Author: John

“All is going according to plan, Fearless Leader.” – The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

I hear Kim won’t go to Heaven – he has no Seoul. 

Various people are good at different things.  Very few people are perfect at everything, except me.  I even have proof: one of my co-workers even told me I was a perfect jerk the other day.  President Trump is actually pretty good at a lot of things.  Top of the list is making a deal, and the top skill in making deals is persuasion.  Trump is generally good at reading the mood of citizens who might vote for him, and setting an agenda that resonates with his voters.

Not even Trump can negotiate with or persuade a virus however, so Trump’s skills will never cure Coronavirus.  Put him in as a leader to drive policy make a functioning economy stronger?  Probably one of the best presidents in the last few decades.  Heck, the money that he’s made mining salt from Leftist tears is probably bigger than the GDP of Bulgaria.

What’s the fastest thing in Bulgaria?  Light.

Put Trump in as a leader trying to rebuild an economy on the edge of a new Great Depression?  I don’t know.  I guess we’ll see on that one.  The fact that he was aggressively trying to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturing even before the CoronaCrisis® was a good start and shows he might have the instincts to make the best out of a bad situation like I did when I cheered up the orphan kid by telling him his favorite beer was gonna be Fosters®.

In an email conversation today, one of my friends mentioned that his biggest hope for Trump was that the chaos that he was inflicting on Washington would “shake up the status quo” and would clear the path for someone new.  Of course the Democrats are nominating Joe Biden, who has been in politics longer than most of the people in America have been alive.  Thankfully, that gives Joe whole new generations of people to sniff.

My friend was looking for someone who might be a better leader than Trump during this current crisis.  It’s not a stretch to say that America is divided, and I certainly won’t win a Pulitzer© prize for that obvious observation.  But when it comes to leading America, which America did my friend mean, and can Joe Biden sniff them, too?

Funny, Joe Biden is always telling girls that their hair smells different when they’re awake.

Americans have obviously been divided before; the years between 1861 and 1865 are a hint that America isn’t necessarily a forever thing.  We’re at a similar juncture here.  But, outside of being a 1970’s folk rock band, what is America, anyway?

America was conceived, at least by the Constitution, as a collection of sovereign States.  The Constitution defined the power of the Federal government, and provided a basis for the States to create experiments with freedom unmatched anywhere in the world.  This was a self-governing freedom that was, above all, based in the rights and responsibilities of the individual.  I’d make a joke about freedom, but the folks in Hong Kong won’t get it.

The ideas that formed this government were based in rights and laws that came from Europe, but they led to true individual liberty here in the United States as well as other countries around the world.

I wrote Europe in the above paragraph, but really those ideas experienced their greatest growth in Great Britain.  Although some of the concepts that led to a free society had a run in Rome, the 2.0 version came directly as a result of the geography of Great Britain.  What made Great Britain historically unique was that it was an island in Europe.  Sure, there are a bunch of European islands, but Great Britain was large enough and cold enough and miserable enough that no one but the Vikings were insane enough to try to conquer it.  But even the Vikings failed and were booted out of England.  All their children were left with were novelty shirts screen printed with: “My Parents Tried to Conquer England and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”

I only have one more Viking joke, but I’m gonna skip it – there’s Norway you’d laugh at it.

So, as an island nation, the English were more-or-less safe from actual invasion.  Beyond that, the local Lords got it in their head that if the King go out of line, well, they just might find a new King.  As such, they made (swords are generally a big inducement) King John sign the Magna Carta.  It really was for the benefit of the aristocracy, but some of the points might look familiar:

• Pizza on Fridays if you do all of your chores.
• No taxes unless approved by a new thing called the “parliament,” which put a curb on things the King could do. This was the first real limit on a monarch.
• The right to due process, which led eventually to our concept of trial by jury.
• Bedtimes can be later in the summer since there’s no school.

