Most every Saturday afternoon is Daddy/daughter time. This is where I give my poor pregnant long suffering wife a token break for a few hours, and together my 3 year old daughter and I go do something fun.
It was rainy today, and the in-laws were visiting so there were morning activities. The afternoon got started late so it was a fairly bogus activity we went to.
We went to this great big family amusement center so I could teach my daughter about economics liberalism and capitalism.
I always leave the family amusement center well-satisfied that I am correct in my political and economic philosophies. There is no better way to temper and test them than through though the microcosm of society that is skee-ball and related amusements. If only our politicians and pundits would test their theories at Chuck E Cheese or somesuch it would save society a lot of problems.
If you want free universal healthcare and a social safety you need to go to one of these places, and go visit the socialized portion.
“Where is the socialized portion of the family amusement center,” you ask?
That’s easy. Just look for the little roped off area set aside for the Birthday parties.
Oh yes, just like socialized medecing, they promise a lot, and it sounds like it should work. “All the food and games you want, all included” Except that food is the cardboard amusement center pizza and bug juice. The games are five beat up video games from 1983 with burnt out monitors and broken controls. They’re not even cool games for 1983 like Pac Man, or Defender, but always some cheesy 3 color rip-off. 25 kids have to share those five crappy games.
But hey, It’s free, right?
Of course, all the kids in the birthday party area just want to leave and play the cool games in the main area.
All children instinctively know that the free games automatically suck. Somehow when they become older and become liberals and lose their minds by being overeducated and underinformed they magically beleive the free games are somehow going to be good.
Anyway, it costs about $200 dollars to rent the party area and the parents that did it now have to shell out another $100 dollars putting tokens in the good machines because the kids don’t want to play the free games.
If they would have just bought 3 pizzas and given each kid $7 in tokens they would have saved $100 and the party would have been that much cooler.
As it is, the Family Amusement Center is designed with the naive socialistic notion that the birthday party kids will stay in the birthday party area.
The naive liberal notion of the birthday party is unequipped to deal with the the competitive market that is the main floor of the amusement center. Kids run around untended without tokens in utter chaos. This is what comes from social planning.
I can’t tell you how many times I see a kid in a birthday hat, sitting in the driver seat of a cool, expensive $1.00 driving game without a token in his pocket.
He’s pretending to drive the game, or, more likely just sitting there in the hopes that if he waits long enough somebody’s going to give him an entitlement and stick some quarters in it so he can play.
After this happens once or twice , the kid expects it. My daughter and I will walk buy and some seven year old will ask me to put money in the game for him.
“Get a job, kid,” I say.
All the brats looking for freebies spoil the experience for everybody since nobody can play when they’re taking up the machine expectantly.
“Al Gore wants to make the whole world like this,” I tell my daughter.
Some of you liberal/socialist types might think that the goal of the family amusement center is to get along, enjoy the action and community feeling , work together and have fun with your kids, and all sorts of mushy things.
That’s just because your a bunch of indolent cowards.
The family Amusement Center is a rational structure built on the principles of entrepeneurialship and cooperative self-interest.
When there is no birthday party, it works perfectly as the conservative utopia it is.
The goal of the family amusement center is a simple worthy capitalistic goal. You want to leave with the best toy or toys that you can.
In order to get the toy, you need tickets. You get tickets by playing games like skee-ball. You get lots of tickets by playing well.
The analogy to society is simple. The toys are goods and services, the tickets are a fiat currency, and the games represent productivity.
Now some of you whiny liberal types will complain that there’s only so many toys to go around, and that’s unfair to try and get all the tickets and get all the good toys.
But we all know that’s a defense mechanism. You just suck at skee-ball and you’re never going to get enough tickets to win the giant stuffed Spongebob Squarepants, so you don’t want anybody to have it.
You try to turn your failure into a virtue. “I won’t win the good toy. I’ll leave it there for somebody else.”
I got news for you. The back room is chock full of giant Spongebob Squarepants toys. You just have to be willing to work hard enough to get one.
And don’t worry, when the nonrenewable resource of Spongebob Squrepants runs out we’ll just move on to rubber Hulk dolls.
That’s another thing wrong with liberalism. The prizes suck. The birthday part area has a skill crane. That skill crane is loaded with… tiny packages containing TWO! Sweetarts.
“Play until you win” the machine says.
Big Whoop. Thanks a lot Bill Clinton.
Of course, capitalism has its traps and failures. There is always the bulldozer game. You know how this works. You slid your coin and hopes it lands in such a way that when the bulldozer pushes forward it will slide multiple tokens off the ledge producing an instant wealth of prize tickets by token landslide.
