We’re so close to being rich. Everybody in the world could be rich as hell. The benighted masses of India could quit pedaling bicycle rickshaws and start dragging Lear jets through the streets of Calcutta. Native tribes in the Brazilian rain forest could be singing in the rain. Eskimos could give up clubbing baby seals and devote their arctic vastness to building an Olympic-quality ice dancing team.
When we’re all wealthy, Sally Struthers will be featured in magazine ads headlined, “You Can Send This Child to Summer Weight-Loss Camp or You Can Turn the Page.” CARE packages will contain oyster forks and truffles. And altruistic musicians will hold benefit concerts to raise enough money to pay the Rolling Stones to retire.
Money won’t solve all our problems. But money will give us options—let us choose the problems we want to have. Leisure conglomerates may open franchises in Bosnia and Herzegovina where Muslims and Serbs can blast each other in paintball wars. Self-destructive individuals will still exist, but instead of dying from drug overdoses in pay-toilet stalls, they will be able to expire in luxury at the Chateau Marmont like John Belushi. The Taliban fundamentalists might continue to keep women in seclusion, but they could do so by opening a Bergdorf Goodman’s in Kabul. They’ll never see those wives again.
All this is possible because the modern industrial economy works. Obviously it works better in some places than in others. But it works, even in the poorest areas. Côte d’Ivoire now produces almost as much per capita wealth as the United States did when the Monroe Doctrine was declared, and Egypt produces more. America did not consider itself a poor country during the 1820s, and, in fact, at that time it was one of the world’s most prosperous nations.
Extensive research has been done on the history of this industrial economy, much of it by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD was founded by the Marshall Plan countries in the wake of World War II, and its purpose is what its name says. The OECD wants to make everyone rich as hell, although it never quite confesses to this in its literature.
In 1995 the OECD published a book by economist Angus Maddison titled Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992. Maddison has been studying economic growth since the 1950s, and has examined and weighed the subject’s statistics and statistical estimates. On the strength of these, Maddison calculates that until the Industrial Revolution, economic growth was paltry. Measured in 1990 U.S. dollars, the world Gross Domestic Product went from $565 per person in 1500 to $651 per person in 1820. That was an increase in wealth of about 27 cents a year.
But after the Industrial Revolution, something wonderful happened. The total world GDP grew from $695 billion in 1820 to almost $28 trillion in 1992. This planet had the same amount of arable land in 1992 as it had in 1820, and, arguably, fewer natural resources. Plus, population had grown from a little more than 1 billion to nearly 5.5 billion. But even so, world GDP per capita swelled from $651 to $5,145. Prosperity increased by $26 a year. Wealth has been growing a hundred times faster than it did before the Industrial Age.
The modern economy works, and we know how to make it work better. Free markets are extremely successful. The evidence is there for anyone who wants to look. Hong Kong, with 6.5 million people in 402 square miles, has an annual GDP of $163.6 billion. Tanzania, with 29.5 million people in 342,100 square miles, has a GDP of $18.9 billion.
Even a free market with lots of tax baggage and regulatory impediments is much better than a market that isn’t free. Sweden has about the same amount of arable land as Cuba, a similar range of natural resources, a worse climate, and a couple million fewer people. But Sweden’s GDP is more than eleven times the size of Cuba’s.
And the free market trumps education and culture. North Korea has a 99 percent literacy rate, a disciplined, hardworking society, and a $900 per capita GDP. Morocco has a 43.7 percent literacy rate, a society that spends all day drinking coffee and pestering tourists to buy rugs, and a $3,260 per capita GDP.
We know what to do, and we know how to do it. So what’s wrong with the world? To a certain extent, it’s the same thing that’s wrong with me. Because the prosaic, depressing, and somewhat shameful fact is that the secret to getting ahead is just what my parents told me it was.
The whole miracle of the modern industrial economy is based upon the things that our folks were trying to drum into our heads before we went off to college to grow hairy and bearded—or, as the modern case is, get pierced eyebrows and neck tattoos. It’s the advice we received at the dinner table while the Jell-O dessert puddled and our friends were waiting for us at the mall. It’s the clumsy set-piece speech our parents made in the heart-to-hearts they’d spring on us when we were really high. It’s what we heard in capital letters when we brought home grades that looked like a collection of Baywatch bra cup sizes or wrecked the car.