In a place where people were constantly being invaded into oblivion, blackmailing the King was a pretty bad idea.  In most of Europe, people needed to follow the local King without a lot of question, otherwise when the very flammable Bulgarians invaded, the local King might just ignore them when it came time to borrow matches.  Irritating the Boss if you were being invaded by Napoleon, the Romans, the Poles, or the Ottoman Empire was probably a good way to learn first-hand what the word pillage meant.

This explains Germany.  And Russia.  And France.  And at least two world wars.  And why England was different.   Great Britain had the time and space to develop freedom without the external pressures of imminent invasion.  Even today, if you look at the Freedom House annual report, almost all independent small island states are democracies (LINK) and serve flaming drinks with umbrellas.  The factors that led to Great Britain developing freedom 800 years ago?  They are still in place on these small islands today.

In America, the idea of individual rights and freedom was part of the reason many of the colonists came to the New World.  Well, also indentured servitude, but we try to forget about that part.  And when they got here, if they wanted more freedom?  There was always the chance to move west into an ever-expanding frontier.  If you didn’t like the government, you could probably move faster than it could, even if you were moving west at a walking pace.  Freedom was found in the frontier.

Until there wasn’t a frontier

I hear old coots don’t roll joints, they tumble weed.

Then people gradually to cities.  Cities are islands, but islands of dependency.  The anonymity of a city leads to rudeness.  Rudeness leads to anger.  Anger leads to armies of Karens demanding to see the City Manager.  Eventually?  Laws, Homeowners’ Associations, and YouTube® terms and conditions.

Despite the cities, some people living there still maintain the traditions and beliefs in the individual freedoms and individual responsibilities that helped to create the United States.  These are passed down from fathers to sons, and mothers to daughters.  If living in the cities was the entire cause of the divide, it would be one that could be bridged.  It was in the 1930’s, and even in the tumultuous 1960’s.  But just like my biological dad’s name, address and phone number after my biological mom got pregnant, things have changed.

Into this divide have been added millions of people legally and illegally from foreign countries.  Virtually all of these countries have zero experience with the idea of limited government.  Most of their home governments are so corrupt that they make North Korea look good.  When it comes to a job that allows you to avoid corruption, make sure you choose the right Korea.

At least in 1920’s America, those immigrant children would have been instructed by teachers who liked and respected individual rights and responsibilities in the United States.  Now?  How many teachers in the Los Angeles School District are teaching those immigrant children about limited government?  How many are just teaching the much simpler concept of the United States is the “worst country in the world”?

In a country where one side believes in limited government and personal responsibility, and the other collectivism and unlimited state power, where exactly is that middle ground?

Trump is about the Art of the Deal®, but how do you deal with a group whose beliefs are the opposite of the ideas founded the country and have no desire for anything but the economic benefits of living in the United States?

In a country so divided, who exactly could lead both groups?

If we’re taking applications, I know a guy who might be interested . . .

Dale: You know what the problem is? It’s a Ford. You know what Ford stands for? Fix It Again Tony.
Hank: Dale, that’s a Fiat.
–King of the Hill

If you have nasal congestion and want to blame the monetary system?  Sudafed®.

In 2020, we’re pretty proud of ourselves for making use of virtual reality.  We have students taking virtual classes while never leaving home.  We have virtual assistants.  Heck we even have virtual assistants for people that can’t spell, like that new one from Amazon®, Dislexa™.

As much as we think of virtual reality as a new concept, it’s not.  Much of life throughout recorded history has been conducted using virtual systems.  Some of them are common, like clubs.  You’re either in or you’re out.  The only thing that makes a difference is the virtual acceptance of others.  You were either a Roman Senator, or you weren’t.  You were a member of Legio XIII, or you weren’t.  You were a Roman citizen, or you weren’t.  Just because a virtual distinction of being in or out of a particular club has existed for thousands of years, don’t think that it doesn’t have significance.

