Once upon a time long ago

and not so far away, I owned a dairy farm. Well I owned the cows and equipment, part of the land with my mother and sisters, and all of the debt.

And life was good, well except for the getting up at 4am and getting slapped in the face by a wet shitty, half frozen bovine tail while trying to milk the ol' hussies. But, mostly good. Because we could sell all the milk we could produce, even if our government set allotment was lower, the Atlanta Dairies Cooperative, which not only bottled milk but made ice cream and had a Cheese plant to take care of any surplus over the demand for milk and ice cream.

A lot of dairies cooperatives were not so fortunate and were selling milk to the Federal government as powdered milk, Cheese and butter which the gov't would dole out to less fortunate countries, less fortunate citizens (read those on the public dole).

However even with all their largess the gov't still had to pay billions to store milk products, with the amount growing larger ever year. They did this because the farmers had an awfully good lobby in Washington, DC which funneled much moola into the pockets of congressmen and senators. And life was good for them and us.......

Well, up until the gov't in it's wisdom decided they couldn't afford the cost of storage anymore and sought to reduce the amount of milk purchased.

You'd think that would be easy enough, just stop buying the surplus milk, right?
The farmers were smart enough to figure out that reducing the size of the herds, feeding less high protein grain and other measures would work and within a week, voila' no more surplus.

Wrong that would be way too simple. No.......the gov't in it's wisdom would pay the farmers not to produce milk.

I'll not bore you with the process, let's just assume the gov't got to spend billions more. And the farmers went on to other profitable pursuits.

Today we have a problem with unemployment in the nation. Rates, depending on who you ask are over 9% according to the gov't figures and in actual fact are closer to 20%.

Many and varied are the solutions put forth by the experts, most of them long on predictions and very, very short on specifics.

I have a plan.

Want to really fix the unemployment problem? Listen up. Eliminate all bailouts, subsidies, giveaways and support systems - both to business and to labor. Abolish all employment restrictions and employment paperwork. All free labor - undocumented non-citizens - to compete equally with native-born workers. Cut taxes to a flat 10% rate for everyone. Abolish every government agency that begins with a letter of the alphabet. Then abolish the rest of them.

I confidently guarantee that the nation would be back at full employment within 30 days.

I can be confident because everybody except the criminal element would be busy working their fingers to the bone growing a garden on any available piece of dirt, and defending it with extreme prejudice to the criminal element many of which would be left to rot where they lay, or thinking green, we could use them for fertilizer. Or in more rational societies they'd be hooked to plows to till more ground.

As long as the feds take the pressure off labor to make adjustments. Giving food stamps, minimum wages, unemployment compensation, make-work, shovel-ready boondoggles - all these things cause workers to think they can continue as before...that a "recovery" of the good ol' days is just around the corner...and that they'll soon be earning as much as they were in 2007. Maybe more!

Tain't gonna happen.

Remember the cooking, gardening and canning advice your grandmother tried to give you. You'll wish you had her around for a little advice again.