When the Seed Corn is Gone, Innovate with Sewage

Some populations are better subjects for Communism than others. When not exiling or murdering the upper class and ruling the rest by fear, force, confiscation, and destruction, Communism is based on definitions, stacked up and pushed into central goals, e.g. harvesting 50 tons of wheat next year. This approach has never worked in practice, but one can imagine a race of sufficient quality, honesty, and awareness to organize the model successfully. Lacking that, the typical method is to blur, confuse, and play word games.

The Chinese are pragmatic achievers able to mathematically assess costs and maximize profit by reducing expenditures to the minimal amount that suffices to meet the defined functional prerequisites.

They don't care about the consequences of cutting corners because that happens to others, and there are a billion others who don't matter. It's simply cheaper to put melamine in infant formula, chemicals in children's toys, and pollute freely without concern.

A clever woman who mines sewage for cooking oil was able to earn enough money to build a house. Good for her! She is not concerned that people who eat food cooked in sewage oil might die, because now through her hard work and smart opportunism she has a house.

As this thinking leaves its previous confines and spreads throughout the slumping and assassinated West, it meets tolerance, open-mindedness, and lack of remaining standards, so all choices and outcomes are equal, especially the easiest ones. Like an invasive species, we can expect the same results seen in the East will now appear in the West, becoming the new model.

"Everyone tries to swindle everyone else. There's nothing we can do about it."

It's a fitting epitaph.