Category: Wealth

Ignoring Reality Catches Up With All Of Us

“When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating. You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record.” – Star Trek (The Cage)

After creating the Nile, God became a podcaster, “Check out my stream!”

Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

It’s a pretty simple definition, and it mostly works unless you have really persistent hallucinations.  Persistent hallucinations just like Philip K. Dick probably had.  This may explain a lot of his fiction and his fascination with reality.  And as for 2021, I’d say reality has great graphics, but horrible gameplay.

In 2022, though, we live in a world where reality seems to be split, and split along ideological lines.  One generally reliably Left member of the media (but I repeat myself), Bill Maher, just gave up on the fiction:  “It’s just gone on too long, nobody cares anymore.  I don’t want to live in your mask paranoid world anymore.  You go out, it’s silly now.  You have to have a mask, you have a booster, they scan your head like you’re a cashier and I’m a bunch of bananas.  I’m not bananas, you are.”

Still not on your side.

With that, the cracks of reality on where we’re at with COVID have swung wide open.  There is the fiction that has the single, double, triple, and mega-vaxxed living in constant fear.  The Mrs. was reading the comments to me from some Lefties on a website she frequents.  One particular set of comments was of Lefties looking for test kits like they were looking for crack.  One commenter had consumed at least four instant kits (without a positive result) because they were certain that they had . . . the Rona.

I have no idea what induces that level of fear in a healthy person.  When one of them pointed out that they were consuming tests that could have been better used by people in nursing homes, this entirely common-sense idea was shouted down by a sea of Leftist fear.

This is a denial of reality.  COVID has killed quite a few people, but it’s no Black Death.  Everyone in my family has had it, and for us it ranged from two or three days in bed (The Mrs.) to an afternoon of fever (me).  I’d go so far as, having had it, to bet that millions of people have had it and don’t even realize it.  For two years, these people have managed to live every moment dripping in abject fear.

How a Leftist imagines a trip to COSTCO®.

Beyond the impact of the fear, there’s the impact of the Vax itself.  There is more than sufficient anecdotal evidence that the mRNA shots have significantly more complications than any vaccine ever delivered.  No one can say what the long-term implications are.  With any luck, the negative health impacts are over more quickly than the protections offered by the shot, but there are no guarantees.

Especially not a guarantee from the manufacturer.  Hmmm.

The “adverse health impacts”, of course, are being denied as well.  But such an overwhelming amount of data leads to even the monolith of “jab good, deniers bad” being breached at an official level.  The current shot does nothing against the current strain of COVID, and it appears the current strain of COVID leaves those that get it immune to certain other forms of COVID.

Huh.  It’s almost like the virus is attenuating like, oh, every virus, ever and becoming progressively more infectious and less lethal.  Even Bill Gates is ready to call this one over.

We know that Bill Gates didn’t invent COVID – none of his other products come up with new versions this frequently.

This isn’t the only reality the Left is denying.  It’s not even the most important reality that is being denied.

What’s falling apart, that Leftists say isn’t?

Well, the economy, but I’ve been on and on about that, so I’ll give you a rest.  Besides, Wednesday is a better day for bikini economics.  For whatever reason, Biden owns the economy now.  In this, I’ll give him a pass.  He’s like the last player in a game of Jenga® where you know the tower is going to go, but he’s gotta try to make it one peg higher.  More on that later.

Our border.  The character of a country is in its people, and so is the success.  I do believe that the traditions of our great nation led to the great prosperity that we had.  That, and having thousands of nuclear warheads.  Yeah, having great traditions is nice, but having the ability to obliterate anyone who disagrees with you never hurts.

Regardless, there’s a group that actively says that the United States, “has no culture” which is like a fish wondering what water is.  The fact is that the culture of the United States was so successful and pervasive that people didn’t recognize its influence because it is literally everywhere.  Is American culture perfect?  No.  But it certainly has remade the world, in some ways for the good, in others for the not so good.

I killed an Australian spider with my shoe.  I’m glad he wasn’t big enough to carry both of them.

