Category: Rome, Yet Again

“Mr. Sulu, lock phasers on target and await my command.” – Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan

Kim Jong Un and Dominos Pizza® share one thing:  both can deliver a crispy Hawaiian in thirty minutes or less.

At the end of the Roman Empire, laws had to be passed to keep the place going.  Some of the laws were normal, like huge taxes complete with people to come break your kneecaps if you didn’t pay the tax.  Some of the laws were a last-ditch attempt to keep the Empire going – the Romans were having difficulty developing technology because they couldn’t do algebra.  Whenever the Romans tried to solve for X, they kept coming up with 10.

Okay, enough math jokes for one paragraph.  The real problem was that laws always have unintended consequences.  When those unintended consequences pop up, what’s the obvious thing for a lawmaker to do?

Well, they don’t call them lawrepealers, they call them lawmakers, so they make another law.  And that new law has unintended consequences, too.  Why?  Because every law has unintended consequences.  If you’re a lawmaker, what’s your solution?

Yet more laws.  It’s like trying to fix a fraudulent election system by voting, but that was what the Empire did – pass more laws.  Expecting politicians to fix actual problems is like expecting the iceberg to fix the Titanic.

It got so silly that they had a law that if you were a farmer, your son had to be a farmer, too, so that Rome had enough farmers.  It wasn’t just limited to farmers, it was any old occupation.  If dad did it, junior had to do it, too.  The reason that they did that is because farmers were headed to the cities where the welfare was better, and just walking off the farms.

I wonder if that had any lasting consequences?

What we’re seeing now in the United States is something sadly similar.  A law is passed, and it has horrible consequences.  The solution?  More laws.

Taxes are simple that way.  Who gets taxed?

That’s simple!  People who don’t have their congressmen’s cell phone number on speed dial get taxed, that’s who.

Why are Sherlock Holmes’ taxes so low?  He’s an expert at deduction.

In order to not tax the people congressmen know, congressmen have to write increasingly complicated laws to create increasingly complicated regulations that then result in complicated interpretations which become as legally binding as the law that led to the regulation that led to the interpretation.  Whew.

Why so complicated?  Because if it were simple, everyone could take advantage of the tax code like it was one of Harvey Weinstein’s dates.

The result?

Jeff Bezos had at least two years that he paid zero taxes between 2006 and 2018.  Good job, Jeff and the legions of tax attorneys you hired!

Me?  I have to make do with TurboTax™, which sadly won’t talk to congressmen on my behalf.

The result of all of these laws isn’t just cronyism, where bald, Bond-villain wannabees like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates save money so they can take their hideous goblin-looking girlfriends out on dates while their ex-wives slave away with only billions of dollars to show for their decades of devotion, which is quite a bit of money.   Some people work an entire year and don’t make $50 billion dollars.

I wonder if she enjoys his company.  Or his companies?

Tax law isn’t the only problem, and it isn’t even the worst problem.  The worst problem is the Command Economy.

What’s a Command Economy?  Essentially, it’s when the government decides that all of those natural economic laws that follow from generally free commerce that have worked throughout mankind’s existence are useless.  The result?

Men, top men mind you, decide who wins and who loses in the economy.  It’s like Jeff and Bill not paying taxes because legislators are lining up to do what they want, but worse.  It’s more like a transsexual bodybuilder having a prostate infection prior to the women’s weightlifting competition in the Olympics®.  We all know that’s not pretty.

What is the result when people try to plan the economy?

Disaster.  I’ve talked again (LINK) and again about the Soviet attempts at a planned economy.  It never works well.  People respond to incentives, and no single person (or even a bureau of people) is as smart as the collective decisions of millions of citizens.

Perhaps the most tragic story is that of China, which I’ve also written about before (LINK).  There, anything that Mao said, or that Mao’s advisor’s thought he said, became immediate law.  The result was the starvation of millions.  Ask AOC, and she’ll tell you, “That wasn’t starvation, that was simply involuntary food restriction, silly.  It was for their own good.”

Stalin and Mao:  still a better love story than Twilight.

Why did people starve to death?  Because the incentives of productivity were destroyed.  It has even happened on this continent when the Pilgrims showed up.  Their first idea was that everything would be held in common – they even wrote it down in the Mayflower Compact.  So, regardless of who gardened, everyone shared equally in everything.  What could be more Christian than that?

Mutual starvation, apparently.