• Hard work
• Education
• Responsibility
• Property rights
• Rule of law
• Democratic government
Actually, most parents didn’t get all those items into the lecture. In fact, I’ve never heard of a parent saying, “Listen here, if I catch you running around without property rights again, I’ll take away your cell phone.” But when our parents said, “Be honest,” they were assuming that property rights were real. And when our parents said, “Obey the law,” they were making a logical inference that the law existed and that it merited obeying. And many of our parents had served in the military, defending democracy, and would remind us of this at length.
Of course, by “hard work” our parents didn’t mean that we should be doing the hard things that constitute work for the poor people in the world. Few parents hope that their children will get jobs carrying forty-pound buckets of water on their heads. Our parents wanted us to do hard work that was intelligent, fulfilling, and promised advancement in life. (Although they also wanted us to mow the lawn.) The hard work was linked to education.
However, billions of people don’t have a chance to get an education, and some of them, like religious fundamentalists and deconstructionist college professors, don’t believe the education when they get one. This is one reason that dinner-table parental advice is difficult to apply to the earth’s impoverished masses. There are also billions of people who don’t have property rights, not to mention property. Or the property rights are arbitrary, and the property can be taken away by anybody with a gun or a government title. These billions of people have trouble being responsible because being responsible means thinking of the future. They haven’t got one.
Rule of law is crucial. And it has to be good law, not Albania’s Law of Lek. So if what our parents tell us is going to be globally effective, Mom and Dad will need to bring world leaders into the dining room. All the presidents, prime ministers, dictators, generals, chairman of idiot political parties, lunatic guerrilla chieftains, and fanatical heads of crazed religious sects will need to squeeze around the imitation Queen Anne mahogany veneer (with extra leaves in) and get a real talking-to.
Then there is democracy to be considered. Democracy is a bulwark against tyranny—unless the demos get tyrannical. People can vote themselves poor.
So now all the people on the planet are coming over to the house. And when they get there, what they’re going to do is … exactly what we did. They’re not going to listen.
There is a worldwide pigheadedness about money. There is a willful and even belligerent ignorance concerning ways and means. There is a heartfelt and near universal refusal to understand the basic economic principles behind the creation of wealth.
Not all this ignorance is irrational. Some people profit from economic privation. Economists, for instance. John Maynard Keynes couldn’t have become a big shot, guiding government intervention in business and finance, if it hadn’t been for the Great Depression. And Alan Greenspan is a success because we all lost our wallets when inflation scared our pants off.
We fear the power that others have over us, and wealth is power. We’re afraid that Kathie Lee Gifford is going to make us sew jogging suits for thirty cents an hour. But are the rich really scarier than the poor? Take a midnight stroll through a fancy neighborhood, then take a midnight stroll a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Sure, we can get in trouble in Monte Carlo. We can lose at roulette. We can get suckered into a shady business deal with Princess Stephanie’s ex-husband. But we’re more likely to be mugged in the District of Columbia.
Not that we should begrudge the crimes of those poor people. They’re just practicing politics on a small scale. If they’d listen to their own political leaders, they’d put down the gun and pick up the ballot box, and steal from everybody instead of just us.
Political systems must love poverty—they produce so much of it. Poor people make easier targets for a demagogue. No Mao or even Jiang Zemin is likely to arise on the New York Stock Exchange floor. And politicians in democracies benefit from destitution, too. The United States has had a broad range of poverty programs for thirty years. Those programs have failed. Millions of people are still poor. And those people vote for politicians who favor keeping the poverty programs in place. There’s a Matt Drudge conspiracy theory in that somewhere.
Many religions claim to admire poverty. And some religions even advocate the practice of being poor. (Although all those religions seem willing to accept large cash donations.)
You’d think that businessmen, in the search for new customers, would always be opposed to impecuniousness. But Kathie Lee Gifford is not alone in depending on destitute workers to take pay-nothing jobs.