But if you replace the people, you’ve replaced the culture, and the Magic Dirt won’t make them prosperous.  Just like if you replaced the Japanese with (spins wheel) Argentinians, it wouldn’t be Japan anymore, you can’t replace Americans with (spins wheel) Japanese and expect anything but another Japan.

The Left somehow thinks the thousands of people in the medical professions (doctors, nurses, administrators, etc.) are magically going to be replaced when they refuse the Clotshot®.  No.  These are skilled positions requiring education and practical training.  Replace these professionals with idiots like me, and you’d end up with every solution being amputation.  They don’t call me “John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon” for nothing.  It did cut down on the owies my kids brought me, though.

Our relationship with each other.  At every level this is breaking down.  That’s not fair.  At every level, people are being pushed apart.  On a racial level, everyone is being taught that, even when there’s no intent, one group of people is awful and the other is blameless.

One of the most pernicious things that can be done is to create a victim class.  No matter what happens, they are told, they have no responsibility.  If they behave badly, well, it couldn’t be helped.  Why not?  Well, something happened three hundred years ago, you see.

It’s nonsense.  I know Scott Adams has been taking a few lumps recently, but a while back he had a thought experiment I felt was interesting:  what would happen if you asked an alien about the situation of blacks in the United States and if reparations were owed.  If the alien looked over the situation, Scott seemed to think that it might say, “Well, comparing your life span, material goods, and general standard of living compared to if you had stayed in Africa, you probably owe the white people.”

Women drinking coffee.  My three favorite things.

Probably not a popular idea to float in 2022, but the constant stream of victimhood replacing any sort of rational assessment will end up doing only one thing:  tearing us further apart.  Which is just what Leftists want.

We are on the road to many reckonings.  From the looks of them, they won’t be delivered sequentially.  I tend to think the big trigger will be the economy, but regardless of the trigger, there comes a point where, regardless of what we believe, reality will set in.

I hope it doesn’t have too much Kardashian.

Pirates, Rail Looters, Fed Looters, And Bikini Economics

“Pirate Ghost would suggest that a pirate died and became a ghost, but a Ghost Pirate is a ghost that later made a conscious decision to be a pirate.” – South Park

What decongestant does the Federal Reserve© ban?  Sudafed™.

Most of the time when a train story hits the news, it involves the comically overloaded trains in India.  The typical headline in a newspaper (back when those existed) was on page 7, and went something like this:  Train Derails In India, 471,320 Dead.  The news story was typically right near, “Local Cat Makes Good!”

It’s been a while since I saw much about trains in the news.  Imagine my interest when I found out that people were hopping on trains in Los Angeles (Translation From Spanish:  Tarp City) and looting them.  What the Corsairs from Compton Boulevard are looking for is . . . merch.  Amazon® packages.  Best Buy™.  Nike©.

If Amazon® delivered by drone, for these folks that would just be skeet shooting, with prizes.

It’s really piracy on the rails.  Mobs attack the slow-moving trains and proceed to loot them.  They’ll load up on televisions and laptops and video game systems and almost everything that you can order online.  Except for books.  And, probably, work boots.

The fact that this is tolerated is a symptom that Los Angeles is now, officially, the Somalia of the West Coast.  There appears to be no effort to stop the mob, and no effort to arrest any participant.  Recent news reports would indicate that an ax-murderer, after arrest, would be given his (oops, California!) xir ax back after getting booked and not even have to post bail.

But try to smuggle a plastic straw in?  It’s off to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495 for you.

When you think about it, using a straw is just like snorkeling in reverse.

The fact that land pirates are actually a thing in 2022 means that, in Los Angeles at least, the rule of law has broken down completely in areas.  Thankfully, that hasn’t translated to other parts of the country, right?

Well, about the Federal Reserve® . . .

It’s not as if the Fed™ governors have been caught in a scandal where they unethically traded stocks.  Oh, they have?  Dallas Fed© President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed™ President Eric Rosengren and Fed® Vice-Chairman Richard Clarida all resigned in disgrace after trading based on future Fed© decisions that hadn’t been made public?

