The Empire

Let’s say you are an award winning baker of 
cheesecakes. You decide to found a bakery to make and 
market your cheesecakes. You want your cakes to be the 
best in the world, so you want complete control over 
all the ingredients to be sure they are the finest 
quality.

Your main ingredients are cream cheese, sugar, wheat 
flour and eggs. So you plan to build a small dairy, 
sugar mill, flour mill and egg farm. You want your own 
cows to produce milk for the dairy.

Your cows and hens will need to be fed, so you plan to 
build a small feed mill. You want the finest feed, so 
you plan to grow your own wheat, corn and carrots, as 
well as wheat for the flour mill and sugarcane for the 
sugar mill.

The only acreage you find available for farming is 
currently a wooded area. So you will need to clear out 
the trees, as your crops need lots of sunlight to 
extract carbon from carbon dioxide - and grow. (This is 
why I said the sun is the root of the food chain.)

You soon realize you cannot do all this by yourself. 
Not only because of the man hours, but it’s best to 
have folks with specialized knowledge in the areas of 
farming, dairy and milling. Your expertise, after all, 
is in the baking of cheesecakes.

You want your people to live close to where they will 
work, so you plan to use the lumber from clearing the 
trees to build housing for them.

These people will probably have growing families, so 
you will need a hospital and a school.

With all these wooden structures you’d better have a 
fire department, and some sort of peacekeeping force. 
(Whenever groups of people live in close proximity, 
there are bound to be disputes.)

All these people will not live on cheesecakes, so you 
will need shops to sell them groceries, clothing, and 
other items. Which means you will need warehousing and 
a freight depot.

Trucks will not drive across bare dirt and grass, so 
you will need to build roads.

The people will want venues for meeting, dining, 
worship, and entertainment. And, of course, they will 
demand broadband internet service.

You will need an electricity plant to power all this, 
and probably much more.

You wanted to produce the highest quality cheesecakes 
in the world. But now you realize you will become the 
reluctant ruler of a cheesecake empire.

The Alternative

Fortunately, there is a much simpler way.

Establish your business within a free market capitalist 
society.

The great strength of any such system is competition. 
It ensures you will be able to find the highest quality 
ingredients, and negotiate fair prices for them.

Yes, you will have competition too. It will drive you 
to produce a superior product, and do so efficiently to 
enable reasonable pricing. Everybody wins.

It was competition that drove you win awards for your 
cheesecakes in the first place.

Another Alternative

Establish your business within a socialist society.

You won’t have to worry about competition. Prices and 
wages are set by the government.

Quality of ingredients won’t be a concern. You will 
make do with whatever you are sent.

Your customers won’t be concerned with the quality of 
your cheesecakes either. They will make do with 
whatever you produce.

You won’t need to bother yourself about making a 
profit. The government will own your business, either 
directly or indirectly through taxation and regulation.

Without the incentive of profit and the motivation of 
competition, production lags, scarcity ensues, leading 
to hyperinflation.

It may become hard to find simple commodities such as 
toilet paper.

Seeking freedom and a better quality of life people and 
businesses flee in droves, putting a severe strain on 
the utopian balance envisioned by the society’s 
founders.

Lastly you see the government erecting walls: Not to 
keep illegal immigrants out, but to prevent the escape 
of its own citizens.

Attempting to leave becomes a capital offense: 
Sentencing delivered immediately on the spot.

Your Friend and Servant,

Ken Klemm - Florida, USA

P.S. “Freedom means seizing ownership of your mind.”

Back