Inflation Nation – Page 14 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Black Friday: 2021

“Oh, and remember, next Friday is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.” – Idiocracy

When I was a kid, I thought, “This little piggy went to market,” meant the pig went shopping. He did not.

Thanksgiving is over, sadly. We had a great one here. We had eight for dinner, and five under the roof when nightfall hit. Of course, Stately Wilder Mansion has room for more, but this was a good number. After dinner, we played games and enjoyed being with each other until things got rough – I was put in jail and nearly stabbed while I was in there. The family takes Monopoly® pretty seriously.

Other than that, it was a peaceful night. That is why I love Thanksgiving. It’s a space where (around Modern Mayberry) only one store was open today, and that store was only open for a few hours. Not that it mattered – we had everything required for dinner. I thought we were low on cream, so I sent Pugsley to the store on Wednesday. He brought home nonfat half-and-half.

At least he tried. Nonfat half-and-half? That’s like PEZ®-free PEZ™.

Thankfully, The Mrs. already had cream, and we had plenty for the mashed potatoes.

But now it’s time for the Friday after Thanksgiving: Black Friday.

My activities in Black Friday in recent years have mainly been related to not leaving the house. I really love spending time with my family, but spending time with strangers standing in line to buy things I don’t really need?

What’s the best place to find a man who has no arms and no legs? Where you left him.

That’s not my idea of fun. I don’t like shopping, even for shrubs – plant shopping always leaves me bushed.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t look down on people looking to get a bargain on Black Friday. I’ve been fortunate enough in the last two decades of my life that the main shortage in my life isn’t money, it’s time. For those that are experiencing an acute lack of money, well, I can sympathize. To be a few dollars short is tough. Marrying my first wife was like winning the lottery: five years later I was broke.

I’ve been there.

At one time in my life, I was running at the ragged edge. Every dollar that came into my life had a home – it was already spent. That was okay, but it limited my choices. One time I was needing to pay dues to play rugby with the local club, but I was raising two children with help only from my friends. The dues were $75. I didn’t have a spare $75.

So, I had decided I couldn’t play. The next day? A check for $200 showed up (that I had no idea was even owed to me) in the mail. Huh.

I guess I could play (prop), after all.

Why are Jedi® so bad at rugby? Because there is no try.

Regardless I’ve known a life where a spare $20 made the difference in a month. This helps me to understand those that stand in line for deals at Black Friday without looking down on them. Those people are looking to do the best that they can for their family – they’re trading their time to make the lives of their family better, just as everyone who has a job and sells 40 or 60 hours of their life every week does.

The part of Black Friday that has always bothered me, though, isn’t the searching for bargains. The part of Black Friday that bothers me is the willingness of people to abandon rules of civil behavior so they can get $10 off on a toaster that they’ll use once in the next year.

Oh, sure, I love toast enough to keep mine in a cage – then I can say it is bread in captivity. But I don’t love toast enough to engage in wanton violence for cheap consumer goods. I have standards. It would have to at least be moderately priced consumer goods for me to riot for them.

The violence, though, are a signal that the cohesion that made society function so well during most of my life is breaking down. I already know that economy is broken. I think that here, in 2021, the economy is broken more than at any time in my life. That’s the good news.

I got one federal stimulus check on Saint Patrick’s Day. Must be the luck of the IRS.

Why is that good news? Even though it will undoubtedly be difficult and tough, the way forward always brings with it the promise of a new rebirth. This rebirth isn’t unprecedented – at more than one time in history have the eternal guideposts of truth, beauty, and virtue faded.

But they keep coming back. Truth may become dim under the tyranny of oppressors, but the fact that it is being oppressed doesn’t make it any less True. Again, I believe in absolute Truth. I didn’t say that I had it, but I know it exists. One plus one is two – it is never any other number. If you start at the physical, very quickly there are many examples that prove that Truth isn’t relative.

Likewise, beauty. We know what it is, because we see it. The curve and texture and color of a rose petal is elegant. It is something that is beautiful. You can, no doubt, come up with many similar examples. Beauty, though difficult to quantify, is nearly always something that people can agree on.

And virtue? For thousands of years we have known what virtue is. It shows itself in the action and grace of those that walk with it.

TOAST

I keep the toaster on the lowest setting. I am black toast intolerant.

