The Deer Crossing Principle of Social Policy

Listening to a
video recently that featured numerous stills of deer, deer crossing signs, and
of cars dented or mangled by close encounters between reckless drivers and
bounding deer, I had an epiphany: I finally grasped, for all time and for all
mankind, how statist economists and society managers thought. A new sun rose,
and I heard trumpets and a heavenly chorus singing "Hallelujah!" I
didn't quite experience "rapture," but it was very close that state
of exaltation.






The revelation was
this: Statists old and new, freshly minted and long retired, think like the
lady who called into a radio talk show to complain about deer crossing signs.
Not about the deer, but about the location of the signs.



Her reasoning, if
it can be called such, was that if the signs were placed at local roads and
highways with low traffic volume, there would be fewer deer casualties and
fewer crumpled cars. It made no sense to her to place those signs at
high-volume traffic locations. Wasn’t that obvious?



The host of radio
Y94, in Fargo, North Dakota, listened patiently to Donna – that was her name – and
refrained from audible smirks and guffaws while he explained in very simple
terms the purpose of the signs. He was a paragon of courtesy and tolerance and
public civility.



Now why, I asked
myself, would any rational person come to the conclusion that the location of a
deer crossing sign would have any effect on, well, deer? Or, rather, the proper
question to ask was: How would any
rational person come to such a conclusion?



Well, no rational
person would establish a causal connection
between the signs and deer. No rational person would ascribe to deer the
ability to read signs, or even grasp the silhouettes on them of leaping deer.
Perhaps not even the caller. We must allow Donna that much – in spite of
evidence to the contrary – for she does drive a car, and it has physically
encountered deer a number of times, much to the cost of her bank balance and insurance
premiums. She did not say that she had tired of exchanging insurance company
information with the offending deer, or had had mutual cuss-out incidents with
any one of them. Or so she claims. But she was clearly fed up.



No, the explanation
for this lady's reasoning must be
that the signs impart some kind of existential power over the deer. The deer
are like metal shavings, or filings, so to speak, and the signs are super
magnets. Deer magically gravitate towards these signs. Move the magnet and
watch the filings move. Move the signs, and watch the deer move. That part of
academia studying the metaphysics and epistemology of deer hasn’t quite nailed
down why deer follow deer crossing signs, just as scientists haven’t quite
nailed down what gravity is – is it undetectable gravity waves, volitional quarks,
or what? – although gravity certainly works. So should deer crossing signs. They
are preparing a major experiment on the power of deer crossing signs to
manipulate the impenetrable predisposition of deer to cross roads and highways.




But deer want to
cross the road, just like chickens, raccoons, possums, squirrels, and other
groundlings that are regularly squashed. The deer don’t necessarily take note
of the signs. They just show up near them, collectively or by their lonesome. Photographs
prove this.



Of course, a deer can
have the quirky habit of outrunning a car and deliberately crossing in front
it. It appears to be in a rush to play chicken with a driver. Or perhaps its
day just isn't made without a brush with metal and risking death or maiming by
a two-ton entity. Perhaps it is vain and wishes to show the noisy entity just
how nimble and agile it is. Deer anthropologists claim there are
"show-offy" deer. Such a deer is determined to cross the road ahead
of the vehicle. Its self-esteem must depend on it. Or something.



Anyway, back to the
complaining lady. She was sincere in her reasoning. Or perhaps she was pulling
the legs of the show's two hosts. But she sounded sincere. Let us grant her a
state of genuine perturbation.



You see, your
average economist and your average politician and your average teacher and your
average voter all think the same way as Donna. Never accuse of them of
harboring a dichotomy between cause and effect. Donna has a unique
epistemology; it established for her the causal metaphysical connections
between deer and deer crossing signs. Our group of averages is also imbued with
a similar epistemology. But Donna could never validate that knowledge, because,
well, she couldn’t. Just as the undetectable powers of Ouija boards and the
miraculous powers of pyramid hats can't be validated. One can't validate what can't
be detected, what isn't open to sensory perception. Or what isn't and never was
there.



Donna has reached
her end game. Her epistemology and metaphysics are the stuff of Road Runner
cartoons. And Groucho Marx's seven-cent nickel. And global warmng.



Paul Krugman,
champion of inflation and government interference and moving the country in a
different direction, shares Donna's epistemology and metaphysics. He believes
that if the Fed moves the deer crossing signs, the public will follow and cross
the road where he and Bernard Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
have designated the true and proper point to cross. Or rather, where the public
should follow, but too often does
not, thus throwing a monkey wrench into their best laid deer crossing plans.
Millions of metal filings fly in every direction but in the direction forecast
by the planners, usually as far away from the magnet or sign as possible. They
haven’t quite validated their metaphysics. Because their epistemology hasn’t
quite worked yet. They haven’t quite figured out the composition of those
countless metal filings. They seem to have minds of their own.