Say it isn’t so!  Oh, wait, it’s completely so.  Apparently, the Fed© treats their “management” of fiscal policy just as seriously as the Watts Porch Pirates treat their “management” of Amazon® freight logistics.

Well, at least they’ve done well with the economy, preserving the purchasing power of money over time, right?

Of course . . . not.

I’d point out how bad this graph is, but somehow I don’t feel as sad with this one.

In reality, monetary policy since the Fed™ started has been to make your cash worthless, over time.  You can see what a great job they’ve done since 2000.  In effect, the Fed© has been in your bank account, robbing it bit by bit, just like the Hollywood Buccaneers have been boosting freight out of the train yard.  They just leave a bit less trash.

But certainly, they’ve been operating now as a sober bunch.

Ha!

No!  They’ve taken every Fed® interest rate record since 1955 and smashed it!  They are, absolutely provably, so drunk on Jack Daniels® that they can’t feel their collective jaws.  They are knee-walking, porcelain-grabbing drunk.

Wolfstreet.com called them . . . The Most Reckless Fed® Ever.  (LINK)

They put together a nice graph (below) that shows that if you take the Fed™ funds rate (what they charge to borrow money) and subtract inflation, we’re at a LIFETIME level of irresponsibility.  The Quantitative Easing (ahem, helicopter cash) and Stimulus Bills (ahem, more helicopter cash) have pushed inflation up.

The reckless bit is on the right.  No, farther right.  Yes, farther. 

So, all of the “Fight for $15” folks are quiet now, because whatever the minimum wage is, $15 is attainable doing temp work.  Everyone not making big bucks?  Inflation is eating the raises of most people.  So who’s winning?  I mean, besides the insider traders at the Fed™?

People who own stuff.  Inflation makes cash worth less, and eventually worthless.  Owning things makes sense in a world where cash is becoming worthless.  Who owns things?  Rich people.  They’ve done very, very well.  Why is Tesla®, which made 936,000 cars last year, has a market cap of $1.1 trillion dollars.  Doing the math . . . that has Tesla© worth $1,175,214 . . . per car they made.

Huh?  Honestly, it’s not a stock:  it’s a meme.

I guess people have to buy something.  Notice that Elon himself was selling his stock to convert it to (temporarily) cash to convert it to . . . stuff.  Even the tax hit wasn’t enough to deter him – he might well have the biggest tax bill of any individual in history this year.

Why?  Do you sell a stock that you think is going to go up?  No.  You sell a meme.  And let’s not talk about how the Fed© has force-fed banks billions of dollars to prop them up and increase their profitability.

I hear he wears Space-Axe® body spray.

So, we have pirates looting railcars to take home blenders and game controllers.  We’re not stopping them.

We also have much, much bigger thieves – the Freebooters of the Fed™ who have done their very best to, first by inflation, then by recession, to drain trillions of dollars of savings of average Americans, and it doesn’t even get higher up in the newspaper than an Indian train accident.

Looks like the D.A. isn’t prosecuting these guys, either.  Guess they haven’t tried to smuggle any plastic straws . . . at least then they’d get sent to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495.

Gold, Silver, And The End Of The World

“What do you know about gold, Moneypenny?” – Goldfinger

Why don’t pirates travel on mountain roads?  S’curvy.

A reader writes:  “. . . if you could explain to me the rationale behind buying gold or silver as a hedge against economic collapse, I would appreciate it.”  I answered by sending him bikini graph after bikini graph, but yet he persisted in wanting to know an actual answer.

I don’t think anyone will complain that this one is a repeat . . . .

He had me cornered.  I wrote to him (embellished for this post and clarified for readability):

Thank you for the question.  I promise to answer, just as long as you give my dog bag safely.  He may be old and one-eyed and have diabetes and alopecia . . . we call him, “Lucky.”

It’s good that he’s not a dinosaur – he’d probably be called an eyesaur. 

I thought that I had already answered this question and looked for the post.

As I’ve got over 1,000 up, I couldn’t find it after I looked for about 22 seconds.  Maybe I developed notes on it and never posted?  Maybe I’m just lazy at searching.  In the worst-case scenario, a previous version exists, and everyone just has to deal with this new, superior post.

