A Modest Proposal: The Original 1729 Edition

Jonathan Swift thought that Englands anti-poverty proposals were so outrageously evil that nothing short of an absurd parody of them would suffice. His Modest Proposal: For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the publick is presented with a completely straight face. The irony is this: in the three centuries since humanity has made it increasingly difficult to find evils so absurd that no one would actually attempt them leaving modern-day Swifts with little material to work with anymore.