One Saturday morning, we decided to go on a picnic. We stuffed our ancient car with blankets, wine bottles, pastry, smoked sausages, dilled pickles, coffee, etc., and set out for the countryside. No sooner than we reached the suburbs of Ljubljana, the car started coughing and jerking, and it ultimately gave up altogether. After many attempts to start the motor, we had to give up ourselves. As neither of us knew much about cars, we called a tow-service, and had the decrepit car delivered to the doorstep of our mechanic. He promised to have it ready by tomorrow morning, and, to our astonishment, he kept his word. According to this patient man, the carburetor was choked by dirt, and he thus had to clean all the gasoline ducts leading from the tank to the motor. So, around noon on Sunday, we returned to our original idea of having a picnic far away from the hubbub. But the car stalled again, and left us stranded in the suburbs. Luckily, we stumbled upon a taxi cab, and we fumed about the stupid car all the way home. The driver was curious about what had happened to us, and when we told him that we doubted whether our mechanic had actually done anything, he assured us that this could happen especially after the gasoline ducts had been cleaned. This was because the particles of dirt already there get dislodged in the process of cleaning, and thus the problem appears even worse than before, at least immediately afterwards. We were delighted by the logic. The first thought that crossed my mind upon hearing this was that the very same taxi driver would most likely reject such a dialectical hocus-pocus if I were to tell him an analogous story about economic planning and the immediate impact of a new economic policy. My next thought was that one must always base one’s professional arguments on concrete experiences of this kind in order to make them politically viable. With this purpose I repeated this story to my colleagues for months. My dialectical fervor has almost withered since, though. Perhaps the incredulous driver would be justified in rejecting such analogies. At least he knew what he was talking about, whereas my argument would have been perforce contrived, as well as derived—from examples just like the one he provided himself.