* * * * *
                                        
                             Parable of the Stairs
                                        
> The other day a young girl came to the door to solicit my support for her
> presidential candidate. I asked her why I should vote for this man. She was
> very nice and earnest, but if you got her off the talking points she was
> utterly unprepared to argue anything, because she didn't know what she was
> talking about. She had bullet points, and she believed that any reasonable
> person would see the importance of these issues and naturally fall in line.
> But she could not support any of her assertions. Her final selling point:
> Kerry would roll back the tax cuts.
> 
> Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome, shopworn, oft-
> told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless anecdotal drivel about how
> I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase that replaced a crumbling
> eyesore, hired a few people and injected money far and wide—from the guys
> who demolished the old stairs, the guys who built the new one, the family
> firm that sold the stone, the other firm that rented the Bobcats, the
> entrepreneur who fabricated the railings in his garage, and the guy who did
> the landscaping. Also the company that sold him the plants. And the light
> fixtures. It's called economic activity. Whatss more, home improvements
> added to the value of this pile, which mean that my assessment would
> increase, bumping up my property taxes. To say nothing of the general
> beautification of the neighborhood. Next year, if my taxes didn't shoot up,
> I had another project planned. Raise my taxes, and it won't happen—I won't
> hire anyone, and they won't hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You
> see?
> 
> “Well, it's a philosophical difference,” she sniffed. She had pegged me as
> a form of life last seen clilcking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. “I
> think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of
> trickling down.” Those last two words were said with an edge.
> 
> “But then I wouldn't have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn't have new steps.
> And they wouldn't have done anything to get the money.”
> 
> “Well, what did you do?” she snapped.
> 
> “What do you mean?”
> 
> “Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?”
> 
> “They didn't give it to me. They just took less of my money.”
> 
> That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:
> 
> “Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”
> 
> Then she left.
> 
> And walked down the stairs. I let her go without charging a toll. It's the
> philanthropist in me.
> 

“James Lileks: A minor political note, if you're interested in such thing
[1]”

My guess, the girl worked for a PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) [2]
where knowledge of a particular issue isn't a requirement to work for them
(link from Jane Galt [3]).

[1] http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0604/062804.html
[2] http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/12/3/231739/424
[3] http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009566.html

Email author at sean@conman.org