I have spent paragraphs and posts talking about truth, beauty, and virtue. Why? Because truth, beauty and virtue matter. They are timeless and ageless. They will endure.

Humanity cannot be long isolated from them. We keep finding them, again and again, not because we are clever, but because they are eternal concepts.

The “Take This Job And Shove It” Economy

“Sure. Grab it, store it, shove it.” – Babylon 5

My parents always called me a gifted child. Turned out I was abandoned in a box on the front step.

I was at the store the other day with The Mrs. and Pugsley. We saw a retail clerk we knew and were discussing life with him. Normally, the retail clerk is very opinionated but upbeat. I’ll admit, it has been over six months since I’ve seen him, but his transformation was amazing.

He’s “retired” but spends his time selling things that he likes to sell. He’s probably one of the biggest experts in town, and a job like his is (more or less) being paid for talking to people about his hobby. He doesn’t have to work, but he wants to. Thankfully it wasn’t a weird hobby, like taking pictures of trout wearing cute outfits. That’s like shooting fish in apparel.

This visit to the store was different. Like I mentioned above, he’s normally upbeat. Now? Not at all. He was angry. He railed against management that didn’t care. He railed against customers that treated low-wage retail employees as if it was their fault that the store didn’t have their particular brand of banana mist spray. The store employee sounded as angry as Darth Vader – I mean he was really venting.

The clerk we talked with wasn’t quitting. Yet. But he was done. He’s done taking crap from management. He’s done taking crap from customers.

I got fired for asking a customer “rare or well done?” The funeral home said that wasn’t the right way to ask, “burial or cremation?”

One more customer screaming at him because something wasn’t on the shelf? He might take off the company shirt and step outside with the customer. After he’s finished the business with the customer he would probably just keep walking.

And this is in Modern Mayberry, where we’ve been essentially untouched by the ‘Rona crisis and mandates and masks. He’s done.

In society at large, I see the very same pattern.

Keep in mind, the retail worker that I described above was nearly at the sour cream stage on his taco because of the rude customers. Why were the customers so rude?

They’re done, too.

They’re done with an economy where they have been abandoned.
They’re done with shortages they don’t understand.
They’re done with rising prices to feed their family.
They’re done with expensive gasoline.
Oh, and they’re done with masks and mandates, too.

Voters on the Right are done, too. The idea of compromise is hateful – the positions are crystallized:

Vax mandate for the greater good versus basic human rights.
Collective guilt over crimes committed hundreds of years in the past versus meritocracy.
Five million other things. I’d list them, but you know them. You see them every day, and it boils down to the violence of the collective mob versus the rights of a constitutional republic.

In my adult life, the high point of our country being cohesive was on 9/12/2001. In that moment, we tried, really hard, to come together as a country. The result? Two of the longest wars in United States history, trillions in debt, the Patriot Act, and Obama.

What do you call Bill Gates’ divorce? An unplanned update.

The lowest point?

Right now.

This has significant political implications, but also economic implications. People like the retail employee, working because they want to, can leave anytime. But it’s more than just that one retail employee. How many other people are just walking away? How many are one rude customer away from wadding up the company smock, and walking out the front door for the last time?

How many firefighters will quit rather than get the jab? How many EMTs will simply walk away rather than submit to it? By my count, the number is not insignificant, and these are crucial jobs if you like keeping your house not burned up like and would like granny to get to the emergency room in some other fashion than you tossing her into the bed of the pickup after you move the Purina® Lion Chow™ out.

Often, the people who run the services that keep the economy running are paid at the lowest levels. What happens when they decide they are done with the nonsense, too? What happens when they look around and see that they could work at McDonalds® for 10% of the stress and 90% of the pay?

No matter how often I ask for a large fry, they keep giving me lots of small ones.

We hear about an economy where jobs are plentiful, and takers are few. From what I see here, it’s true. Except the jobs that are plentiful are at the lowest levels of pay and prestige, and the people are simply not interested in taking them.

We have shortages of everything. Inflation is wonderful at creating that: inflation pulls demand forward. Why buy a window tomorrow when the price will be up. Buy the window now. Buy everything that that you can, now. This is a rational reaction, but when everyone does it, it feeds inflation.

Tensions are high. People who make $30,000 a year have seen themselves take a $3,000 pay cut, simply through the government’s printing of money. The cause may not be apparent, but at the gas station they see it. At the grocery store they see it. When the time to pay the rent comes?

