FEUDALISM
You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
PURE SOCIALISM
You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.
BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM
You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the
chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and as many eggs as the regulations say you should need.
FASCISM
You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.
PURE COMMUNISM
You share two cows with your neighbors. You and your neighbors bicker about who has the most “ability” and who has the most “need”. Meanwhile, no one works, no one gets any milk, and the cows drop dead of starvation.
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM
You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the black market.
PERESTROIKA
You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the Mafia takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the “free” market.
CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM
You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.
DICTATORSHIP
You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.
PURE DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for it. After the election, the president is impeached for speculating in cow futures. The press dubs the affair “Cowgate”.
BRITISH DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. You feed them sheep’s’ brains and they go mad.
The government doesn’t do anything.
EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. After that it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
SINGAPOREAN DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. The government fines you for keeping two unlicensed farm animals in an apartment.
LIBERTARIANISM
You have two cows. One has actually read the constitution, believes in it, and has some really good ideas about government. The cow runs for office, and while most people agree that the cow is the best candidate, nobody except the other cow votes for her because they think it would be “throwing their vote away.”
CAPITALISM
You don’t have any cows. The bank will not lend you money to buy cows, because you don’t have any cows to put up as collateral.
HONG KONG CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly-listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the right to all even cows’ milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because of bad feng shui.
ANARCHO-CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
ENVIRONMENTALISM
You have two cows. The government bans you from milking or killing them.
LESBIANISM
You have two cows. They get married and adopt a veal calf.
FEMINISM
You have two cows. They both think Bulls are pigs but marry them anyways and produce calves. Then they divorce the Bulls and take the whole farm. Only other cows and calves get any milk.
PURE ANARCHY
You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to take the cows and kill you.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
You are “associated with” (the concept of ‘ownership’ is a symbol of the phallocentric, war-mongering, intolerant past) two differently aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.
SURREALISM
You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
COUNTERCULTURE
Wow, dude, there’s like… these two cows, and… you have **got** to have some of this milk.
OLYMPICS-ISM
You have two cows, one American, one Chinese. With the help of trilling violins and state of the art montage photography, John Tesh narrates the moving tale of how the American cow overcame the agony of growing up in a suburb with (gasp) divorced parents, then mentions in passing that the Chinese cow was beaten every day by a tyrannical farmer and watched its parents butchered before its eyes. The American cow wins the competition, severely spraining an udder in a gritty performance, and gets a multi-million dollar contract to endorse Wheaties. The Chinese cow is led out of the arena and shot by Chinese government officials, though no one ever hears about it. McDonald’s buys the meat and serves it hot and fast at its Beijing restaurant.
MICROSOFTISM
You have two calves, and neither of them work, so you wait for the COW XP upgrade.
AMISHISM
You have two cows, but if you use a milk pump, you will surely burn in hell.
MARILYN MANSONISM
U HAV 2 COWZ U SACRFISE THEM TO MONSON THE ANTECRIST.
SOLIPSISM
Your mind would like to believe that several cows exist, and that two of them are yours, but you know better.
NEO-NAZISM
You have two white cows, and they never see any other non-white cows, and you have convinced them that slaughterhouses never existed.