TICOBULL – This Is So Accurate It Hurts. Found this on tickld.com, thought I was worth sharing it. At the end I added my version of Tico Capitalism.
TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.
AMERICAN 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 exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.
AUSTRALIAN CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.
FRENCH CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.
JAPANESE CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them worldwide.
GERMAN CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat only once a month, and milk themselves.
BRITISH CAPITALISM: You have two cows. Both are mad.
CANADIAN CAPITALISM: You have two cows. Come to think of it, they look more like a pair of moose – in fact, yes they are. One speaks French, one speaks English. One fights to create a new country, the other won’t let it. They both play ice hockey rather well.
ITALIAN CAPITALISM: You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are. You break for lunch.
RUSSIAN CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 12 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.
SWISS CAPITALISM: You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you. You charge an outrageous fee to others for storing them.
CHINESE CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest and detain without trial the journalist who reported the number of cows.
NEW ZEALAND CAPITALISM: You have two cows. That one on the left is kinda cute…
And lastly, TICO CAPITALISM: You have two cows. Period.
Use the comments section to add your vestion of Tico Capitalism.
Article originally appeared at Ticobull.com
Tico Capitalism: You have two cows. You may milk them tomorrow if you remember.
TICO CAPITALISM: You have two cows. Period. In the meantime a government of experts are to appointed to study the implications and a Cámara de Vacas to check on the panel and report back to a commission of retired notables. The deputados cannot agree and dairy farmworkrs plan a protest in the capital next week supported by 42 unions.Pura Vida.
Tico Capitalism: You have two cows, both tended by Nicas on distant land owned by your aunt while you yourself work an office job in a multinational in the suburbs. You complain that the Nicas are stealing the milk, but don’t do anything about it besides tell Nica jokes. Eventually you realize that actually what you have is an eco-tourism operation in which an English-speaking Tico can haul vans full of gringos to your aunt’s land to see the cows, and you even get the Nicas to install a zip line. Your tourism business fails, so you protest to the government about how you are the goose that laid the golden egg and deserve protection. You get it, but still fail. You therefore pressure for more foreign direct investment to create more office jobs in the suburbs, while comforting yourself in the knowledge that you’re at least superior to the Nicas who are so dumb that they actually tend cows.
You have two cows. You put them up for sale for $1,000,000. Nobody will ever offer you more than $1,000.
25 years later, you have 2 cows for sale for $1,000,000 and no offers, but at least you know you could be a milionaire.
You die.
Your child inherits the cows. A gringo offers $2,000 for 2 cows worth $1,000.
You create a fake deed and sell the neighbors cows to the gringo.
collect $2,000.
The gringo spends 7 years in court and $7,000 trying to collect the cows.
Court rules against gringo because a pruple stamp was on the document and not a blue one.
Repeat.