Lucky for us, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, has discovered the solution to the world's worst problems just in time to save mankind from inflation, natural disasters, and political instability. In a recent column, Friedman declared that those things will all go away if the little people will just give up, surrender, submit, and acknowledge that "owning less and working less" is their only hope of salvation.
Friedman called his column "The Earth is Full," and I can sure see why. Because, you know, have you ever visited the world's overpopulated areas like Texas and Nebraska? It's like living in the middle seat on an American Airlines red-eye from New York to Chicago. There's no space left anywhere to throw a good elbow, because of all those obnoxious workers and owners – Friedman says — who insist on hogging up the last precious inches of terra firma available to mankind:
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all…
Furthermore, he declared:
We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less.
And then he guffawed and said that he was just joshing, and everyone knows this year's crazy weather is caused by La Nina, and food shortages are caused by climate change zealots and their stupid ethanol subsidies, and economic instability is caused by leftists who smoked too much pot in college and think they can spin gold out of straw and who are now running the U.S. government. Then he declared that telling people to work, produce, and own less would be really, really stupid — and counter-productive too.
No he didn't.
And I'm pretty sure he didn't recline by the pool at his palatial mansion and declare himself an elitist hypocrite, who like all good leftists will never give up trying to scare Americans out of being Americans.
