Once upon a time there was a town called America. It was a lovely place, full of healthy bootstrapping folks, and they enjoyed dining every night on a nice piece of meat.
The residents needed a system for keeping their meat. At first, it involved using blocks of ice, sold by a motley collection of vendors, who competed with each other. But all of the cabinet makers got together, and spent a huge amount of money convincing the city's leaders to adopt their meat cabinet system - a wooden cabinet placed in every home, in which meat would be stored. The cabinet makers reaped huge profits, installing and maintaining all of those meat cabinets in everyone's kitchen.
The problem was, the system didn't work very well. People would go and buy fresh meat, most of them from either the Democratic Meat Co-Op or the Republican Meat Open Market, bring it home, and stow it in the meat cabinet.
And within a day, they would complain that the meat was rotten. They would throw it out, get more meat, and again within a day it would be rotten.
Many said it must be the dirty hippies at that leftist co-op, and their union thugs and desire to make rich people pay for poor people's meat.
Others said it must be the cruel nature of that Open Market, with their greedy butchers and shady sales practices.
While some claimed it was both the Democratic and Republican meat stores that were the problem. That everything would be better if only people started buying from third-party meat stores, this would somehow shake things up completely.
None of them noticed that the whole system they were using just didn't work. Whether it was Democratic meat or Republican meat or any other kind of meat, put it in that cabinet and it went rotten.
One lone person called for a radical change: refrigeration. She had studies showing refrigerated meat didn't go rotten, that it could even be frozen to stay edible longer. That other towns used this method, with great success.
But nobody listened. Do you have any idea what refrigerators and freezers cost? Plus the electricity to run them? DO you have any idea how much meat that money could buy?
And who would pay for all of those? Nobody wanted their tax dollars going to pay for someone else's refrigerator. Not even when it was explained to them that they would end up saving money in the long run, because they would stop tossing out rotten meat.
Then there was the business of all of those electrical lines. Running lines to each individual house was in some cases very expensive. To have everyone chip in, share the costs, and share the sytem - well, that would be socialism. And everyone agreed that would be terrible.
So the people of the town refused to listen. They kept buying meat from the store they were sure was the best, angrily denouncing the people who bought from the other store. The few that wanted everyone to buy from new stores were laughed at (though for the wrong reasons). Nobody listened to the girl who kept pushing refrigerators.
And so the nice little town always had the stench of rot hanging over it, everyone spent far too much on meat that ended up spoiled, and the meat sellers and the meat cabinet makers grew rich and fat and lived happily ever after.