They see it.

It’s not just that. At the voting booth, they look back at the 2020 election.

They see the fraud.

I will say this, he’s certainly given himself an incentive to not slip . . .

This is, to say the least, a very, very chaotic situation. As I said, we have shortages of everything. In 2018, the economy was working because the people in it were working. Now, in addition to the shortage of “stuff” we have shortages of the people who make things go, as well.

What does that lead to?

Increasing dysfunction. Worse services. Longer waits on EMT calls.

Why?

I call it the IDGAF economy. People are done. How many folks simply don’t care? How many have been crossed out of the economy and have the attitude, “screw ‘em all, I didn’t need this job anyway”?

A lot. In the 1977 as inflation hit there were similar sentiments – Johnny Paycheck scored a big hit with Take This Job and Shove It. This is where we are in 2021. People are done. People are sick of it all. They know the economy isn’t right.

I got some extra money this Halloween. I went into a haunted house and on the way out they handed me a paycheck.

Economies consist of more than companies and procedures and policies. Each of those things depends on: people. Lose a foreman? The crew may or may not do as well. If it was a good foreman, it’s likely that they don’t do as well. Lose an EMT, and you’re one shy for a full shift? Which heart attack do they skip out on?

Who makes that ambulance run? Who gives time off to the weekend dispatcher? Who runs the window at the DMV? Who makes the PEZ®?

The reactions I’ve seen so far are discouraging. The idea from at least some management is that, “Well, isn’t that a part of their job?” which is technically correct. But if they can do another job for a dollar less an hour that doesn’t cause a sacrifice?

They’re gone.

That’s the difficulty. An economy isn’t Nike® or Amazon™ or Netflix©. An economy is made of the people that run it. We’ve seen that truckers can paralyze an economy. Now imagine the economy when all the people that make it go say, “IDGAF”.

We’re close.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Are We There Yet? (Part II)

“Brandon, come on, let’s go . . . Brandon?” – Brightburn

Midnight?

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

I’ve bolded both 9. and 10. That’s the lead story.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Making The Call, Part II? – Violence And Censorship Update – Models For The Future, It’s Personal – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – After Virginia – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 600 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

Making The Call, Part II?

Last month we spent time discussing whether or not the United States has met the international criteria for being in a civil war. The answer (in my opinion) is that we are close enough that it’s hard to tell. Some people are solidly on the “it’s already going” and some are not. One bit of criteria that was sent to me by a faithful reader – thank you 173d VietVet. Mike Shelby (Forward Observer) wrote up a short missive on this question (LINK) and came out on the “no” side.

That’s fair. He put forward some criteria, and I thought they’d be worth discussing this month. These four bullet points are direct quotes:

domestic military action (i.e., not just police)
government involvement as a belligerent (i.e., not just a tribal war between citizens)
capable fighting on both sides of the conflict (i.e., not just a genocide)
at least 1,000 combat-related deaths in a 12-month period (i.e., sustained fighting)

My responses are in bold:

domestic military action (i.e., not just police) – Have you seen the police recently? They have equipment that most world militaries would love to have. Heck, our police even have stuff we didn’t leave for the Taliban. To require military action seems irrelevant.
government involvement as a belligerent (i.e., not just a tribal war between citizens) – The trend in our current generation of warfare explicitly uses the citizen as a belligerent, if not the main belligerent. In my mind, it is more than enough that the government aids and abets citizens to kill others. This is indisputably happening right now.
capable fighting on both sides of the conflict (i.e., not just a genocide) – This is the best point of the bunch. The violence (at some point) must go both ways. Right now, it is observably one-sided, and is looks much more like a genocide.
at least 1,000 combat-related deaths in a 12-month period (i.e., sustained fighting) – Another valid point, but remember, in dirty wars, state sponsored combat looks like . . . crime. I do hope the violence level drops, but there is no sign of it now.

Again, I have nothing but respect for Mr. Shelby, but the reliance on his past military background provides an analysis lens that I do not share and he perhaps parses the terminology a bit more finely than I would. Thankfully, there’s room for both of us to be right.

If A is for apple and B is for banana, what is C for? Explosives.

