WALES

I know this is hard to believe, but I was not always the prosperous and independent operator that you now see. I was poor and desperate, my job having been sent to Uzbekistan or Tajikistan or someplace. I had no health insurance, my unemployment benefits had run out, and I had applied for food stamps, but I couldn't even get those. Delay followed delay ... until I found out about WALES.

WALES was not, as you may think, a pod of aquatic mammals. Nor was it a Celtic subdivision of Great Britain. Let me explain. One day, I got a call from a caseworker at BSWA. For those who can't remember, BSWA is the acronym for "Big State Welfare Agency." The caseworker said she had something to give me and asked me to come to her cube at BSWA. I was all of a twitter. Food stamps at last, I thought!

My caseworker, whose name was Bonnie, apologized about all the delays I had been experiencing.

"What was the hang-up?" I asked.

"Well, you've got to understand that we were in the process of converting from an old, antiquated computer system to a new, billion-dollar, state-of-the-art system."

"Ah," I said. "I understand. The old clunker was fouling things up, but now you've got the new one, so my claim could be processed. Say no more."

But she said some more. "Um, not exactly," she said. "The old clunker was actually doing fine. It was WALES that was having the problems."

"WALES?" I asked, eyebrows raised.

"'Welfare Administration Legal Entitlements System,'" she explained. "I know it sounds stupid, but believe, me there are worse names."

"Now, I don't understand," I replied. "First of all, that seems backwards, and second, if the new one doesn't work, all you have to do is go back to the old one. At least, until my claim is processed."

"Not that simple," explained Bonnie. "We wanted to be sure we had all the bugs out of the new software, so we established a pilot program in one county, while the old system served the other 253."

"So, that's over, then," I prompted, "and when you rolled the new system out statewide, you ran into problems."

"Um, not exactly," she said again. "The pilot ran for 16 years, and it was too slow and buggy to handle even the one county. Your bad luck was to live in that one, blighted county."

I tried again. "So, now they've decided to give it up and go back to the old system."

"Um, not exactly." I was getting really tired of hearing this. "We couldn't go back to the old system."

"Why not?" I screeched.

"You might call spending a billion bucks and 16 years on a piece of crap, only to return to the status quo ante, where you could have remained for free, a ... somewhat tough sell with the legislature."

"Well, I can see that," I admitted, "but didn't the legislators have some friends who got rich off this ... thing?"

"Of course," said Bonnie, "but even so, zero return on a billion bucks is a bit hard to spin. And then the Feds got involved."

"The Feds?" I asked. "In what way?"

"They said that WALES looked like a total catastrophe, and they threatened to withhold federal funds, if it wasn't fixed or replaced."

I was amazed. "I didn't think the Feds gave a toss about human welfare."

"Neither did we," said Bonnie, "but there it was. So the state took them to court."

"Really?" I was fascinated.

"Oh, yes," she said. "It went all the way to the Supreme Court."

"And?" I prodded.

"They said there was no Constitutional right to food, clothing, housing, healthcare, and all that, and why the heck did the state have that big agency, anyway?"

"Oh, dear," I gulped.

"Well you may gulp," said Bonnie. "The state legislature has abolished BSWA. I'm losing my job, too."

"But, but, you said you had something to give me," I protested.

"Indeed, I do," said Bonnie. "The Supreme Court ruled that no one has a Constitutional right to welfare, but everyone has a Constitutional right to a gun. The solution is elegant. Instead of those wasteful welfare benefits, everyone gets issued a gun so they can go and get their own food, clothing, and shelter. We get rid of a huge, expensive agency, and a friend of the President's gets a no-bid contract to provide firearms. So here's your brand new AK-47."

The beauty of it was dawning on me. "It's like Confucius said," I explained. "'Give a man a fish, and he will eat for one day. Give a man an AK-47, and he will eat for a lifetime.' Say, do you get a gun, too?"

"Lockin' and loadin'," said Bonnie.

"Why don't we go into business together?" I suggested.

"Clyde," she said, "yer on."