The law is another virtual system.  In this case, it exists so we just don’t go killing each other willy-nilly in a never ending cycle of vengeance.  All that vengeance makes a great movie, but it’s pretty rough unless you have a lot of relatives.  But through the invention of law, a virtual system, revenge violence could be avoided.  We voluntarily gave up our right of vengeance to a virtual system so that we could have peace.

Another virtual system is religion.  The exception, of course, is if your religion allows you to draw a series of weird sigils and glyphs on the ground and chant a mysterious incantation dating from the time the Old Ones walked the Earth and make a blood sacrifice.  If you do that, I’ve heard it said you can summon my Ex-Wife.  Nothing virtual about her, and all you have to do to get rid of her is give her half of your stuff.  But most religions are virtual.  Faith itself is a concept that is virtual right on the label.  I’m not discounting religious experiences that people have, (having had profound ones myself) but the systems that are created are in large part virtual.

My relationship with my ex-wife is good.  She texted me the other day:  “Wish you were here.”  She was at a funeral.

What are some other virtual systems we make use of?  What about property lines, last will and testaments, corporations, and, gasp, even government?  These systems have been around for thousands of years, and in the case of religion, certainly longer than that.  But outside of religion, the biggest and oldest virtual reality system we interact with regularly is money.

Wait, what?  Money is virtual?

Yup.

Money has always been and will always be virtual.  “But what about gold, John Wilder?  Gold isn’t virtual!”

Sorry gold is gold, and it’s not worth a lot unless people are willing to trade you something for it.  Gold is just one way to represent it in such a way that it’s hard to fake and easy to divide.  Lots of things have been used as money, from the reasonable (like gold) to the silly (massive coins of copper).  One thing that surprised me in doing research for this post was that the oldest minted coins date only back to about 700 B.C., and were promptly left in car ashtrays all throughout the ancient world.

This coin weighs over thirty pounds, and was used by the Swedish in the 1700’s.  To buy popcorn and a Coke® at a movie, it would take sixty of these coins.  Thankfully, movies had yet to be invented.

There is historical evidence of using sea shells for money in Ancient Asia, Australia, Africa and Arabia and the Americas.  Why?  I’m assuming that was what the vending machines took, but I may be mistaken.  Or maybe it was only used in places that started with the letter ‘A’?  But, as you can see, money didn’t have to be gold, or even a coin.  Money is what we believe money is.

Why does money being a virtual system matter?

Systems based on physical laws like gravity and entropy and time and mass are what they are.  You can invent ways to “overcome” them, like an airplane, but as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott taught us, “Ya canna change the laws o’ physics, Cap’n.”  The systems are what they are, and ceasing to believe in the system doesn’t change it.  You can’t click your heels to change dimensions and end up back in Oz or the Matrix®.

You heal cuts in the Matrix® by using Neo-sporin©.

Those real systems we run into are required (for the most part) to make our entire Universe run in a way that allows living things to grow.  Change just a few terms, say, Pi=357, or Planck’s Constant=Pizza, and the Universe couldn’t have life at all.  And they behave in rational (though sometimes complex) ways:  it’s not like one out of twenty thousand times when you start a car all the gasoline doesn’t ignite at once blowing the car up, just because.  I mean, if you have dirt on the Clintons or are involved in certain, umm, families that might happen but otherwise it’s a statistical impossibility.  Real systems just don’t work that way.

But money?  We made it up, so it can do whatever we all collectively agree it will do.  And when our belief about those systems changes the entire economy can blow up in just a few days.

I don’t want to scare you, but bankers are messing with fundamental constraints on the monetary system all of the time in 2020.  From 1787 or so until August 15, 1971, the United States operated on some sort of standard based on gold.  The nice thing about gold was you couldn’t just print more of it.  On August 16, 1971, the United States left the gold standard and had a currency backed by – nothing.  Money was already a virtual invention, but Nixon went Full Mario Brothers™ on it.  If you’re a banker, calling someone who plays video games stuck in a fantasy is a bit of hypocrisy.

