Newton's Optic:Nationalise the pursuit of happiness so that everyone can benefit equally, writes Newton Emerson.
But, are you happy? You have never had more opportunities to pursue happiness but that does not guarantee you will find it. This party believes that the pursuit of happiness should be nationalised so that enough happiness can be guaranteed for every hard-working family.
But, are you equally happy? Equality means nothing if it does not mean that everyone ends up with the same amount of happiness. It could also mean something about equal opportunities, but this concept makes us unhappy so mentioning it is reactionary.
Because people are not all equally happy now, they must be given different amounts of happiness to be equally happy later. This might seem unequal to hard-working families who must work hard so that non-working families can be equally happy.
However, only people with more than their fair share of happiness will be unhappy about other people getting an extra share to be equal, thus proving that redistribution works.
But, are you absolutely happy or relatively happy? Studies show that happiness is strongly correlated to slight material advantages over your hard-working neighbours.
We will be ignoring these studies because the vulgarity of the lower orders is too ghastly to contemplate. Instead, this party will concede that different levels of happiness are relative, while somehow still insisting that all levels of unhappiness are absolute.
Means testing should be introduced to test what we mean. But, are you happy while you're sitting in traffic? Try listening to Lyric FM - it's surprisingly soothing. But, are you existentially happy? Albert Camus believed that happiness could be sought through even the most pointless labour.
However, we believe that discussing this further would only draw attention to the fact that we all went to university.
But, were you ever so happy that you had a Dick Spring in your step? Let's not draw attention to that either. But, are you happy with your work/life balance?
We pledge to fund universal pre-school education so that more parents can go back to work a year early, forcing every other parent to go back to work a year early to keep up with the resulting rise in average household income.
But, are you too happy? Some Irish people have excessive levels of serotonin which should be extracted from their brains and injected directly into the miserable. This will allow the extraction of serotonin from everyone else to be cut by 2 per cent, proving that we are no longer a high serotonin extraction party.
But, are you happy with your personal relationships? Do you miss your old friends and sometimes feel that your new friends don't really understand you? Were you ever so lonely that you spent a whole weekend in a hotel in Mullingar just hoping that somebody would ask you out? Let us reassure you that better relationships are just at the end of the rainbow, or at least at the start of the next rainbow.
But, are you happy with the condition of our hospitals? Only our party supports a morphine drip on every trolley and a clown in every waiting room.
But, are you happy being treated like an idiot by people who only took their portraits of Lenin down eight years ago? Are you happy and you know it? Then you and your hard-working family should clap your hands.