Then there is a certain kind of environmentalist who thinks that human deprivation means plant and animal wealth. Tanzania’s experience of rhinosubsidizing rich tourists versus rhino-killing impoverished poachers argues against this. (And an Asia where every man could afford Viagra would be the best thing that could happen to the rhinoceros.) But many “Greens” still believe that increasing human prosperity is wrong. For example, the famous population-control advocate Paul Ehrlich has said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy … would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Finally, general poverty benefits specific wealth. If most people are broke, that’s great for the wealthy few. They get cheap household help, low ancestral-manor real estate prices, and no crowds on Martha’s Vineyard. This explains the small, nasty plutocracies in impoverished countries. Maybe it also accounts for the rich socialists prominent on the political landscape of wealthy countries for the last two centuries.
I began by asking why some parts of the world are rich and others are poor, and I naturally had prejudices about what the answers would be. I favored the free market, not because I knew anything about markets, but because I live in a free (or nearly free) country, and I’m a free man (as long as I call home frequently), and it works for me. I was skeptical about the ability of politics to deliver economic benefits because I did know something about that. I’d been writing about politics, at home and abroad, for years. I had a low opinion of the political trade and its practitioners. And I considered culture, as an economic factor, to be a joke. How is ballet going to make the Tanzanians wealthy?
I was stupidly surprised to find out how important law is. Law, of course, derives from politics. And a political system is ultimately a product of a society’s attitudes, ideas, and beliefs—that damned conundrum, its culture.
Which brings me back to the free market. I started out looking at the free market in terms of its effectiveness, its “efficiency,” as an economist would say. I ended up looking at the free market as a moral device. My initial prejudice was right in one respect. The most important part of the free market is the free part. Economic liberty cannot be untangled from liberty of other kinds. You may have freedom of religion, if the rabbi can get off night shifts on Fridays. You may have freedom of assembly, but where are you all going to go if it rains?
The U.S. Constitution is (at least I hope it is) a statement of American cultural values. The First Amendment implies a free market. Six of the remaining nine articles in the Bill of Rights defend private property specifically. And two of the others concern rights reserved to the people, some of which are certainly economic rights. We are a free-market nation, though the electors and the elected sometimes forget it.
A belief in the free market means a belief that people have an innate right to the fruits of their endeavors, and the right to dispose of the fruit the way they see fit, as long as other people don’t get pasted in the face with a rotten peach.
There are people who don’t believe this. Some of these people are just bad. They steal. Some of these people are “nationalistic” and think it’s okay to take things from other people if they live more than a peach toss away or speak another language or have a different religion or look funny. And the kings, emperors, and so forth who ruled mankind during most of history were under the impression that everything belongs to kings, emperors, and so forth.
Now that the kings and emperors have been shot or reduced to pathetic ceremonial posts, the most common reason given for not believing in economic liberty is that the free market is unfair. Socialists, Social Democrats, American liberals, and all other kinds of economic levelers think that unconstrained industry, agriculture, and commerce lead to the exploitation of people who aren’t very good at these things.
A little bit of immoral wealth and a great deal of unconscionable poverty is supposedly thereby created.
It was Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (published with happy coincidence in 1776) who originally argued that a free market is good for everybody. Smith seems to have been the first person to realize that all voluntary exchanges increase prosperity. Wealth is created by any swap. It may seem like an even trade, but each trader gives up something he values less in order to receive something he values more. Hence the wealth of both traders grows. When Neolithic spear makers did business with Neolithic basket weavers, the spear makers were able to carry things around in a manner more convenient than skewering them on spear points, and the basket weavers were able to kill mastodons by a method more efficient than swatting them with baskets.
The free-market outcome benefits all. It’s moral. And the beautiful thing about this morality is that we don’t have to be good to achieve it. In the most, perhaps only, famous passage from an economics book, Adam Smith states, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Smith saw that a man’s selfish concern with his own well-being is a desirable, indeed, a splendid thing for society. “[He] intends only his own gain,” wrote Smith, “and he is in this … led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” That end is economic progress.
The general morality of the free market, however, does not answer the specific objection of unfairness. Economic liberty leads to differences in wealth. And the differences are enormous. The “wealth gap” is the subject of a critical debate about economics. The perception of unfairness is the reason that enormous numbers of the world’s decent and well-meaning people, in fact the majority of them, do not rush to embrace the free market in its totality. Complete economic liberty would mean a system like Hong Kong’s under John Cowperthwaite with no barriers to trade or capital flow, and no barriers to labor flow, either; no check on immigration, no minimum wage, no cost controls, and no attempt to create a fair society. This is a daunting prospect, and it’s not just Fidel Castro who’s daunted by it.
