Eric’s Blog

Recently I saw the moveon.org Will Ferrell piece about insurance executives. That’s two minutes of my life I’ll never get back. I was a Mad TV fan until it was canceled. Saturday Night Live was funny decades ago, but I remember turning it on in the 90s and seeing lame acts like Will Ferrell in a cheerleader outfit. I never thought I’d see comedy bad enough to give you cancer. In fact the only thing I ever saw him in that was funny was The Producers where he was brilliant. It may have been his first new character to play in decades. When I saw Star Trek this summer there was a preview for a movie about him and another 40 something as step brothers. Come to think of it, he had another movie that was sort of a parody of something so campy… It was like a parody of a parody pitching a really bad movie. So after two minutes of his web ad I was trying to figure out where the funny was and why a rich annoying Hollywood actor dork was lecturing me on people getting paid too much. I was stunned to see that he has been getting paid $20,000,000 a movie. I mean his entire schtick is getting in stupid situations and acting uncomfortable so that really immature, insecure imbeciles and teen aged boys can feel better about themselves because even their dumbest friends are mildly more intelligent. Watching my fingernails grow would be less tedious. In Shakespeare’s time a comedy was a play where the protagonist doesn’t die. In a Will Ferrell movie comedy is where you wish the protagonist would die 15 minutes in.

I remember being told the secret of wealth years ago. Serve the classes and live with the masses, serve the masses and live with the classes. Wealth is built on pennies. Look at it this way. If you came up with something so cool 10% of all Americans had to have it and whatever it cost you got 10¢ each you would get $32,000,000. If you got 15¢ and people bought it monthly you would get over half a million dollars a year. To the unenlightened capitalist this is the reward for serving many people well. After all everyone chooses freely whether or not to spend their money with you or your competitors. Anyway that was the theory before government hid the cheese in a maze of tax code and regulation, but how much money you make for serving others was never anyones business. Of course today we know these failed ideas are not just quaint memories, but evil incarnate. Profit means stealing candy from babies and wearing swastikas. Shame on you for wanting to get rich, but keep playing the lottery… also known as the voluntary tax on the mathematically challenged.

Today if you make too much money it is entirely unfair to everyone who didn’t make as much as you. Never mind that they already got what they want, they should get your money too. Sure it was just nickels and dimes, which are meaningless to us, but when they add up to millions we want our share! The only way to take it from those evil rich is to have the government take it. I read recently that the thinking behind socialist utopia is that it’s unfair to have a small part of the population have so much power, so the solution is to empower an even smaller part of the population, the government, to have total control over our lives. Right now our beloved congressional Democrats are trying to figure out how to make this new and ingenius idea work with health care. Without enough of other people’s money utopia turns to distopia and government has to shake down the middle class of our caste system.

So we need to identify the evil rich people we want to punish for providing us things we chose to buy who kept some small part of our money. Of course the rich pay the government a lot more than 10% of their money. More like half but it’s important to point out that government has low overhead, like 4% while businesses have expensive profits, like 30%. Okay, oil companies actually get by on 8% profit, but we can destroy them after we nuke insurance companies. Please ignore the fact that overhead and profit are not the same things. Also ignore that the average government job pays 80% more than private sector jobs and and along with gold plated benefits has six figure pensions in as little as 30 years. Also ignore that government waste and corruption is about 100 times the level of companies that need to make a profit. Companies can only profit by keeping costs down and competing… Government doesn’t have to worry about evil profits so costs are irrelevant and best of all it’s all paid for with those evil profits we take from those terrible people collecting pennies for serving us.

Oops, back in that old think. We’re fundamentally transforming America so we have to think new. The biggest problem with health care reform is the 53 or so new agencies we need to create which means tens of thousands of new high paying jobs and pensions. That’s good news if you’ve been schmoozing with the ruling class. The president says this has to be paid for! This is where Will Ferrell gave me an idea. Recent surveys show nearly 90% of America thinks the press is in the tank for our current administration and I bet you can’t name 10 Hollywood stars who aren’t cheerleading for far left causes. Movies make billions of dollars a year. I smell a plan. You see every fiber of my body says Will Ferrell is making too much money at $20,000,000 a film. In fact I bet a lot of people want their money back. While I’d like to flog everybody with a wet noodle who went to see the moron’s films, I think the “new think” way to do this is to have the government just take what we all know he doesn’t deserve. My proposal is to take everything over $100,000 a year if he makes a movie. Don’t think of it as a tax, it’s more of a humanitarian gesture for the rest of us. Also the studios should be limited to 4% profit and turn over the rest as an homage to their political message.

Don’t look at me like that. This is a brilliant plan. Hollywood is already on this bus. They are full of self righteous propagandists consumed with self loathing and guilt over their money. Don’t think of it as a government takeover of Hollywood. Think of it as reforming Hollywood’s greedy no talent stars and vapid uninspired studios, whose best idea is comic book pictures and parodies of campy TV so bad it looked like a parody. Not much will change. Oliver Stone can still make romance movies about Chavez and maybe one about George Bush contracting with Nixon on Wall Street to hit JFK. We all know that’s what happened anyway. Michael Moore can still say capitalism is failed and we can mete out justice by taking his money. Barack Obama can star in a movie which will should keep him busy enough for months that we can turn on the TV without hearing him rehash the same speech for the hundredth time. Of course if the movie is out before we seat a new congress it will be mandatory to see, but free with your national health care card. Hollywood reform would pay for Cadillac health care for everyone while paying ridiculously high salaries and pensions to tens of thousands of new government workers in dozens of new federal agencies. To honor Will Farrell for his part in my health care financing idea I nominate we rename proctology to WillFarrellOlogy. It’s only fair that we honor the center of his wit in this proposal.