If you’re really rich, you can afford two-ply.

A currency backed by nothing is called “fiat” money, which is Italian for “Fix it again, Tony.”  No, wait, that’s a car.  “Fiat” in this context is from the Latin for “let there be” as in “let there be money.”  Since the United States dollar isn’t backed by gold anymore, it was just wished into existence.

Essentially, in 1971 the bankers exploited what a gamer would call a “cheat code.”  In a video game, a cheat code might make you invulnerable, or give you infinite ammunition.  That’s what this did – the printing of dollar bills was no longer constrained by how much gold the United States had.  It now had infinite money.

But physical systems like gravity have been around since the Universe began.  It’s well known, and people have been observing what gravity does since they were wearing saber-tooth tiger for evening wear and bathing once a lifetime whether they needed it or not.  Gravity is a real system, and we can’t game it or pop in a cheat code.  Because of that, it’s predictable – a black hole isn’t going to spring into existence for no particular reason the same way a cell phone won’t spontaneously assemble itself out of the spare silicon leftover from Kardashian butt surgery.

And the Universe would explode every twenty years.

Monetary systems don’t behave like gravity, they behave like a video game.  Bankers can change the rules at any time, and I mentioned that bankers can and do drop in cheat codes.  During the Great Corona Panic of 2020, they’re doing it weekly.  They can also reboot the system – that’s what every country ever has had to do to end the hyperinflation that seems to nearly always eventually follow the introduction of fiat currency systems.

And that’s the problem.  As much as economists would like to pretend that they know what happens when you apply cheat codes to the system, they really have no idea what will happen.  It’s like when Albanian lawyers who have an office next to the JCPenny® have a broken copier.  Oh, sure, they can take their hairy, greasy Albanian fingers and poke and prod the copier with their ballpoint pens, but it’s only going to fix the copier if they get miraculously lucky.  It’s far more likely that their grunting and pointing and prodding with only a dim understanding of what gears and rollers are will cause the copier to catastrophically fail.

One time I found our copier full of peanut butter, which is weird.  Normally it jams.

There’s nothing more pathetic than watching Albanian mall lawyers trying to fix a copier.  Unless it’s watching the Federal Reserve trying to fix the economy that’s crippled by debt by injecting more debt.  I mean, the Albanian mall lawyers can at least call a professional to fix the copier after they gum it up.

Who is the Fed going to call?

“I learned of a place where a man can be free.  Free to do what he wants to do.  Free to ketchup his eggs without being hassled by the man.” – Strong Bad

My father-in-law raised dwarf dairy cows for a while.  They gave condensed milk.

Almost everyone reading this post has lived a life of nearly unthinkable abundance.  Did we have everything when we wanted it?

No.

Did we sometimes go without?

Yes.

Did we have to make tough choices because our primary liquid assets included some string, an empty PEZ® dispenser, a coupon for 2 for 1 taquitos at Sven’s Taco Hub, three cases of returnable Coors Light® bottles and a bank account with $3.17 in it?

Yes, though I guess that might be suspiciously specific.

Even as our individual economic conditions may have changed, we have lived in societies of amazing abundance.  At no point in history have so many people been fed to the point that, rather than having too little food, the main food-related problem in the world is that we’re too fat.  I can expect that this sort of conversation could have been had with most of our ancestors throughout history if we took them for dinner at a modern restaurant:

John Wilder:  “Hey, slow down!  You don’t want to get obese.”
Ancient Wilder Ancestor:  “Obese, what’s that?”
John Wilder:  “It’s where you eat too much food.”
Ancient Wilder Ancestor:  “Sounds great.  Let’s get obese.”

The Mrs. asked me to put ketchup on the shopping list, and now I can’t read any of it.