Socialists and capitalists naturally take opposing sides on the question of how economically fair life should be. But so do various political parties which claim to be pro-market. So do theologians and philosophers. And so do ordinary people when they’re voting for school-bond issues or deciding how much to cheat on their taxes.
Fairness is a potent emotional issue, but how is fairness to be delivered? It’s hard to build a political structure that provides economic fairness. The map is full of failed attempts. When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state, we get, at best, Mainland China, a place that violates a fundamental rule of happy living: never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
There is another difficulty with political control of the economy which keeps even the best-behaved governments from using resources well. This problem was explained by the economists Milton and Rose Friedman in their book Free to Choose. The Friedmans argued that there are only four ways to spend money.
Spend your money on yourself.
Spend your money on other people.
Spend other people’s money on yourself.
Spend other people’s money on other people.
If you spend your money on yourself, you look for the best value at the best price—knockoff Pings on sale at Golf-Fore-Less. If you spend your money on other people, you still worry about price, but you may not know—or care—what the other people want. So your brother-in-law gets a Deepak Chopra book for Christmas. If you spend other people’s money on yourself, it’s hard to resist coming home with real Pings, a new leather bag, orange pants with little niblicks on them, and a pair of Foot-Joy spikes. And if you spend other people’s money on other people, any damn thing will do and the hell with what it costs. Almost all government spending falls into category four. This is how the grateful residents of Ukraine got Chernobyl.
Also, if fairness is important, what is really fair? We may say something like, “People have a right to food, a right to housing, and a right to a good job for decent pay.” But from an economist’s perspective, all those rights involve making finite goods meet infinite wants. Unless the fair society generates tremendous economic growth—which societies that put fairness first have trouble doing—the goods will come from redistribution. Try rephrasing the rights statement thus: “People have a right to my food, a right to my housing, and a right to my good job for my decent pay.”
Accepting the free market allows us to avoid the political abuse and financial mismanagement inherent in trying to design an economy that’s fair. It also allows us to see that economies can’t be designed. Economics is the measurement of how human nature affects the material world. The market is “heartless.” So are clocks and yardsticks. Saying that economic problems are the result of the free market’s failure is like gaining twenty pounds and calling the bathroom scale a bum.
Adam Smith recognized that markets are self-organizing. Man has a “general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange,” wrote Smith. If people are protected from coercion by other people, and from coercion by that agglomeration of other people known as the state, human brains and greed create economic growth. “The strength of the mastiff is not in the least supported either by the swiftness of the greyhound, or by the sagacity of the spaniel,” wrote Smith. “Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another.”
I had thought that economic problems were the result of ignorance about economics. I was wrong. I asked a friend who’s knowledgeable in the field: “Why is the concept of the ‘invisible hand’ so difficult to comprehend?” He said, “It’s invisible.” The hardest thing to understand about economics is that it doesn’t need to be understood. My beatnik friends and I, when we were in college, were perfectly justified in expending our intellectual energy on love and death instead of money.
But there was one thing that we did need to learn. And still do. And it’s a piece of knowledge that seems to contradict psychology, life experience, and the dictates of conscience: economics is not zero sum. There is no fixed amount of wealth. That is, if you have too many slices of pizza, I don’t have to eat the box. Your money does not cause my poverty. Refusal to believe this is at the bottom of most bad economic thinking.
True, at any given moment, there is only so much wealth to go around. But wealth is based on productivity. Without productivity, there wouldn’t be any economics, or any economic thinking, good or bad, or any pizza, or anything else. We would sit around and stare at rocks, and maybe later have some for dinner.