These are the ponzi schemes of the arcade, I guess anybody that sticks a token into those games deserves to go over to the party area and fish for sweetarts with the Democrats.
There are two very political games in any amusement center.
Skee-ball represents conservatism and capitalism at its best.
It’s absolutely fair. Everybody gets nine balls. You get tickets based on how well you roll the ball down the alley, up the ramp and into one of the concentric circles. The smaller circles are worth more points with two very difficult 100 point circles in the upper corner.
You can play it safe and go for the concentric circles, and win some tickets pretty safely, or you can shoot for the big time and go for the big money holes, knowing you might be skunked if you mess up.
My daughter and I can play skee-ball all day. We love the pressure and the choice and the responsibility, though we play totally differently.
My kid plays with a wicked side arm throw, that looks dangerous. It looks that way because it is. She almost brained half the family amusement center before she got the hang of it, and once I had to call an attendant because she accidently whipped a wooden ball in such a tangent that it completely missed the entire skee-ball area and got lodged behind the basketball toss.
But, she adapted quickly, and pretty soon she got the hang of it, wracking up 20-30 points on each shot by just hitting the general target area, and winning several tickets on each game.
I shoot for the big holes, and I’m streaky. Some games I might miss everything. Other games, I’ll get seven or eight out of nine, and set the sirens off and collect huge payoffs.
Today was a birthday party so the joy of our little captolitst exercise in entrepenurialism was marred by by a commie pinko of an eight year old in a birthday hat, and his little friends.
These tokenless layabouts had abandoned the party area and lurked everywhere looking for an entitlement payout.
These brats would edge up to the skee-ball machine to watch my daughter play and get in her way. They act friendly but it’s not thirty seconds later that they’re pushing her away from her machine that I’ve just loaded with a token. It’s their turn. They want to play.
The second time they got some harsh words from me, and I was duly pissed to see that they’d ripped away my daughter’s tickets right from the machine.
While I was doing this one the litle brats literally took one the balls from my alley and tried to play it in an adjacent alley. So there I am with 550 points on my skee-ball alley and no ninth ball. I end up having to play the adjacent alley to collect my ball back.
But such is the liberal illusion of the birthday party concept, that 2 parents can supervise 20 kids in and they’ll all be satisfied with the crappy free games of the party area.
The other capitalist game is the token shoot. This is nothing more than an evil captitalist game that preys on the working class.
You can’t win unless you’re already wealthy, and then you can’t fail. Your succes comes at the expense of the poor.
It’s a quick and discouraging game. You load a token into the gun, pull the trigger and try to shoot it at a tiny hole. The tiny holes are labelled with points.
You miss, your token falls, and that’s it.
Every third or fourth token gets caught it this basket, though.
Most people come, shoot a quarter or two, decide the game sucks and move on to something else. This represents the working class taking their shot at the good life. They run out of tokens and fail.
Their failure loads the basket.
Once the basket has been loaded at the expense of the working class, I can move in (I represent Bill Gates, an inside trader, or some multinational conglomerate.)
With my capitalistic know how and propietary stack of quarters, I have enough tokens to ensure that I can hit the super hard hole that tilts the jackpot.
My daugher finds this game boring and wants to go back to skee-ball until all of a sudden I hit the jackpot, tilt the basket and win 450 tickets. It takes five minutes for the machine to spit them out and the clanging of the bell brings all the little socialists like flies to a feast looking for a handout… or an opportunity.
Then it’s off to the Tragedy of the Commons. I buy my kid the armband and she’s let loose in the play area. She can jump in the infaltable moon room, play in the ball pit, or climb the obstacle course play area.
I call it the Tragedy of the Commons because like all shared things it is either a utopia or a hell.
If everybody just plays nice, everybody can have fun.
All it takes though is a couple of bigger kids roughousing recklessly in the moon room, and suddenly it’s too dangerous for everybody. If they go tearing through the jungle gym, or diving into the ball pit headfirst they ruin it for everybody in their selfishness.
Fortunately we get some time in Utopia before it turns into hell.
Then we order two slices of pizza (which is a different kind of pizza than they serve in the party area. This stuff is edible.)
We cash in our tickets, get the giant spongebobs and blow the last few tokens on the good skil-cranes by the exit door.
Skil Cranes are high ends capitalist games. Winning at a skil crane looses up the toys which makes it easier for those that follow to also win.
My daughter and I contribute to progress, are rewarded with a plastic spiderman and leave, proud to be a Republican.