The modern grocery stores have suffered not from a lack of products, but have an amazing variety of choices.  In the ketchup section here in Modern Mayberry, there are no fewer than 21 different options (including different sizes) for ketchup.  It’s a literal wall of ketchup:  spicy, organic, no fructose, already mixed with mayo . . . the list goes on.  I looked it up – a good blogger always checks his sauces.

When I was growing up, there were just four choices if you wanted ketchup:  Hunts® or Heinz™, and you got to pick the little bottle or the big bottle.  That was it, and in my imagination the only people that would pick Hunts© ketchup were trolls that lived under bridges or that couldn’t afford the tasty goodness of Heinz®.  We can have so many choices because while the 1970’s Modern Mayberry was served by two small grocery stores, today it’s served by a Wal-Mart® that has a food section that’s nearly double in size to the grocery stores of the 1970’s.

We have an abundance of choices today.

And I thought it was just people’s data he was interested in.

What does the world look like in a world of shortages?  I think most people can’t even understand what a world like that might look like, but they are beginning to get glimpses.  The toilet paper shortage was so odd a start to COVID-19 shenanigans that it could have almost been written by a comedy writer for a humorous end of the world movie.  Me?  I hope that if the end of the world happens, it starts in Las Vegas, because, you know, maybe it will stay in Vegas?

The toilet paper shortage didn’t impact us, because we generally have an inventory of two or three months’ worth of toilet paper on hand at any given moment.  Why?  I don’t like to run out of things.  It’s the same reason I have spare ketchup in the pantry and a socket set and jumper cable in every car.  I don’t like to let inconveniences become emergencies.

But the prospect of running out of toilet paper became very real for millions of Americans.  And it showed many people for the first time what a shortage was.  It wasn’t like the brand of ketchup you wanted was too expensive, it was that there was no ketchup at all.  And no schedule of when there would be ketchup.  And a line of people panicking about ketchup and buying cases of ketchup because they had heard ketchup was in short supply.

I imagine that people who bought a lifetime supply of toilet paper during the shortage feel a bit silly.  But it’s really a great illustration about how the human mind works in periods of low information.  If everyone knew that the toilet paper supply network was robust, then there would never have been a shortage.  So, that was a short-term shortage caused by panic and lack of information.  I mean, it’s the 3-2-1 rule of New Preppers:  A three dollar first aid kit, two days’ worth of food, and one year’s worth of toilet paper.

But what about longer term issues?

Farmers have plowed vegetables back under into the soil because there was no way to get them to market.  People who have hens to produce eggs have destroyed hundreds of thousands of eggs at the same time my local Wal-Mart® was out of eggs.  Why?  They produced the eggs for the restaurant industry, and there wasn’t a way to package them for individual sales.  It’s like the inverse of communism:  there’s too much food and the system is performing too well.

Cows have hooves instead of feet.  They lactose.

Will that happen with cattle?  I don’t think people will slaughter cattle on a whim, but the entire system is now partially locked up because meat packing plants are shutting down because of the WuFlu.  But even that is a short term problem, since cattle that were going to go off to the feedlots to be prepped for the packing houses . . . aren’t.  This will result in beef prices going up (not enough packing plant capacity), then dropping (lots of cheap cows), and then going up again (cows that should have been put in the pipeline . . . weren’t).

Today my daughter, Alia S. Wilder called me.  She was spooked about beef.  “Should I be concerned?  Should I look for alternate sources of protein?  What should I do?  I saw row after row of empty shelves in the meat department.

“Are we going to be okay?”

Those were good questions, and if Alia is asking them, then you can bet millions of other people are, too.  Even though I feel that the meat shortages are (for now) a short term ripple of the Coronavirus Economy®, I sense that people are getting the idea that at least some of the short term shortages we’re seeing now will build into long term shortages.  Maybe not with toilet paper.  Maybe not (for now) with beef.  But people are worried that it will be real with something, and soon.  And we’re certainly not going to have a shortage of toilet paper jokes.