Two years after the foundation of the Plymouth Colony the Pilgrims dumped their Mayflower Compact on the Ash Heap of History.  People could farm and keep the stuff they grew and do with it whatever they wanted.  The result?  The harvest of 1623 was the best harvest the Pilgrims had, until the next year when they produced even more.  The Chinese have dumped all the crazy Mao stuff, and have used the incentives of the free market to quickly pull amazing numbers of people out of poverty.  The Chinese people say they don’t mind the associated total state political control, but the CCP noted back to the people, “I don’t recall asking your opinion on anything.  Back into the kitchen!”

The secret ingredient in creating real prosperity remains the same:  private property.  Duh.

But people never learn.

Never mix math and booze:  don’t drink and derive.

I fear we’re at the brink of the next, tragic, Command Economy.  Of course, I’d love to blame this on the Left, but at least on this one?  It’s been a mutual suicide pact leaping towards a controlled economy.

Bill Clinton is the unlikely hero here.  Realizing his only path for re-election after his wife’s failed attempt at socializing medicine was to govern from the center, he did just that.  He stopped being a water carrier for the economic Left and stuck to cigars and interns for his amusement.

Clinton is a critically flawed man, but his true allegiance was power, and realizing that the path to it was one of moderation, he followed it – at least in the laws he signed.  Bush II wasn’t so inclined, he never met a person whose money he didn’t want to spend.  W’s abuse of the economy started with “compassionate conservatism” and continued through massive bribes of additional Medicare funding to buy his re-election.  Just as Clinton drove Right to get re-elected, Bush drove Left.

Obama?  Socializing medicine in a way that’s obviously not something that can be paid for in the long term is his legacy.  Otherwise, he mainly just continued W’s budget shenanigans, but with his friends winning.  Of course, why not.  They had his cell number.

I’d love to tell you that Trump was in some way different, but Trump has one strength – making a deal.  The laws of physics and economics are, sadly, not negotiable.  Biden?  Who knows what he thinks.  He certainly doesn’t.  But the idea of opening the checkbook has been continued (by someone) under Sleepy Joe.  I just got a check from .gov.  It was for “advance payment of child tax credit.”

What’s this?

Bread and circuses.  Flooding the economy with cash in the idea that not only votes can be printed by the millions, but prosperity can be printed, too.

Political Tip:  it’s okay to use your family members as political props, just remember, don’t use them as Halloween props.

The result is going to be predictable:  the inflation that’s currently occurring will be an “unintended consequence” of the spending today.  The reactions will be simple, and wrong.

• “Let’s fix prices.”
• “Let’s mandate higher wages because of higher prices.”
• “Let’s give more money to those who need it most.”
• “Let’s give a tax credit for alternative energy.”
• “People. We have a lot of them.  Could we turn them into food?  Chuck-fil-a®, anyone?”

All of these ideas sound good (except Chuck-fil-a™, unless they have good dipping sauces), but all of them are wrong.  The distortions that resulted from FDR’s New Deal® still reverberate in our economy today.  Social Security alone has lifted trillions from the economy and removed the incentive to save for retirement.

Just like so many of the siren songs of socialism, Social Security sounds super.  People who get it say, “I paid in for it, so I earned it.”  Well . . . no.  The benefits far outweigh the contributions.  Social Security is really just income redistribution from the young to the old.  But hey, it sounds good, right?

Other distortions, as I said, are on the way.  We’ve seen this song and dance before.  Can’t sell at NY strip for more than $12 a pound?  Welcome to a new cut of meat – the Missouri Strip.  Or the Ohio Strip.  Of course, the reaction from government at this late stage will be to imprison people who attempt to get cheeky by getting around the laws.

What’s the hardest thing about being vegan?  Keeping it to yourself, apparently.

That’s what governments do when they are starting to lose control.  They come down in force on those who thumb their noses.  Look at the charges levied against the January 6 protesters:  they’re unjust.  Why are they unjust?  Because the more frightened a government is, the more it overreacts.

The reaction in the economy will be similar.  The idea that we can ignore thermodynamics and select an energy source without consequence is one that will be chosen.  Ideology will attempt to trump physics.  Instead of being hungry for food, if a Command Economy takes over, we will first hunger for power.

Of course, Leftism has caused nothing but hunger whenever (and that’s not an exaggeration) tried.  Want a diet plan that always works?  Communism is a sure bet.

Why can I be so sure in making that prediction?  When the Romans tried a Command Economy, it failed.  Those farmers, whose sons were supposed to take their place?

Those Roman sons walked away from the productive farms, because the price, their freedom, was too high.

In the end, economics always wins over ideology and bad math.  Always.  Generally, though, a lot of tragedy precedes it.

Let’s just hope this isn’t coming soon to a farm near you.