The question is a subtle one.  The first part of the answer is the degree of collapse.  I’ll start out with this idea: how bad does it get?

  1. Another Boring Wednesday: Would I rather have a ton of gold on a Wednesday morning than not?  Of course.  But I’d probably worry about George Clooney and his wisecracking band of thieves breaking into Stately Wilder Mansion.
  2. Personal Economic Problems: Again, in a sequel, having that ton of gold is still great, but I still have that pesky George Clooney problem.  In reality, gold is somewhat less liquid than cash, but having a bunch of it is still nice.  Also, if you bought gold in 1990, you would have had zero profit on it until 2006.  This was mainly due to sane economic policy and high-interest rates that tamed inflation.

Or is this why they were always after his Lucky Charms®?

  1. Recession: What’s going on in the economy?  If you look closely, silver and gold actually dropped in value at the start of the Great Recession in the 2000s.  As people liquidated their “stuff” so they could still buy the G.I. Joe® with the Kung Fu™ grip for their kid at Christmas, the price actually dropped.  For a while.  Then the price jumped up when it became clear that the Fed® would print as much money as required to choke every person on the planet.  In the fiat world, gold and silver are something I’d look to have.
  2. Depression – 1930s Style: This is a hard analogy – back in the 1930s, the dollar was backed in gold, until FDR (press S to spit) stole the gold from the American people.  Now?  The dollar is nothing more than, to quote Aerosmith, “a lick and a promise.”  (See below)
  3. Weimar-Style Hyperinflation: I don’t think we’ll get here, until there’s a lack of faith in the dollar.  Brandon is doing his best to make Jimmy Carter look like a master of economics, so, if hyperinflation hits?  Gold is awesome, and you might be able to repay your mortgage with five or six pre-1965 silver quarters.  So, yes, gold and silver make sense.  A lot of sense.

In a Leftist world, everyone is a Billionaire.  And also starving.

  1. Country Collapse: What happens if the country ceases to be?  It has happened again and again through history, especially with large “empire-like” countries that don’t have any sort of ethnic commonality.  Japan will always be Japan because there are Japanese and it’s a nation, not a country.  China, likewise.  Without a functioning country, there is no nation to fall back on.  This is where we add another precious metal:    So, yes, gold and silver, but understand that it might be some time before it’s useful again.
  2. International Collapse: Rome provides a powerful example here.  In Great Britain, they’re constantly finding hordes of money – including silver money, and gold.  Why?  Because people stopped using it, and you can’t eat it.  Did that last forever?  Of course not, but 100 years is nearly long enough.  Lead is nice here, too.

Who sang “Can’t Touch This” for Caesar?  1100 Hammer.

  1. Civilizational Collapse: What happens if there’s no oil for the cars – anywhere?  What happens if we don’t have phosphorus for fertilizer?  Bad things.  Gold and silver might be helpful, but lead is much better here.  If the warlord wants your stuff and you can’t keep it from him, welcome to no longer having that stuff.
  2. A Kamala Harris presidency: Looks pretty much like number 8, but with more makeup.
  3. A Neutron Star Eating The Earth: I suggest investing in SpaceX®.

I think that we underestimate the likelihood of things getting really, really bad.  To give an example, I once worked at the headquarters of a big company.  They asked me to look at disaster recovery.  I looked at all of the natural hazards that might hit the company.  The most likely disaster would hit the headquarters once every three hundred years.

“Huh,” I said to my boss, foreshadowing future writing endeavors, “a new civil war is far more likely than that . . . I mean if the company lasts that long.  Companies go out of business all the time.”

He was not amused.  Corporations tend to not like actual reality to interfere in their projections.  But, I maintain I was right.  How many companies have ceased to exist – big companies – since 2000?  I’ll leave that work to the reader.  Enron®, anyone?

Country music and calculators are both produced by Texas instruments.

Listen, I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but banks are giving mortgages out at 3.3% and inflation is at 6%, which means that banks will lose money every year as long as inflation is a thing.  How can they do this?  Volume!