I’m not going to (besides the notes above) belabor the point. I don’t care if the gun that shoots me belongs to a private from Louisiana or a cop or a Mexican cartel gunman. I’m still dead. And if the government is encouraging, it’s either genocide or, if the fighting goes both ways, it’s civil war.

There is more from Mr. Shelby a bit later in this edition of the Weather Report.

Violence And Censorship Update

Not a lot to add to violence this month.

Censorship, continues in full force. At the beginning of the month, Congress had a Facebook® “whistleblower” as the main witness at hearings where . . . she said the big problem with Facebook© is that they don’t censor nearly enough.

What does the “p” in Facebook© stand for? Privacy.

Yup. That was the story. But then it came out that that the “whistleblower” spent last October making sure that information that could damage Joe Biden was censored from Facebook™. She was on the team that made sure that information related to Hunter Biden’s laptop was suppressed.

I’m shocked, shocked that she was wanting yet more censorship from Facebook.

Applying for work at Facebook® is easy. They already have your details.

Since it’s November, I thought I’d remind everyone of a picture from last year. Consider it a stroll down memory-hole lane.

There was more fraud in the 2020 election than in a Thanksgiving Wilder Family Monopoly® game.

Again, if you want free and fair elections, it’s absolutely certain that you block windows so the public can’t view the vote counting in any way. Stalin said it well: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Models For The Future – It’s Personal

I mentioned above that we’d see more from the Forward Observer, and here’s an excellent article where he discusses the model of the Irish Troubles as a model for potential future difficulties. You can read it here (LINK).

Similarly, Mary Christine put forward a fictional piece at The Burning Platform in 2019. Those set as a fiction, it describes how conflict escalated from the political to a guerilla war in Missouri during the Civil War. You can read it here (LINK).

A third model to think about would be the Second Boer War, where the British defeated the Boer Republics and forcefully integrated them into British South Africa. Like the other two, this conflict was based on guerilla tactics. To defeat them, the British finally just started putting Boer civilians (women and children) into concentration camps with all the expected brutality and tragedy that is implied by that. Tens of thousands of civilians died in the camps.

These models all have several things in common, but what strikes me is the utter brutality in each of them and the sometimes-targeted attacks on non-combatants. Conflict of this type is marked by tragedy in a way that lasts for generations – it becomes and remains personal.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and our perception of violence is holding steady.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it ticked up this month again, mainly on inflation fears.

Economic:

Economic measures ticked upwards in October – despite my prediction that they’d drop.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels last three months, and this rate is 4x the rate from any previous year in the last four.

After Virginia

Virginia has scared the Left, badly. In their minds, Virginia had become a permanent Blue state – a Leftist outpost where statues could be taken down and Critical Race Theory could start along with hormone treatments for kindergartners.

Then they lost. Big time. And it wasn’t just a loss, it was a loss that was a psychological blow. Biden is in political free-fall, and is less popular than COVID-19.

The Left is realizing the hard truth: they won’t sweep into a victory, everywhere and forever. The comments section in Leftist areas?

Calling for a peaceful split. Previously, when winning, they wanted it all – they were sure they were going to win and establish a socialist paradise from sea to shining sea.

This was a sea change. They realize that the attitude of the Right is changing, and they realize that they’re managing to make Trump look good to the swing voters. Is a consensus building for a split?

Is this where we might beheaded?

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

From Sea To Shining Sea

Brooklyn 1:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1NR_DWUeKI

Brooklyn 2: https://twitter.com/i/status/1454903434046578688

Lancaster PA: https://youtu.be/-Ch2q0Gw5Vg

Washington DC: https://twitter.com/i/status/1447913542674522117

Chicago 1: https://twitter.com/i/status/1445784277807890436

Chicago 2:https://twitter.com/i/status/1445483216475885576

Minneapolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_6hA9PgICc

Mobile AL:https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1449214856138305536

Berkeley Campus: https://youtu.be/dYB9-o5QklE

Army Boot Camp: https://twitter.com/i/status/1449910120364879880

Marine Field Exercise: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10159949/Royal-Marines-commandos-force-troops-humiliating-surrender-training-exercise.html

Bad Guys…Guns…Good Gals

https://alphanews.org/78-instances-of-fully-automatic-gunfire-in-minneapolis-so-far-this-year/

https://buchanan.org/blog/who-is-killing-10000-black-americans-every-year-158601

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls

https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article255162407.html

https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/more-women-especially-black-women-are-becoming-gun-owners-ownership-firearms/531-49622eec-5ac8-4793-ab89-cfa0213ebff4

