Who Takes the Cake?

       

 It was a slow day so I decided to do something I’d never done before: bake a cake. It came out looking pretty good. Suddenly a pink bubble floated into my house, and there stood a nice lady.

 

                “Glad to meetcha,” I said. “Dorothy went that way.”

 

                “Forget Dorothy,” she said. “Moved to California, made a fortune doing Red Shoe commercials. I’m Gilda, the Good Cake Lady. I give cake to needy people and I want your cake, make no mistake.”

 

                “You want me to give you my cake?”

 

I'm Not ASKING.

 

                “No,” she said. “I’m not asking you to give it. I’m demanding you hand it over. It’s a tax. After I take it, I’ll give it to someone who doesn’t have as much cake as you do, and they will thank me and think I’m wonderful, and vote for me because everyone should have cake.”

 

                “You’re not a real Fairy. You’re a fake, taking other people’s cake.”

 

                She smiled and laughed . “Okay. Suppose you give me half for charity’s sake.”

 

                “Hey!, Didn’t your Mom ever say ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it too?’”

 

                “How can you eat cake you don’t have?”

 

Opportunity Cost.

 

                “Good point,” I said.”Still, it means that if you eat your cake you can’t have it for something else. I can eat my cake, freeze it for the future, give it to someone, or if it’s really good cake, I can sell it. But I can’t do all of those things with my cake, so I have to choose. When I decide to do one thing with my cake, the alternatives I gave up are called ‘Opportunity Cost.’ When you use a cake for one thing, the cost is the opportunity to do something else with it. When Fake Cake Fairies take stuff from people, they always brag about what they did with that stuff—but they never mention the opportunities and alternate uses lost because the stuff they took wasn’t available for those other uses.”

 

Giving Other People's Stuff Away Is Good...

 

                “Giving cake to needy people is good for its own sake,” she said.

 

                “So make your own cake,” I said. “What about money? When you take money away from people to give to others, that money isn’t available to the people who earned it. It’s not there for them to invest. It’s not there for them to hire people and create a job or spend on stuff, which gives some other businessman a job. It’s not there for any number of alternatives. Opportunity Cost never shows up in the debate. We always talk about happy free cake takers, never the potential jobs that didn’t get created because Fake Cake Fairies shake down bakers to take their cake and give to somebody else.”

 

So Just Bake Another Cake? Why?

 

                “So bake another cake,” she said.

 

                “Why should I? You’ll just come and take it. There’s another Opportunity Cost: cakes that never got baked because cake bakers know Fake Cake Fairies will take them away. And cake bakers who moved to states where the Fake Cake Fairies don’t take their cake.”

 

                She looked me in the eye. “There are more cake takers than cake bakers. And we vote.”

 

But When You Take the Baker's Cake...

 

 

                “True,” I said. “But when you take the bakers’ cake, they give up baking and become more cake takers, so there’s no baked cake for anyone to take. So let the cake takers bake their own cakes, then they’ll be cake bakers too. With more cake bakers, there’ll be fewer cake takers, more cake baked and all you fakes can go make steak or jump in the lake.”

 

                “What right do you have to own lots of cake when other people don’t partake?”

 

                “What right do you have to take my cake, you fake?” I asked. “Without me, you wouldn’t make any cake at all. Who can do a better job of deciding what to do with limited resources: the baker who baked the cake, or fakers and cake takers who think cake comes from Good Fairies? And who’s got more moral right: the guy who bakes the cake or the fake Cake Fairy who takes it from its maker, the baker?”

 

                “But when you give people free cake, they buy candles and ice cream, and that creates jobs. You’re killing all those jobs, you snake.”

 

                “What jobs did you kill when you took the cake?  What was Opportunity Cost of the choices the cake bakers would make with their cake if you didn’t take it? If we want more cake for everybody, the guys who bake need a fairer shake. Maybe we need a Cake Bakers Bill of Rights. Heck, maybe we need to become a Right to Bake state.”

 

                She rolled her eyes.  “Sweet.”

                               

 

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