What happens when we have real shortages because the systems that we relied upon to create the fabulous wealth in the West are irreparably broken because of the economic strains we’ve put on them?

We can look back on a real case study:  Germany just after World War I.  At the end of World War I, Germany had collapsed like my cat Rory on the surface of a neutron star.  The Allied blockade had effectively starved the German people, and chaos was in the air.  Their royalty, Kaiser Wilhelm had given up the throne for the life of a carnival worker who ran the “guess your age and weight” booth.  A new government was formed, and became known as the Weimar Republic.

Go sightseeing in France they said.  Home by Christmas they said . . . .

In 1919, this government’s first job was to “negotiate” the Versailles Treaty.  In actuality, the treaty was dictated to the Germans, who had little leverage.  Their army had been disbanded, and the Allied food blockade stayed in place during the negotiations, so Germany was ready to sign anything, no matter how bad the conditions.

The conditions were bad – the German reparations required by the treaty were huge, more even than the $257 billion (equivalent in today’s dollars) they had actually paid by 1932.  One response was to set up a two-tiered currency system – one backed by gold, and one not backed by gold.  However, the war reparations payments set by the Versailles Treaty had to be backed by gold, so Germany couldn’t just print their way out of those payments.

But they could print their way into poverty.  They used the German marks not backed with gold to buy goods overseas.  The nice thing about that (if you were German) was that you could just print those marks.  Then?  Free stuff.

Until it wasn’t free stuff.  The impact was significant.  In 1921, $1 would buy you 150 German marks.  Two years later, that same $1 would buy you over 25 billion marks.  The result was perverse:  the Germans had no idea how to stop the hyperinflation.  People had become used to it and the government was worried that if they stopped hyperinflating the currency, then the whole system would collapse.

One story I heard was that a man had a wheelbarrow full of money he left outside a store.  When he got back, someone had stolen the wheelbarrow and left the money. 

Germany at that time was an odd place – the factories and farms still existed and all of the physical things required for production were there.  There was still food in the stores, but there was hunger and destitution everywhere:  money had ceased to be of value.  The nonsense of hyperinflation ceased when the adults took over the printing presses and sliced 12 zeroes off of the value of their paper currency.  Since the money was pretend in the first place, the number of zeros is like Beto O’Rourke’s political opinion in Oklahoma:  nearly irrelevant.

I don’t expect that we’ll have Weimar America, but then again the Germans didn’t expect hyperinflation (or the Spanish Inquisition) back in 1921.  Thankfully, we haven’t been through a loss in a devastating war and starvation and the collapse of our government.  But it’s entirely possible that whole categories of stores and even products will disappear.  It’s also entirely possible that the money printing we’re doing in such a big spurt will have a significant impact on prices, squeezing our economy and the world’s economies in ways that we can’t yet understand.

But what I really expect is that we’ll find out soon enough that we can’t print our way to abundance.  Whereas the physical world hasn’t changed much with COVID-19, the systems of companies and people that work together to create and distribute something as simple as a hot dog, hot dog bun, mustard and ketchup (yes, I’m one of those) have to work together with all of the harmony that communists imagine only comes from communism.  It takes thousands of people and a dozen companies to prepare such a simple feast.

Cast out this abomination!

Coordination of that type takes place naturally in a capitalist system that’s running well.  The hot dog maker doesn’t have to coordinate with the bun maker – bun makers make what they can sell, and then buy flour from flour mills.  Who buy wheat from farmers.  Who buy fertilizer . . . and you see I could keep this chain going forever.  The world is a web of interconnections.  When normally self-correcting systems are first deprived of money, then flooded with it, systems and signals break down.

And our world of abundance goes with it unless we have those signals that prices and orders give.  I hate to promise this, but I am certain when I say that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the strange things we will see in the next few years.

But one thing I don’t think we’ll see in a year:  our previous world of limitless abundance and shelves filled with 21 different kinds and sizes of ketchup.   I mean, who even buys Hunts®?