Wealth is based on productivity, and productivity is expandable. In fact, productivity is fabulously expandable, as Angus Maddison has shown in Monitoring the World Economy. Yet a person who is worried about fairness can look at Maddison’s figures and say that they are just averages. Per capita GDP does not show us who actually got the cash. The worrier about fairness can recite the old saw: “The rich get richer and the poor …”
“Get entertained by People magazine stories about divorces among the rich.” That is not how the worrier was going to finish his sentence. “Get lower mortgage rates because banks have more money to lend.” That is not it, either. “Get better jobs because there’s more capital to be invested in businesses.” No, the cliché is, “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”
Except there is no evidence of this in recent history. Per capita GDP is a tricky figure and doesn’t tell us much about the well-being of individual people. But there are other statistics that don’t present the same problems of averaging. Life-expectancy and infant-mortality rates do tell us how things are going for ordinary folks. No matter how rich a nation’s elite, its members aren’t going to live to be 250 and wildly skew the numbers. And a country can’t fake a low infant-mortality rate by getting a few rich babies to live while letting all the poor babies die.
The United Nations study World Population Prospects: 1996 Revision contains historical statistics on life expectancy and infant mortality. Figures are given for Most Developed Regions, Less Developed Regions, and Least Developed Regions. The last being places that are truly poor, such as Tanzania. In the early 1950s the richest countries had an average infant-mortality rate of 58 deaths per 1,000 live births. By the early 1990s the average was down to 11. During the same period the infant-mortality rate in the poorest countries dropped from an average of 194 deaths per 1,000 to 109 per 1,000. Infant-mortality rates declined in both rich and poor countries, and so did the gap between those rates. A difference of 136 deaths per 1,000 had diminished to a difference of 94 deaths forty years later. This is still too many dead babies (and it’s hard to imagine a number of dead babies that wouldn’t be too many, unless the fair-minded worrier is also a zealous pro-choice advocate). But infant-mortality rates give us some hopeful information about world economic growth. Yes, the rich are getting richer, but the poor aren’t becoming worse off. They’re becoming parents.
Life expectancy tells the same story. In the early 1950s, people in rich countries lived, on average, 66.5 years. By the early 1990s they were living 74.2 years. In the poorest countries, average life spans increased from 35.5 years to 49.7 years (which, somewhat unnervingly, was my exact age when I wrote that sentence, and I was glad I didn’t live in Tanzania and had to die that night). Anyway, the difference in life expectancy between the world’s rich and poor has decreased by 6.5 years. The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting richer. And we’re all getting older.
So if wealth is not a worldwide round-robin of purse snatching, and if the thing that makes you rich doesn’t make me poor, why should we care about fairness at all? We shouldn’t.
Fairness is a good thing in marriage and at the day-care center. It’s a nice little domestic virtue. But a liking for fairness is not a noble sentiment. Fairness doesn’t rank with charity, love, duty, or self-sacrifice. And there’s always a tinge of self-seeking in making sure that things are fair. Don’t you go trying to get one up on me.
As a foundation for a political system, fairness may be no virtue at all. The Old Testament is clear on this point. The Bible might seem an odd place to be doing economic research, especially by someone who goes to church about once a year, and only then to give the Easter Bunny time to deliver Peeps. However, I have been thinking—in socioeconomic terms—about the Tenth Commandment.
The first nine Commandments concern theological principles and social law. Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, etc. Fair enough. But then there’s the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”
Here are God’s basic rules about how we should live, a very brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts, and right at the end of it is, “Don’t envy your buddy’s cow.”
What is that doing in there? Why would God, with just ten things to tell Moses, choose, as one of them, jealousy about the livestock next door? And yet, think about how important to the well-being of a community this Commandment is. If you want a donkey, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don’t bitch about what the people across the street have. Go get your own.
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates—to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And the message is clear and concise: Go to hell.
If we want the whole world to be rich, we need to start loving wealth. In the difference between poverty and plenty, the problem is the poverty, not the difference. Wealth is good.
You know this about your own wealth. If you got rich, it would be a great thing. You’d improve your life. You’d improve your family’s life. You’d purchase education, travel, knowledge about the world. You’d invest in worthwhile things. You’d give money to noble causes. You’d help your friends and neighbors. Your life would be better if you got rich. The lives of the people around you would be better. Your wealth is good. So why isn’t everybody else’s wealth good?
Wealth is good when a lot of people have it. It’s good when a few people have it. This is because money is a tool, nothing more. You can’t eat or drink money, or wear it very comfortably as underwear. And wealth—an accumulation of money—is a bunch of tools.