No, I’m kidding.  The Fed® is giving them tons of money to lend cheaply to keep housing prices up.  When mortgage rates go up?  Then the housing bubble bursts.  So, we could end up in Scenario 3., 5., or 6. very, very quickly.

Gold and silver (in my NON FINANCIAL ADVISOR) opinion are awesome in most scenarios.  If it devolves past the point where order matters at all, then it comes down to weapons, political connections, preps, and sheer dumb luck.  If nothing happens, then my kids will get to enjoy some shiny metals after I pass away.

What’s the best way to tune a bagpipe?  A pitchfork.

I would, however, not want to put all of my eggs in any one basket.  I will personally limit the amount of gold and silver I own to about 10% of my net worth.  Why?  Random number – not bad if things go well in the rest of the world and gold and silver don’t go up in value.  If things go really south, it’s a decent enough hedge to act as a parachute as the plane goes down in flames.

So, that’s my answer:  it depends.  What do you think?  What Scenario above is the most likely?  What’s missing?

Ohhh, Lucky, come here, boy . . . oh, wait, he’s deaf, too . . . .

(Appended Graph)

Christmas – It’s Not About The Money

“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk

What do Musk and Edison have in common? They both got rich off of Tesla.

Wednesday is normally a day where we talk about wealth, economics, money, currency, and the state of the economy. But, it’s nearly Christmas, so I thought I’d take this time to give a different take on wealth. And no, it’s not Joe Biden appearing in a Marvel® movie where his superpower is to make vast amounts of wealth disappear, because he can do that on, oh, every Tuesday.

Don’t get me wrong. I love prices. Prices are a great way to allocate things in such a way that the most people win. I have my pile of cash and get to buy (within that limit) the things that make me the most happy. Does everyone want a really cool sports car? No, some people don’t want them at all.

Personally, I’d love to have a cool sports car, but I’d much rather not have a mortgage. So, I make choices. And then cry silently in my pillow at night because I’m dead inside because I decided I didn’t get that Mustang®.

Othello always would visit Sauron through the Moor Door.

Regardless, choices mean that I’m in control. I mean, if I chose to study theology and then move to Colorado after I graduated? My choices mean I could become a high priest. I am free to choose and try to optimize my life based on my resources, talents, and luck.

Combine that with a system of (more or less) private property, and the system allows for the sum of millions of individual actions as people try to maximize their happiness. This provides incentives to work to buy steak. Or starve. But owning property provides incentives to create wealth. So, in striving to get enough money to buy a Lambo® and a vapid trophy wife in a functional economy, a businessman works to create the most joy for his customers.

Boom. People who have never met, and will never meet, work together to create a complex economy. This economy translates information based on prices, and is fueled by incentives, and private property.

And yet . . .

What’s the fastest thing in the universe? Nic Cage accepting a movie role.

As much as I love this system, I have to mention again, this system exists to serve men. It does not exist for men to serve it. There is a richer experience of life than only the pursuit of profit.

Also, this system is one that optimizes without regard to morality or virtue. On more than one occasion I have heard a Wall Street billionaire exclaim, “this isn’t Boy (or Boy-Girl, or Trans, in 2021, I guess) Scouts®.”

That was a direct rejection of morality and virtue.

The result of that type of thinking?

If it’s legal and can pull money out of someone’s pocket, Wall Street will do it. If heroin were legal for sale, Wall Street would be looking to invest in the e-Heroin® mobile App. They’d sell underage . . . well, you get the picture. Heck, Wall Street would sell ghosts as supernatural slaves if they thought it wouldn’t come back to haunt them.

When money is their god, they will do anything to get it. Wall Street will do anything legal. The black market, we know, will do anything illegal, as long as they get paid. Wall Street and the black market have essentially the same morals. And, like Satan, Wall Street just has better lawyers and lobbyists.

If there is a fault in the system, that is it.

I hear Charlie Brown was suspended from school. Some kid was allergic to Peanuts™.