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-winsome-sears-becomes-virginias-first-female-lieutenant-governor

Election Tidbits

https://twitter.com/GlennYoungkin/status/1448396312098050048

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/breaking-fulton-county-georgia-ordered-one-million-absentee-ballots-printer-days-2020-election-knowing-no-time-mail/

https://www.wtnh.com/news/politics/emails-released-to-news-8-show-a-flurry-of-confusion-over-mass-absentee-ballots-mailed-to-guilford-voters/

https://www.defendflorida.org/canvassing

https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/secretary_raffensperger_calls_on_department_of_justice_to_investigate_allegations_of_fulton_county_shredding_applications

https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/ap_news/gbi-chief-not-enough-evidence-to-pursue-gop-s-ballot-fraud-claim/article_edd11901-b7a1-524f-9815-6bedbdd4bc98.html

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis/kline-zucks-bucks-were-illegal/

Secession – Thinking Nationally

https://link.medium.com/yNzD8Sxhzkb

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/dan-rodricks/bs-md-rodricks-1010-civil-war-20211008-sy33rtzmind5vnsawrshjh2tw4-story.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/he-saw-americas-crackup-coming-in-2011he-says-its-worse-now

https://alt-market.us/in-a-civil-war-the-authoritarian-left-would-be-easily-beaten-but-it-wont-end-there/

https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/

https://www.salon.com/2021/10/09/a-new-confederacy-and-the-have-already-seceded/

Secession – Acting Locally

https://mises.org/wire/three-reasons-start-taking-secession-seriously

https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/california-secede-one-group-got-a-key-approval-last-week-to-try/

https://www.axios.com/atlantas-whitest-neighborhood-may-secede-7ae8755d-d378-4aa1-8534-f90faf029356.html

https://dnyuz.com/2021/10/22/bye-maryland-lawmakers-in-3-counties-float-a-plan-to-secede-from-the-state/

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-canada-health-public-health-idaho-0d2015c826bb01a2cd04b31254c870c5

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/10/10/civil-war-trending-on-twitter-after-comment-made-by-trump-supporter/?sh=3c6d9b0b1853

https://www.laconiadailysun.com/news/state/lawmaker-wants-new-hampshire-to-declare-independence/article_d2717e73-5b7b-55b8-a8b3-aa7a45da9bf2.html

https://www.unionleader.com/news/politics/voters/should-the-2022-ballot-include-a-vote-on-new-hampshire-seceding-from-the-united-states/poll_fc16f69e-161c-11ec-8c39-b318093e8de3.html

https://www.amazon.com/Break-Up-Secession-Division-Imperfect-ebook/dp/B07X9PWSVG

https://www.amazon.com/American-Secession-Looming-National-Breakup-ebook/dp/B07N94RL11

Secession – Everybody Calm Down

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/no-were-not-more-divided-than-we-were-during-the-civil-war/

https://www.governing.com/now/is-america-in-a-cold-civil-war-not-at-all

https://www.sunjournal.com/2021/10/10/rich-lowry-national-divorce-is-a-poisonously-stupid-idea/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/06/americans-national-divorse-theyre-wrong-515443

https://www.silive.com/news/2021/10/its-dangerous-for-pro-trumpers-or-anybody-else-to-want-to-secede-from-the-united-states-opinion.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043401926/russia-expert-fiona-hill-there-is-nothing-for-you-here

Secession – The Least Of Our Worries?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10154745/The-pace-China-moving-stunning-Americas-No-2-ranking-military-officer-said.html

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/moment-biden-casually-committed-ww3-over-taiwan-last-nights-town-hall

https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/secret-chinese-philosopher-lessons-for-america/

https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/

https://dokumen.pub/america-against-america.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school. I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses. Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good. A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster. The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay. Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax. However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax: Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff. We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax. They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce. This increases the price. In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability. In practice, I’ve seen both. Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids: Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition. Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children. Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills. And those were the good jobs. “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners. So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes. Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me? That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave. They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box. There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded. I’m raisin awareness. But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes. Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme. It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses. At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years. But, hey, books for blind kids, right? It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit! Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us. What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored. The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria. Since then? Everything they focus on gets worse. So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes. People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously. It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well. They touch every physical item in the economy. If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it. It’s a tax on people who have to commute. It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls. The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too. A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply. But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks. Why are they in short supply? Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made. Does that make Ford® happy? No. The shortage tax doesn’t help them. About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax: inflation. It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day. The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell. Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom. In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy. As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom. I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax. It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over. Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®. Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going? Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those? Well, Biden still has three more years.

