I’m reading a bedtime story.

“This is why we decided to take a cab. . .”

“Mommy, what’s a cab?”

“It’s the same as taxi.”

“Mommy, what’s taxi?”

“It’s like Uber.”

“Ah, OK.”

“What’s weird,” said a colleague coming into my office, “is that at the end of each fiscal year we run out of money and end up not being able to pay our bills, begging for extensions, and borrowing from other departments. But this year, we paid everything and still have a lot of money left. I wonder what changed.”

“Yes, what could it be?” I said.

The really funny thing is that all of the stuff I’ve done as Chair has been extraordinarily easy. This recent project of getting a low-wage worker a higher salary and backpay, for instance, literally took under half an hour of effort on my part. Getting the book money for everybody – twenty minutes. Setting everybody up with a new printer – an hour.

I’ve been here for 12 years and there was never a red cent to buy anybody a book. And now we are so flush with cash that everybody got the books they wanted and there’s money for more. I’m practically begging people to ask me for more stuff. Technology, iPads, films, anything you want. It was all there this whole time but nobody bothered to grab it.

Got it? You can buy the cards deemed relevant but not the cards right next to them.

There’s obviously no reason to forbid the purchase of the “non-essential cards” other than to let people know who has the power and how far it stretches.

I highly recommend this article on the truly diseased and reprehensible Western attitudes toward China’s one-child policy. One would hope that Malthusianism would finally be abandoned but unfortunately it still has many adepts.

China reversed the policy, and that’s great. But the Westerners who applauded it are still in power here.