And Christmas is one of the best times to point that out. Christmas is a holiday that has been morphed over time into one that, if we were to go by commercials alone, was based only on the mass consumption of stuff.

I won’t go into the deep history of Christmas. It’s long and more complicated than the math that Nancy Pelosi uses to charge her vodka back to taxpayers. But the short version is that the Winter Solstice was a great place to put a festival if you were going to convince the Germans and the Vikings that this new Christianity thing would work out okay for them. To make it work, Christmas had to be a party.

And it was. And it is. Over time, though, the party aspect of Christmas changed to a focus on family and generosity, which seems to be well matched to the holiday’s stated purpose. The meaning of Christmas then, is giving, not getting.

Certainly, there’s a certain magic in the eyes of a young child being surprised when the gifts under the tree far exceed anything she could imagine. The delight in a boy’s eyes when he sees the BB gun that will probably shoot his eye out?

Priceless.

I pitched a movie to Alec. He shot it down.

That’s the magic of the giving. The Mrs. and I, however, are old enough that we like the peace and family aspect of Christmas far more than the “stuff” aspect. I’ve given her the same gift for Christmas for the last five years (hint: it’s expensive scotch). She enjoys it. The Mrs. generally gets me something small. I like the keychain fob that she got me a year ago, “Be careful, handsome, I love you” better than something large, or an expensive scotch I won’t drink because it’s too expensive.

This year, The Boy and Pugsley have also (I think!) surpassed the greed aspect of Christmas. It’s not so much about the gifts they get. Heck, it’s not so much about the gifts they give, either. It’s about waking up on Christmas Eve, getting together and sharing the few gifts we have for each other, having a nice dinner, and then . . . relaxing together.

Together. And for me, that’s the biggest gift.

It’s that spirit that makes me look forward to Christmas. We’ve long been a “Christmas Eve” gift giving family, because it defuses the emotions associated with gift giving and leads to a very quiet and family-based Christmas Day. Plus no one wants to get up early if the presents are all already opened.

That’s the opposite, really, of the advertising that pelts us on a regular basis. The ads are all based on more and bigger. Time to give your loved one a $75,473 car with a big red bow, because nothing says love more than massive consumption.

Die Hard is not a Christmas movie. It’s a Christmas Eve movie.

Just like in most of our lives, we have choices. We can live the choice and have the Christmas that the media wants to sell us which is a holiday based almost entirely on creating the most economic activity possible.

Or? We can enjoy our family, and choose to place emphasis on giving, and choose to understand that the Nativity itself was the greatest gift that could be given. Even if you aren’t a Christian, understanding the promise of redemption in that gift of a child to mankind is one of supreme optimism.

That optimism is based firmly not in economics, since it promises exactly zero economic prosperity. No, this gift is not money – it was a gift based on virtue and morality.

I love prices, and incentives, and the creation of wealth. But there are things that are more important than money. You know, things like all the stuff . . . .

What If The Mess . . . Is All Planned?

“There is a pestilence upon this land, nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Think you’ve had a great morning?  Every day Joe wakes up and someone gets to explain to him that he’s the president.

Peter Grant over at Bayou Renaissance Man (LINK – if you’re not going there regularly, you’re missing out!) mentioned a quote from Monday’s post (The Winds Of War?):

The idea is simple – warfare encompasses absolutely every facet of the life of the enemy.  Destabilize the government.  Force their economy into chaos.  Starve them.  Own their communications systems.  In other words, it’s just like a Biden presidency.

When I write these posts, there are generally multiple edits.  First, I do a draft.  Then I go through and edit that.  Then I go through and use hammer, tongs, spackle and a welder to fill the post with jokes.  The last bit I do is to go to work in the meme forge and sweat and pound and make (mostly) new and original memes.

If your only tool is a meme, every problem looks like a grumpy cat.

In this case, I wrote the Biden line in the first edit.  I was trying to be a bit cheeky, but it just fit so well.  When Mr. Grant noticed that line . . . I thought about it even more.

What happens when your government is making war on you?