I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.

“Good. Then climb up, get inside, and make it spin.” – Cobra Kai

Oh, wait, then she couldn’t circle back?

JW Note: Monday was the third day (I think) that I had to skip a scheduled post since 2017. It’s nice to be back. Thanks for waiting.

I was driving down the road. It was Christmas Day, back a zillion years ago. There had been a fresh few inches of snow on the paved road. I was going to see my parents. The day was overcast, and cold, with temperatures hovering around 0°F (101.325 kPa).

My car was going around 70 miles per hour. There wasn’t another car on the road, and I could see for miles. Little did I know that I would soon have an auto-body experience.

Instead of snowplows, the county had used road graders to scrape the snow off the asphalt. One result of that was that there was a continuous tiny hill of snow in the center of the road where the yellow line would be.

As I drove along, I reached to change the cassette tape. Perhaps a switch to AC/DC® from the Crüe? I wandered off just a little bit toward the center onto that little hill as I reached into the tape box. It slowed my car. On one side. Just a little.

The result wasn’t little. A force applied to one side of the car led to the other side going forward faster, a result most people call . . . spinning.

Or in this case, Tyrannosaurus Rexth.

The car went into a very fast spin as the car’s forward energy was transferred into angular momentum. I could probably describe the amount of energy in math, but I was concentrating right then and there on not being reduced to my personal lowest common denominator. But you can think about it this way: how fast would a car going 70 miles per hour spin if all the forward energy went into spin?

Fast.

This spin forced the weight of the car onto the driver’s side wheels as the car bled linear energy into rotational. As the car spun, out of control, there was no real way to do anything. Everything was happening far too fast.

The spinning car spun up a small tornado cloud of snow from the road. Finally, the car tilted up on the driver’s side tires, and tilted up, 30 degrees from horizontal. It stopped rotating.

The car then slammed down, at a complete stop, engine stalled, and every light on the dashboard on. The defroster was blowing snowflakes into the car, and every window was covered with white flakes of snow, outside and inside.

There is only one thing I could do. I got out of the car and stared down the asphalt at the path I had been on. It all happened so fast that had little time to feel any fear. Besides, who can be afraid when Bonn Scott was busy telling me all about Rosie?

How does he like his eggs in the morning? Ohhhhhmmmmlette.

I had been going due east, facing right into the ditch. I was now pointing due south. The entire time, not a tire had left the narrow two lane asphalt road. I looked back on the track the wheels had made, and it looked like the path of a figure skater doing a pirouette. I got wiped off the car windows, got back in, backed up, and headed east again.

Much more slowly.

Back when the ‘Rona first started, the long-term implications (to me) were clear. The immediate shutdown of large segments of the global economy would be disastrous. It was certain to leave a mark.

The toilet paper binge was signal one. When people panic, they feel that they have to do . . . something. Buying toilet paper wasn’t rational.

Here at Casa Wilder we actually had a relatively ludicrous amount on hand before the whole mess hit. It was (sort of) a prepping situation. We kept buying more than we needed, and it kept adding up. And up. Before too awful long, we had the basement bathroom stacked pretty high with the stuff.

I hear that two guys stole a calendar from Capitol Hill. Each of them got six months.

When the storm hit? Well, let’s say that we were squeaky clean. And we didn’t buy a single sheet. We weren’t part of the problem, but part of the solution.

But the economy wasn’t. Every bit of initial distortion from the economic dislocation was amplified. It echoed down the system. What kinds of shocks?

Initial runs on supplies.
Federal stimulus.
Initial lowered consumption of fuels.
More Federal stimulus.
Lower demand for office space.
More Federal stimulus, which increased unemployment benefits, distorting labor incentives.
Eviction moratoriums, distorting housing costs and lowering profits of building owners.
More Federal stimulus.
Spiking stock markets with contracting GDP.

