I’m from Bulgaria and still learning more about English language usage. Impressed by one of the presidential hopefuls I told my cousin, “This boy, Obama, is the best orator of them all.” She looked at me with fear and explained that it was dangerous to call a black man “boy,” since slave owners had used that term for their male slaves in the nineteenth century. It did not matter that I was not a slave-owner or that Obama had never been a slave.

Maybe you have to be an outsider to be surprised at such sensitivity, but I should point out that the world knows about slavery and segregation in America. It will benefit America to learn the history of the world. Other nations have had much worse for many more centuries and they do not brood on the past as much. In just a few years after gaining freedom from Turkey in 1878, the Bulgarians got over centuries of their children being taken from their families to be forcefully converted to Islam. These “enichari” were trained as soldiers of the sultan to be sent back to their native villages to continue murdering the fathers, raping the mothers, and taking even more Bulgarian children as government taxation.

We have to remember the evils of the past so we do not relive its horrors. And we are to mourn the victims. But unless people forgive, really forgive, and move on, they will keep bickering over their segregated past long after the Tutsi and Bhutto have found harmony in Rwanda. And Martin Luther King’s dream will never come true. Call me a wishful thinker but I have seen many Christians of racial and ethnic minorities who are now free to love their neighbors regardless of melanin content. God has more power than history. He can heal any pain, ancestral or personal.

I want to see the end of the American racial divisions but I don’t want to have to consult the current politically correct dictionary. I do not intend to feel uncomfortable because of the color of my skin or the shape of my skull. I will make every effort to judge people solely on character, just as Martin Luther King preached.

To the Honorable Members of Congress who shape our laws and to the national media who shapes our opinions.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We appreciate your patriotic efforts on behalf of the American producer. You help us see through the fallacies of economic theory. You make us embrace the good old mercantilist common sense that exports are good and imports are bad for the nation. You work hard to outlaw the outsourcing of our jobs and to exclude from our market all foreign industries.

Your good fight has convinced millions that abundance and low prices will ruin America. Fact: Our living standards rise in proportion to our wages. The latter are obviously dependent on the scarcity of the goods and services we produce. Because of you we now understand that the less we have, the wealthier we are.

You have summoned the spirits of Marx and Keynes who prophesied the current glut in the global market. Capital accumulation and technological innovations have lowered the cost of producing and transportation in the rest of the world to levels that are ruinous for our middle class. Under such adverse conditions our only hope is that you will keep multiplying the obstacles for the consumer and increase our need for domestic labor.

But yours are only half measures. Our nation’s survival under the economic sun is at stake. We cannot cure the spreading gangrene with ointments for diaper rash. Not taking your arguments to their natural conclusion is irresponsible. Nay, it is stupid and, as journalist Lou Dobbs wisely claims, “being stupid is un-American.” Thus we humbly offer our Final Solution to the problem of abundance. As you will see in each case below it boils down to legislating the increase in the ratio of effort to result.

1. The reason our farmers are an endangered species is that science has made agricultural labor so productive while our ability to consume food is limited by nature. Tariffs and subsidies are not enough to cope with the tragic atrophy of the backbone of our nation, the family farms. What is needed is a complete ban on the import of food coupled with dumping our fertile top soil into the ocean. In case the latter raises objections in the environmental movement, our second-best choice is a prohibitive tax on mechanical equipment and chemical fertilizers. These measures will create incentives to return to the farming techniques of our Founding Fathers.

2. The reason two hundred years after it industrialized America is steadily de-industrializing is that our own capitalists have invested in the economies of foreign countries. The obvious solution is to prosecute such activities as high treason. In the case that our courts fail to produce a constitutional justification for imposing capital punishment on unpatriotic greed, we have a back-up plan. In concert with the global efforts to reduce carbon emissions, we should keep the roads to Mexico open only for bicycles and require that imports from Asia be brought only on row boats.

3. The reason we no longer understand the language when we dial customer service is the recent improvement in communications. The multitude of taxes on phones is far from sufficient to reverse the trend of outsourcing jobs in the service sector. The fix here is quite simple - we call it the outsourcing that will end all outsourcing. We must monopolize our phone and internet services and sell them immediately to North Korea.

We believe that you will find our suggestions consistent with your preaching against abundance.

In memory of Frederic Bastiat,

Dr. Alex Tokarev

Economist at The King’s College, NYC