Seriously – if a foreign government would try to:

  • destabilize our currency (not money, currency) through massively printing it,
  • produce and disseminate propaganda to further polarize the citizens,
  • import millions of people with no ties to the country and no understanding of its governmental systems,
  • work through an admitted conspiracy encompassing virtually all media(traditional and social as well as search engines), corporations, state and to make sure the vote produced the “correct” winner,
  • make yet more Marvel movies,
  • effectively purge from the military all senior officers who don’t follow the correct ideology, and
  • create a culture of dependency on government programs,

we would say that was an act of war, or a copy of the secret Disney® business plan.

Sure, Donald Duck can walk around Disneyland© without pants and he’s beloved.  I do it, and I’m “banned for life.”

From an economic standpoint, one goal appears to be:  destroy the middle class and destroy small independent business owners.

Why?

Large businesses can be easily converged into following the Narrative with little actual damage in most cases.  Need examples?

  • Gillette® attacks traditional masculinity. It’s still in business.  It doesn’t want my business, and doesn’t care.  It’s doing fine financially.
  • Coke™ reportedly provided access to training that told employees to “be less white” and its stock is up about 20% since that came out, despite my personal boycott.

That’s two.  There are countless others.  If you look at the major companies that financially support the radical Marxist organization Black Lives Matter©, they are overflowing with cash.  They are free to take whatever political positions they want, as long as those positions are Leftist.  Just ask Ben & Jerry’s®, which is a Leftist political organization masquerading as an ice cream company.  I guess communists have finally fed someone.

I met a French guy – what a coward.  He kept asking for “mercy” . . .

Big Businesses love Big Government.  They love the huge shield that regulations bring – the more regulations, the fewer competitors they face.  And, if you’re lucky like me, OSHA names a new safety regulation after you.

Big Businesses also don’t care what consumers think, because most consumers are mad for a week or a month and then forget.  Me?  I haven’t bought Levi® jeans since 2002 or so when they went full anti-Second Amendment.  I guess I’m stubborn.  Must be in my jeans.

Big Business also doesn’t really care about inflation.  So what if a dollar is worth less?  Their job isn’t to sit on piles of cash, their job is to create cash flowing through the business, while keeping some of the cash for themselves.  Because the cash is flowing through, it doesn’t matter much if that cash is becoming less valuable every day, they’ll just make more cash and use it immediately to buy more raw materials.

Hunter wanted to be the Secretary of Energy until he found out it wasn’t pipes and lines.

Destabilization of the economy through inflation, though, is good if you want to create more government power.  Another way to create more power is to make sure people are polarized.  That means that they can’t come together to demand freedom.

Increasing poverty is a good one, too.  Having people become poor makes them slaves to the government, and afraid to speak up at injustice.  Microsoft® may choose to support Black Lives Matter™, but individuals can be fired for criticizing it on their own time even when not connecting that criticism to their employer.

Is it government suppression of speech?  No, why would they bother when private businesses will do it for them.  The effect, though, is the same.

At least he’s not French Vanilla Ice.

Is it too far to call it warfare against the Right?  It’s more than that – it’s a war against every aspect of American culture and the basis of what made that great – Western Civilization.  The statues are coming down not because the Left hates slavery or “colonialism”, the statues are coming down because they want to erase the history of America so that they can rewrite it to fit.

Looking into what that means to wealth for individuals, let’s extrapolate what we know:

The United States government for over 100 years had gold and silver as money for a very special reason – gold and silver meant stability for the money of a country.  You either have gold or you don’t.  You can’t print more.  Could you manipulate it?  Sure, but it was certainly harder than running a printing press.

When FDR (press S to spit) took from American citizens the right to own gold, he was effectively robbing them.  He bought gold from them at $20.67.  A year later, he revalued the dollar to $35 dollars to the ounce of gold.  It now took $1.69 to buy what a dollar did before Roosevelt’s heist.

“For example, the free circulation of gold coins is unnecessary, leads to hoarding, and tends to a possible weakening of national financial structures in times of emergency,” was what that philandering monster said to excuse the theft.  Me?  After I read that, I was glad he was in a wheelchair.

Fun fact:  he never ran for office.