I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done. It provided the greatest expansion of government powers since FDR nearly destroyed the economy with the New Deal. If the Federal government could tell a landlord in Podunk, Iowa that he couldn’t kick out people that refused to pay, it’s only a tiny step to saying that the landlord should let people move into his guest bedroom and feed them pancakes when they demand them.

French pancakes give me the crepes.

That might be the worst. But the economic situation has all the charm of a pitbull that just quit smoking, and it will be the spark.

Wilder’s Law (might as well grab one when I can) says that Federal debt doubles every eight years. The debt is right now at $29 trillion. That means that (on average) the debt will rise by $3.5 trillion each year. That’s a lot of money. Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much!

I think we’re on track to more than double it in the next eight years, regardless of who is in the White House. The end state of any exponential curve is, well, exponential. The headwinds we are now facing are strong.

Medical costs, which are growing faster than Germany between 1939 and 1941.
Infinite Leftist “free” programs to see who will be trained to be the poet in Collective Farm #8675309 (I bet it will be Jenny).
Whipsawing energy availability. I promised Lord Bison I’d do an energy post again sometime soon, and we need to review where we’re at. Is energy expensive because of political reasons, or because of physical reasons? We need to have a great documentary about oil. We can save it under non-friction.
Political division that mirrors only a few times in our history. Hint: all of those ended in historic levels of bloodshed. I’m sure this time will be different.
The man is a potato.
Lashing waves of inflation and shortage, as I predicted back in July. Heck, I priced cheap electric outlets the other day. They were shocking!
China and Russia seeing their moment. Why didn’t anyone Xi that coming?
Joe Biden’s America? Borders are open, no jab required. Oh, wait, have a job? Jab required.

I wish that I could tell you that things will get better soon in the economy. It is certain that they won’t. The economy is shifting in unpredictable ways. When you have a system that is working at its limits every single day and then subject it to amazing levels of stress?

It will fail. No chips for new cars. No drivers for trucks. Chicago getting ready to lose a big chunk of cops. The worst dislocations are yet to arrive.

The government solution will certainly make things worse. How can I tell that? It already has. The dreams of those who assume that prosperity can be bought at the price of new law or regulation or printing more cash has always failed.

Second place winner, Collective Farm BR-549 poet competition.

Prosperity is hard. Really hard. The natural state of humanity has been one where starvation was always a possibility, where actually consequential diseases (see: The Black Death or The Justinian Plague) was inevitable from time to time. It was so bad that episodes of that show you love were on the streaming service that you don’t have and you’re not going to buy another one.

We live in a world that has become just like my car on that Christmas Day so many years ago. It was moving down the road at full speed. One tiny two-inch hill of snow caused it to spin.

I assure you we haven’t been anywhere close to the worst that this downturn will bring. Prepare. Stay away from crowds. And if you and all you love all still there when all four wheels drop back on the ground?

Say a prayer.

Of thanks.

We can’t have too many of those.

Gresham’s Law, Bad Money, And Trillion Dollar Coins

“The money in your account. It didn’t do too well, it’s gone.” – South Park

You can always tell if a coin is fresh: it smells like the mint.

As I’ve mentioned before, Pa Wilder was a banker. There are certain advantages to being a banker, and back in the late 1970s, he took advantage of one of them. It’s nice that being a banker has some advantages, because so many of them are loaners.

What Pa did was go through the change that came into the bank drawers. Pa would then take a quarter and replace it with another quarter. Okay, that just makes him sound crazy. Isn’t one 25₵ piece just like another?

Well, no, not in the 1970s.

In this case, Pa was taking a 90% silver quarter and replacing it with a 0% silver quarter. Prior to 1965, dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and dollar coins had been made from 90% silver. Eventually after details, blah, blah, (this isn’t a coin collecting blog) the value of silver in the coins went to zero. It’s virtually certain that all of the coins you receive as change in 2021 are of the 0% silver variety.

Why? Well, people like Pa.

Pa had the coin flow for an entire small farm bank, so he could pick and choose. He replaced 90% silver quarters with 0% silver quarters. On the balance sheet, there was no change, so he wasn’t stealing from the bank. The bank had a quarter, and then after Pa swapped it out, the bank still had a quarter.

It wasn’t the same quarter, mind you, but the cost to the bank was zero. If you’re looking for a perfect heist, this is it.