Tools can be used to do harm. You can break into a house by driving a forklift through a picture window. You can hit somebody over the head with a hydroelectric turbine. Tools are still good. When a carpenter has a lot of tools, we don’t say to him, “You have too many. You should give some of your hammers, saws, screws, and nails to the guy who’s cooking omelets.”
Making money through hard work and wise investment is a fine thing to do. Other ways of making money aren’t so bad, either, as long as everybody who’s in on the deal is there voluntarily. Better sleazy productivity than none. As terrible as Albania’s pyramid schemes were, Albania’s riots were worse.
And the Hong Kong of John Cowperthwaite shows that even the most resolutely free-market system makes use of private means for the public weal. If the United States radically reduced the size of its government, eliminated all subsidies, price controls, and corporate welfare, and abolished its entitlement programs, we’d still pay taxes. And those tax revenues would be spent—ideally—on such reasonable things as schools, roads, and national defense, in case the British invade again and try to hand over Wall Street to the Red Chinese.
Or take the real-world example of two kids who graduate from college with honors. One is an admirable idealist. The other is on the make. The idealist joins Friends of the Earth and chains himself to a sequoia. The sharpie goes to work for an investment bank selling fishy derivatives and makes $500,000 a year. Even assuming that the selfish young banker cheats the IRS—and he will—he’ll end up paying $100,000 a year in taxes: income tax, property tax, sales tax, etc.
While the admirable idealist has saved one tree (if the logging company doesn’t own bolt cutters), the pirate in a necktie has contributed to society $100,000 worth of schools, roads, and U.S. Marines, not to mention Interior Department funding sufficient to save any number of trees and the young idealists chained thereto.
And if the soulless yuppie cheats the IRS so well that he ends up keeping the whole half million? That cash isn’t going to sit in his cuff link box. Whether spent or saved, the money winds up invested somewhere, and maybe that investment leads to the creation of the twenty-first century’s equivalent of the moldboard plow, the microchip, or the mocha latte. Society wins. Wealth brings great benefits to the world. Rich people are heroes. They don’t usually mean to be, but that’s their problem, not ours.
Almost everyone in the world now admits that the free market tells us the economic truth. Economic liberty makes wealth. Economic repression makes poverty.
Poverty is hard, wretched, and humiliating. Poverty is schoolgirl prostitutes trying to feed their parents in Cuba. Poverty is John driving around in the Tanzanian night looking for the doctor while his daughter dies. But what poverty is not is sad. Poverty is infuriating. These things don’t have to happen. These conditions don’t need to exist. We can’t solve all the problems of life, but we can solve the problem of gross, worldwide material deprivation. The solution doesn’t work perfectly. The solution doesn’t work uniformly. Nonetheless, the solution works. If we can’t fix everything, let’s fix the easy stuff. We know how to get rid of poverty. We know how to create wealth. But because of laziness, fear, complacency, love of power, or foolish idealism, we refuse to do it.
We think we can dabble in freedom—allow a few of its liberties and leave our favorite constraints in place. We think we can screw around with the free market—skip its costs and get all of its benefits anyway.
There is a joke that President Reagan used to tell to illustrate the attitude that some people have toward the blessings they get from freedom and private property.
A traveling salesman is staying overnight with a farm family. When the family sits down to eat, there’s a pig in a chair at the table. The pig has three medals hanging around its neck and a wooden leg. The salesman says, “Um, I see a pig is having dinner with you.”
“Yep,” says the farmer. “That’s because he’s a very special pig. You see those medals around his neck? Well, the first medal is from when our baby son fell in the pond and was drowning, and that pig dove in, swam out, and saved his life. The second medal, that’s from when our little daughter was trapped in a burning barn, and that pig ran inside, carried her out, and saved her life. And the third medal, that’s from when our oldest boy was cornered in the stockyard by a mean bull, and that pig ran under the fence, bit the bull’s tail, and saved the boy’s life.”
“Yes,” says the salesman, “I can see why you let that pig sit right at the table and have dinner with you. And I can see why you awarded him the medals. But how did he get the wooden leg?”
“Well,” says the farmer, “a pig like that—you don’t eat him all at once.”