The Ant and the Grasshopper

This is a modern retelling of the famous Aesop's Fable. This was given in a speech by Lt. Governor Gary Herbert to the Utah County Republican Women. I hope you enjoy it!

Original Intent:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper, though, has no food or shelter so he has to beg for his survival or die out in the cold.

The Liberal Perversion:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Keith Olbermann of MSNBC names the ant the “Worst Insect in the World” and Senator Harry Reid calls for a senate investigation into “why wealth should be more equitably distributed.”

Then a representative of the NAG (National Association of Grasshoppers) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with “grasshopper” bias, and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of anti-tobacco juice prejudice.

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when he sings “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Katie Couric that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper that has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefitted unfairly during the Reagan Summers and because of the “Bush Tax Cuts.”

Nancy Pelosi Exclaims in an interview with George Stephanopoulos that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his “fair share.” Congress calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to “re-distribute the wealth” as the President’s economic team begins to work on a “federal bail-out” package for all grasshoppers.

Finally the EEOC drafts the “Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Discrimination and Excess Profits Tax Act.” This is retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire proportionate number of grasshoppers, and then having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.

“Sixty Minutes” Later shows the now fat grasshopper finishing up the last of the ant’s food even though spring is still months away, while the government house that he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles down around him because he hasn’t maintained it. Inadequate government funding is blamed.

The ant has now disappeared in the snow and the story ends as we see more grasshoppers and fewer ants, more Joe-bums and fewer Joe-the-plumbers as we depart from capitalism and the risk/rewards of a free market and the realities recognized by Adam Smith when he said: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, or the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but—rather from their regard to their own interest.”

Or as George Bernard Shaw said, “A Government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always depend on the support of Paul.”