cocksucker,” he shouted, adding profanity to get his putrid liberal agenda across. “If you want to make an argument against the president’s economic policy, how about taking a fucking fact based approach instead of throwing around fucking buzzwords like ‘socialism’ and hoping that enough limp dick chowderheads realize that it’s the same word as the second ‘S’ in USSR and vote for whoever will ensure that they don’t see a horrifying 3% tax hike, you fear mongering, ill informed cun-“

Before he could finish, a MARINE who had served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan punched him in the face. The atheist tumbled to the floor, visibly shaken, and exclaimed, “Why did you do that?”

The MARINE calmly replied, “God was too busy taking care of America’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid shit and act like an asshole, so he sent me instead.”

“Psst!” The professor whispered. “I think you’re in the wrong story. The atheist professor asking God to knock him off his podium is down the hall.”

“Oops!” The MARINE said, and hustled out of the room.

Meanwhile, at the back of the classroom, two self styled libertarians who got most of their talking points from South Park and Pen and Teller were eagerly watching the proceedings.

“Oh man,” One of them, whose parents were paying for his college tuition and living expenses, grinned. “That socialist just got told!”

The other, a 25-year-old whose recent appendectomy had been paid for by his parents' insurance per the Obamacare extension, nodded and said, “I’m SO posting this on Facebook with a picture of Obama standing in front of a chalkboard.”

Truman Capps is sick of your bullshit, America.