By Ralph R. Reiland
Remember those stories about Nero playing the fiddle while Rome
burned?
Actually, if he was really playing, it was probably a lyre,
a small harp-like stringed instrument. Fiddles weren’t around
yet.
Well, showing how little the art of governance has
improved, we’re now borrowing money from China to buy cocaine for
monkeys, calling it a jobs program, and running up the national
debt to $14 trillion.
Or, perhaps worse, President Obama might get the money here
at home for his failing jobs programs by grabbing even more money
out of the pockets of America’s key job creators.
Fully one-third of the high-income taxpayers that Obama and
the Democrats are targeting for tax hikes in January — on
income, dividends, capital gains and inheritances — are the
nation’s small business owners, the people who create the bulk of
the new jobs in the U.S. economy.
As part of the recent non-stimulating stimulus bills, Wake
Forest University received $71,623 to “study how monkeys react
under cocaine.” There’s also a grant of $181,000 to see how
cocaine enhances the sex drive of Japanese quail.
That’s $252,623, enough loan money in this down economy to
pay for a year’s rent at a dozen storefronts, a strong incentive
for the launching of startup companies that could well have the
potential of hiring hundreds of people off the unemployment
rolls.
Instead, what we’ll get for our money out of this
particular jobs spending is a few high monkeys, a covey of stoned
quail, and a bit of temporary employment for a handful of grad
students and a few crack professors.
To add to this monkeying around, taxpayers are now picking
up the tab for over 2 million cell phones and prepaid minutes for
people who are allegedly unable to purchase this new necessity
out of their own pockets.
Let’s just hope that those guys hanging out on our most
dilapidated street corners with complimentary cell phones stuck
to their ears all day are chatting with their mothers, checking
in to see if all’s okay at home, and not conversing with their
customer base.
Still, none of the aforementioned is saying that monkeys
aren’t interesting or that we can’t learn things by studying
them. It’s just that snorting monkeys aren’t what belongs in a
jobs bill if we’re trying to get our biggest bang in terms of
employment growth.
Last year, for instance, researchers at Wake Forest
University School of Medicine reported that adult male monkeys
exposed to cocaine while in the womb have almost no impulse
control.
And it’s not temporary. For years, they freak out more than
the average monkey after they’ve been exposed to cocaine in the
womb, and it’s just males who are affected, not females.
In other words, it’s smart not to flash negative finger
signals to male drivers in neighborhoods where cocaine use wasn’t
exactly frowned upon when they were unsuspecting and innocent
embryos.
In one of the experiments to measure impulse control,
researchers gave monkeys the choice between pushing a lever that
delivered a single banana pellet immediately or a lever that
delivered several banana pellets but required the monkeys to wait
up to five minutes before the reward was delivered.
Male monkeys who were exposed to cocaine in-utero had “no
patience or impulse control whatever,” preferring what was
immediately available over what was a larger reward that required
a brief wait.
This lack of impulse control wasn’t displayed by male
monkeys who hadn’t been prenatally exposed to cocaine, or by
female monkeys, whether they’d been prenatally exposed or not
exposed.
That might partially explain why females graduate from high
school at a higher rate than males. If five minutes is too long
to wait, delaying gratification for years for a bigger reward is
off the table.
Another study shows that subordinate monkeys are more
likely than dominant monkeys to reach for cocaine when confronted
with stress. That’s something President Obama might
want to use in his push for greater social leveling and more
redistribution of wealth, arguing that drug use might decline in
the more miserable sections of town if we were all more alike in
terms of things like cars, houses, wealth and income.
He could gloss over the fact that such a redistribution,
centrally directed by the nation’s top Ivy Leaguers, would slash
incentives at the top, middle and bottom, thereby reducing our
productivity and overall standard of living, like in Cuba or
collectivist East Germany.
