Posted by
PDX Dave on Sunday, October 18, 2009 2:35:01 PM
In the land of Eats, there is a street with a dozen or more restaurants. It's called Restaurant Street. Most of them are state-run restaurants that provide subsidized food at a much lower cost. Only one restaurant is not subsidized, and it happens to be the best restaurant on the block.
The menus in the government restaurants feature items dictated by the government. The cooks in the government restaurants are government cooks, who are not allowed to cook their own culinary specials, but must serve exactly what is proscribed by the Minister of Menus. Which raises the question of why they are called "cooks" at all, rather than automatons which they resemble most. Sadly for the cooks who loved the art of cooking, their hands were tied. If a cook catered to an individual customer's desire and deviated from the government recipe, he would face fines, loss of his job, or even imprisonment by the government.
Not surprisingly, the food in the government restaurants is carefully designed to "not offend" as many pallets as possible and thus was pretty bland. That is to say, it is not intended to actually taste good, but to not taste specifically bad. Many of the diners at the government restaurants are forced by law to eat the food there, and they didn't know that food was supposed to taste good.
At the government restaurants, breakfast would regularly be delayed until lunch, and many times until dinnertime. Diners who came in at 6:00 am on Monday and ordered eggs over easy might wait until Tuesday evening for a breakfast of cold porridge. But it was free at the government restaurant!
At the lone restaurant that was not government run, called the Free Market Restaurant, happy customers came and went at a regular clip. The food at the Free Market Restaurant was a bit more expensive, but they could get it exactly like they WANTED it, and served quickly by a polite wait person rather than a surly government bureaucrat. If a person were extremely poor, they would also be served nutritious food for free. They wouldn't be served filet mignon for free, but they would leave with a full belly, which is perfectly fair. In this case, there IS a free lunch, but it maybe wasn't quite as tasty as the $50 lunch. Who would reasonably expect otherwise?
A few miles from Restaurant Street is a government agency who's job it is to rank and grade all the restaurants. Not surprisingly, the government bureaucrats there find the fare at the government restaurants to be of the BEST quality, and the Free Market restaurant to be horrifically unsatisfactory. They regularly complain about the Free Market restaurant not serving their entire menu for free, and their grading system heavily penalized them for that. Any restaurant that served free food was automatically deemed "better" than the Free Market Restaurant. The actual quality of the food was immaterial. That is be served free was the most important factor.
But, the customers of all the restaurants knew in their heart of hearts where the best food was to be served. Only one restaurant had a steady flow of customers from the OTHER restaurants. Only one restaurant had a creative and tasty menu from which the others were always trying to copy and steal.
The people who ran the government restaurants – indeed, the very ones who came up with the IDEA of government restaurants – were very mad at the Free Market Restaurant. It made THEIR restaurants look bad. For, even though they claimed they were the best, everyone knew otherwise. So, they wanted to create a law to "reform" the Free Market Restaurant by turning it into a government-run restaurant. They called the Free Market Restaurant nasty names, and accused them of wanting to starve little children to death, even though the Free Market Restaurant fed more poor little children for free than anyone else.
Most of the customers of the Free Market Restaurant were understandably very upset by the plan to turn their restaurant into a government restaurant. They liked their food as it was. They liked the service. They liked how quickly they were served.
The poor customers of the Free Market restaurant thought it was a grand idea. They thought they would get Boef Bourguignion for free. They didn't know that the best food would be taken off the menu and NOBODY would get it, and everyone in the Free Market Restaurant would be stuck with bland food served by surly bureaucrats after a long wait, and they would change the name to "The Best Restaurant in Town."
So giddy were the fans of government-run everything, that they gave those who thought up the idea of destroying the Free Market Restaurant a Nobel Peace Prize just for thinking of it.