“A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift begins by discussing the extreme poverty that is in Ireland and expresses at how the country’s position is not helped  by England. The narrator of "A Modest Proposal" by Swift is very cold and rational, despite his somewhat sympathetic early description of the poverty he witnesses although this narration is the key to the presence of satire and irony in "A Modest Proposal". He believes in a cycle of poverty where the parents are too poor and thus their children remain poor and thus useless to society and his only offering is that these children be put to use. Shockingly, the “use” these children are designated for is food. The narrator of "Modest Proposal" backs up this frightening statement with economic rationalization and concludes that the children will contribute to the feeding and clothing of Ireland’s massive population. The essay begins innocently by establishing the speaker as a concerned citizen genuinely sympathetic to the Irish poor, whose suffering he describes in moving detail.  

"A Modest Proposal"  goes on to further to suggest all of the ways such a system could work. Since he has the belief that every poor family has a price, he is convinced that mothers would gladly carry and then sell their children for 8 shillings, that the rich would find the youngsters to be an excellent delicacy, and with the extra money going to the landlords ,the whole economy would be benefit, the population and poverty problems would be solved. The state would no longer be responsible for these poor children’s welfare and Ireland would no longer be reliant on England. Although there have been a few rather gruesome details omitted in the modest Proposal by Swift the general idea one should pay close attention to is that Swift’s satire is meant to point out the flaws inherent to a strictly rational way of dealing economic and social problems . He is also suggesting that the Irish people are not necessarily the victims that for personal economic gain they would “sell out” the families and go along with such a disgusting proposal. The reader’s confidence in the speaker vanishes quickly after the first few paragraphs, however, as Swift engineers one of the most shocking moments in all of English literature. The modest proposal, humbly presented and drafted at great length, argues for the many advantages of the Irish people raising their children as food to be sold at great profit to the landlords throughout the kingdom. Far from being horrified by this suggestion, as the reader surely is, the speaker continues to imagine himself as a disinterested patriot offering his countrymen a practical and almost miraculously effective way to reduce poverty, overpopulation, and an unfavorable balance of trade with England.

"A Modest Proposal" is a very short satire, it is nonetheless loaded with political, moral, and economic questions worth exploring. In general, I read the piece two times to try and capture the very essence of what he was trying to convey. The first time, just  to appreciate the humor and language that comprise the brilliant satire of "A Modest Proposal" having fun with it without driving yourself nutty thinking about the implications of what the narrator/Swift is saying on a sentence by sentence basis. The second time, do a little seeked the underlying history of the piece beforehand about the Age of Reason, especially as it relates to rationalist approaches to state management. I thought about how the Irish are being represented and question whether or not there are any “good” points that the narrator makes. I considered the role of England, the Catholic versus Protestant representations, and the way the poor of Ireland are not shown to have much initiative. The most powerfully ironic aspect of this essay is rather obvious. The modest proposal is of course anything but modest. It is in fact savage, frightening, perhaps even insane. But other subtle ironies and satiric targets may be overlooked if the speaker is simply dismissed as an extravagant madman. Most important, Swift characterizes him as rational and calculating in order to show that these qualities are dangerous when taken to an extreme. People who rely on speculative reason to solve problems may end up thinking the unthinkable rather than following what should be more natural and humane impulses of common sense and compassion, and those who treat humans as numbers rather than as living beings recall how often the speaker in the essay computes and quantifies are only one short step away from making it easier to murder them.