Now, take your
average socialist. You know, the one who wants to just "spread the wealth
around a little." Or a lot. One you will find in a stinking,
vermin-infested sleeping bag with Occupy Wall Street; the other you will find in
the meticulously clean White House, bacteria- smoke-, and class-free. They
together possess in common a cornucopia of deer crossing signs, in many sizes
and colors and styles. All property is theft, you see – they both agree with John
Reed, who was an acolyte of socialist-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who
worked out his own deer crossing sign hypothesis before Karl Marx did (Karl
stole it from him, that was only fair) – so the OWSer and the White House guy
share the credit.



The OWS fellow
wants to maneuver the deer with baseball bats and curtain rods and pooper-scoopers
in the manner of Indian tiger-beaters and herd them in a direction that will
stampede them off a cliff. Just as those other Indians used to do to buffalo
herds, resulting in piles of dead buffalo at the bottom of a precipice, from
which Indians managed to carve out some edible buffalo meat and the makings of
a teepee and a wrap-around coat before the whole pile putrefied.



The average OSWer doesn’t
believe there ought to be any roads for any deer to cross, not until he first has
had everything provided to him for free, including a vehicle in which to play
"dodge the deer." Then he will deign to use the roads, as long as
they are always torn up by contractors and municipalities being paid with
stimulus money to repave those roads and confuse the deer who might want to
cross it.



Of course, once the
property is seized and redistributed and consumed, that is the end of it. There
is no more, not unless deer living beyond the range of an OWSer's deer crossing
signs decide to volunteer for the experiment and provide the OWSer with freshly
stolen property. To the Donnas of OWS, all property is also static, but that's
just a theory which doesn’t bear close examination, so they don’t talk about it
much. After all, there was the Soviet Union, and that experiment in deer
crossing signs finally collapsed much to the embarrassment of sign planners and
deer manipulators, and that section of the road was taken over by a champion
tiger beater by the name of Putin.



The fellow in the
White House wishes to maneuver the deer with executive directives and mandatory
health insurance and subsidized solar energy companies and an auto company that
produces cars that deer do not want to tangle with. He has the same deer management
philosophy as the OWS fellow, but has infinitely more power to experiment with
his policies, and a nasty army of tiger-beaters, as well. His rule of thumb is
simple and easily understood by the graduates of Sesame Street: If you change
the deer crossing signs, the deer will come. Just like in that fabulous Kevin Costner
movie about baseball fields and deceased baseball stars.



If you pour
millions into a solar panel company or two or three, the sun will come and so
will the deer. And if the deer don't come, then the molecular composition of the
crossing signs must be awry and not friendly to deer vibes. Or something. The
guys in the lab are working on it, following John Dewey's philosophy of
pragmatism: If you build it, and it doesn’t work, try something else at random,
such as putting deer into a super-microwave oven and setting it at full blast
to see exactly when they explode.



If you force banks
to accept billions in imaginary money and credit, prosperity and full
employment and economic solvency will come. All that money, causing the machines
at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to hover close to over-heating and
breakdown, and all that credit, are the deer crossing signs. But now the deer
crossing signs are so numerous and thick that they form a barrier that deer
cannot cross. They remain across the road because they cannot penetrate through
the signs, and exhaust the foliage and begin to starve.



Deer crossing signs
were urgently needed in the Mideast. Dozens were erected at all the designated
crossings in hopes of altering the deer's social environment. The species of
deer that inhabit the Mideast, however, is particularly destructive, even carnivorous,
and have pulled down and trampled on all the signs, and have staged mass
attacks on passing traffic, such as cars full of female journalists and Coptic Christians
and ambassadors. These deer look like normal, peace-loving, plant-munching
deer, but the workers who attempt to erect the signs and befriend the deer with
handfuls of foliage have had their hands bitten off and their torsos gored. These
aggressive deer have taken over whole sections of the highway, and the sweltering
pavement is littered with human road kill as far as the eye can see.



This species of
deer is infected with an incurable strain of rabies. The Donnas of deer
crossing sign policy implementation refuse to send in professional hunters to
cull the herd or perhaps even eradicate the whole lot. Rabies is not, by Donna's
thinking, a disease, but just a different way of looking at things. There is room
on this earth for all classes of deer, even ones that froth at the mouth and whose
coats are thick with tics and chiggers and other viral bugs.



So, there it is. The
Donna principle of people management and deer crossing sign guidelines. Don’t everyone
get up and applaud me for the discovery. After all, I didn't build it. I must
give credit to deeper thinkers than I, such as Plato and Augustine and Kant and
Comte and Proudhon and Marx and Dewey and all those other guys.



The metaphysics is:
Reality is malleable, movable, and flexible. It can be anything one wishes. The
consequent epistemology is: Deer will cross wherever you erect a sign. Automatically.
Without fail. Except when they don’t and you must take a fistful of filings and
do it yourself with your back turned to the audience, or the electorate. That's
cheating, of course, but with artful sleights of hand, no one will notice. But whether
or not it works or is cheating, is irrelevant, because it accomplishes the
desired end. Deer or filings wind up in the right place, where they belong.



Will someone please
gag that guy in the front row who did notice?