The Way We Live Now: taxonomically. All of our expenditures must be organized into "necessary" and "unnecessary" piles. The hard part comes when deciding how to sort everything. Sliced bagels: necessary or not? Your financial future depends on it.

Whole bagels? No tax. Sliced bagels? There's a tax. Which raises an interesting question which really distills our nation's economic woes down into a viscous, hashish oil-like substance: Do you want to enslave you fellow man?

More specifically, do you find subjugation of other to be necessary? We know lots of you do. Everybody who lives in a "doorman" building, for one. If you treat a real estate broker like an indentured servant, just imagine how you treat the doorman. Yea, home sales are at the lowest point in a decade and suddenly you're telling the broker to massage you "down there" and you're demanding the doorman stand on one foot all day just for your amusement. You've shown your true colors, sir.

Just because gas prices are low doesn't mean that you can tell the gas station attendant to shine your shoes for free when you fill up. Just because monthly metrocards might go up to $130 doesn't give you the right to steal a train driver's liver just so you have an extra one. Just because your state didn't get an education grant doesn't mean you can skip school and go walk on the White House lawn with a visible handgun

Nor can you demand the right to untaxed sliced bagels. You're too lazy to slice your own damn bagel? Pay the government, big man. The only "necessary" thing here is the bagel itself, and the sharp knife, and maybe the deli paper they wrap around it. Don't like it? Get the fuck out of Starbucks. Think about it.

[Pic: Flickr]