What say we arbitrarily single out farmers for punishment?

You know, like we do with numerous and various other producers of stuff.  I mean, they can afford it, like those rich evil bastards that make medical products that doctors and nurses use to make people healthy. Bastards!

They need punished, I say, with a special tax that nobody else has to pay! Them farmers… producing food… man! They’re not really people, anyhow.

And while we’re at it, we’ll be punishing the people that work for the farmers, and their families; the people who buy and eat the food, and their families; the people who make a living making stuff that the farmers use to farm, and their families; we’ll punish them all, but we’ll just talk about punishing the farmers, ‘cause we have got to keep up appearances, you see.

Consequences are not really consequences, so it’s all okay, because the fines we took to penalize the farmers for being farmers, we will just give some of that money to the invisible peripheral people we punished, and we’ll say “We’re here to help”, and “Look what those farmers did to you”, and “We’ve made food cheaper for everyone and available to everyone”. Nobody will be the wiser, least of all the people who hire us to do the stuff we feel like doing, like the people we just peripherally punished.

We won’t either talk about how the farmers, in this country at least, will have less money to invest in figuring out ways to grow and harvest food at lesser expense to the people who eat, since we and some of the farmers’ victims will have that money.

It is settled. It is done. We have made up our collective minds. You just witnessed the greatness of our reason.

This is a fine idea, because we say it is, and because our friends on TV say it is, too. Justice is what we say it is, and you will see in the end, that it’s best when we single people out for random punishment. You’ll see, we promise.

Oh, and the motion picture industry, people who make forks, the rap music industry, people who make toilet paper, and those rich evil bastards that make products for pets, all of these need punished, too. You’ll see, I promise. Justice!

~betters.gov

P.S. If you are one of the bastards herein mentioned, please quietly consider our subjective reprisals upon your existence as merely another cost of doing business, and accept with heartfelt gratitude that we benevolently permit you to be. (smiley face)