Pa walked away with hundreds of dollars in 90% silver quarters, all just by leafing through someone else’s drawers.

I saw a werewolf at work. Or maybe it was a hairy guy. Regardless, the silver bullets worked.

We’ve had some discussions where I’ve referred to our current money system (fiatbux?) as money. More than one person in the comments has said, “No, that’s not money.”

Well, it is. I can take a $100 bill and go and buy some beer and cigars and PEZ®. I could also do that with a gun, but the fact that everyone will go along with the deal means that the dollar really is money.

But it isn’t good money. I’d gladly swap out that $100 fiatbux for $100 in 1965 silver quarters. The $100 in 1965 silver quarters (checks Internet) could be bought on the open market for $2100 or so. That shows that the silver coins are 21 times better money than our current fiatbux.

This little story is an example of Gresham’s Law. Sir Thomas Gresham is an old, dead English dude who made massive amounts of money back when the style of the day was to wear fluffy black pancakes on your head while hoping that Queen Elizabeth didn’t have a bad day and order your execution because (spins wheel) “she was not amused and really wanted pudding for dessert.”

Okay, it’s really Sir Thomas Gresham on the left, and George R.R. Martin on the right. Notice I didn’t say write, because I don’t think George remembers how to do that.

Stated simply, Gresham’s Law is: “Bad money drives out good.” In my example, the bad money was the 0% silver quarters, the good money was the 90% silver quarters.

Why would I take bad money when I could get good money?

You wouldn’t. No one does.

During the Zimbabwe hyperinflation, people would take United States dollars as payment, but they’d give you never-ending stacks of Zimbabwe cash as change. The bad money (Zimbabwebux) was driving out the good. The dollar, though not “good money” was still better than the wrapping paper that the Zimbabweans scrawled zeros across like an eight-year-old with a pen.

The brain is the most important organ in the body. According to the brain.

Why is that important? Because in 2021, the government of the United States has fully embraced the Zimbabwean concept of “we’ll just print more money.” The reasoning is simple: if a football game can’t run out of points, well, why could a government run out of money? We can just print more.

That’s the sign that the Left half of the bell curve has finally taken the reins of power. The short-bus pity graduates have decided that the phrase “we don’t have enough money” will cease to be an impediment to their wishes.

This year we’ll spend more money than ever in the history of our country. It’s bad. How bad? In order to avoid a debt default because the Democrats are insisting that they have Republican assistance since they don’t want to go solo. The Republicans are resisting spending money because that’s what they pretend to do whenever a Republican isn’t president.

I went to an Irish mechanic the other day. He couldn’t fix my engine, but he could blow up my tires.

The current idea of the Washington set is to make a coin that says “one trillion dollars” on it and deposit it with the treasury. I’m not making this up. This is their actual plan.

This is the plan of people who are not serious. They’re looking for pretend loopholes to evade the law. The bright side is that they are at least pretending that the law exists. Regardless, the goal is to take a chunk of metal, write $1,000,000,000,000 on the side, and keep the spending party going.

Woo! More sangria!

The one thing that is sacrosanct in the world of 2021 is this: thou shalt keep thy government debt whole and multiply it.

Strangely, this is exactly (really, exactly) the same thinking that the leader of Zimbabwe had: “Dude, we have more paper, so we can totally print more money.” We laughed when Zimbabwe printed trillion-dollar notes. People in the government of the United States are ready and willing to create a trillion-dollar coin.

At least this one is (according to the news) platinum.

If this keeps up, JCPenny® will have to change its name to JCTrillion©. And the smell? It’s nearly certain the coin didn’t poop its pants.

The excuse to pull the silver out of money was that “it is costing too much money” to make the coins. A quarter (last article I read) now costs over 12₵ to make – but that article was nearly a decade old. Given inflation, I’d bet that it costs nearly 20₵ to make 25₵, and probably costs at least 3₵ to make a penny.

Looks like over time, the value of bad money begins to match what it cost to make. Beware: it only costs about 14₵ to make a $100 note. That trillion-dollar coin? It will probably cost $1000 or so to make.

Wonder what Pa Wilder would have done if he would have stumbled across a trillion-dollar coin in the bank’s drawers?

Probably, he would have thought it was a fake.

Which, of course, it is. I guess the government is going through our drawers, driving out good money with bad.