Many years ago, upon noticing the unusually svelte figures of my customarily overweight relatives, I predicted trouble before the first Fen-Phen lawsuit was a twinkle in a PI attorney's eye. How did I know?
You see, we are a nation that holds these truths to be self evident: there is free lunch, we can have our cake and eat it too, and you can gain without pain. Yes, take a pill, strap on an ab-energizer, use a condom, buy a lottery ticket, get a credit card, pass a few environmental laws while heavily arming the world's Banana Republics and voila, Shangri-La.
We want high wages without the tension that a unionized work force inevitably creates. So we union bust here, pass minimum wage laws and assist corrupt foreign governments so they can red bait and enslave their working poor. We want a clean environment (as we should) so we pass costly environmental laws without ensuring that our industries can still compete. We want to be eternally young and affluent without having to work at it, so we take drugs, undergo unnecessary surgeries, and max out our credit cards.
And what is the consequence? Greedy CEOs pillage companies like Enron or move their capital, earned on our shoulders, to the cheaper foreign labor markets that our tax dollars created. Heavy industries, like Geneva Steel, are overwhelmed by foreign competitors whose impoverished workers chum out cheap products as well as billows of pollution which floods back to us on ocean channels and storm fronts.
Long before it happened I saw it coming because there is no free lunch, we can’t have our cake and eat it too, and you can’t gain without pain. So, the next time you're looking for a quick fix, remember where the Fen-Phen society got you and kiss its promises of Shangri-La goodbye.
Loren M. Lambert
March 8, 2002 ©