But the pattern is there:  if the Left wants something you have, they will take it.  Will they confiscate gold in the future?  I don’t know.  I tend to think not, unless it’s just for spite.  In this case, they’ll inflate the currency, and lend freely to Big Businesses and Big Banks so that they can acquire houses and land and every asset with cheap, borrowed dollars.  Why steal the gold when they can make people so impoverished that they sell it?

After the elite have bought all the stuff they want?

Inflate again if they missed something.  Will they lose control and end up in hyperinflation?

Probably not, unless they want to.  But realize that almost every person reading this doesn’t have a seat at the table, and the game is certainly rigged.  We knew that.

But what happens when a government declares economic war against its own people?

Energy in 2022? I Hope So . . .

“No, Jonny. It consumes them. It eats energy – sunlight, electricity, the energy in a living body – anything it can get.” – Jonny Quest

I went into a room with a negative person in it, and then there were no people in it.

Energy is freedom.

Energy allows one person to do the work of hundreds or thousands.  I sit here typing this in Stately Wilder Mansion, it’s near freezing outside, yet a nice and toasty 61°F (43 and 2/3°kiloPEZ®) inside due to natural gas piped directly to my heater.  I like it cold in the house, just like my heart.

My computer is running, the television is running, and because I am apparently the only person in the house who knows how to use a light switch, at least 32 lights are on in the house are on.  It’s winter, so a light left on is (at worst) a little inefficient heater, so all is not lost.  I will tell you that when I die, though, I will walk to the light.  And turn it off.

Our energy costs aren’t all that high in winter, especially since I can keep warm by rubbing my thighs together like a cricket.  I go and fill my gas tank about every two months, so gasoline isn’t even that much of an issue.  When your commute is four miles a day (two miles each way) and takes four minutes (if I get caught at the one traffic light), well, it’s hard to use a lot of gas unless I pour it all over the truck and ignite it to look like a cool meteor while I’m driving.  Again.

But energy is freedom.

I started bench pressing again.  That’s a huge weight off my chest.

When energy prices are low around the globe, freedom increases.  As I’ve discussed in previous posts, high energy costs act like a tax on nearly all physical goods.  Sure, it won’t make the cost of a Kindle® e-book go up much, but it will increase the cost of a physical book – that has to be manufactured using energy, moved using energy, and delivered using energy.

So, what’s up?  Why are prices where they are?  Where are prices going?

I’ll start with “what’s up?”

We can’t create additional energy just by turning a knob:  the process is a bit more complicated than one of Joe Biden’s coloring books.

Let’s take oil.  In the 1930s, oil in Texas was so plentiful that it crashed the price.  Pools of the stuff would show up if you stuck a McDonalds straw too deep into the ground in East Texas.  Oil was so plentiful that people could barely tell the difference between water and gasoline.  Of course, in Flint, Michigan, you can get the gasoline unleaded.

I hear their swimmers are always in the lead.

What happened then is the Texas Railroad Commission decided it was in charge, and it limited the amount of oil that could be produced.  It was OPEC® before OPEC™ was even thought of – their idea was to stabilize the price of a seemingly limitless resource.

It worked.

But the era of oil abundance in the United States ended in 1973, and the Texas Railroad Commission (which still exists but no longer regulates railroads, seriously) ended allocations.  Texas could no longer control the price of oil in the United States by restricting sales.  The hunt for the next big oilfield was on.

We had then to hunt for oil in more and more distant places.

  • Alaska.
  • The Middle East.
  • Deepwater offshore.
  • Johnny Depp’s hair.

Also?  When exposed to pollen, bees develop hives.

Then we hit the jackpot – fracking.  Fracked oil is different than conventional crude.  It’s hidden in tight rocks that aren’t as porous.  That’s where the fracking comes in – the rock has to be fractured to let the oil out.  To keep the cracks open, high-pressure water and sand (and chemicals) are forced into the cracks.  The grains of sand remain and keep the cracks open.  There are so many jokes I’m not going to do here.

When this process started, it was inefficient.  But smart people spending billions of dollars will tend to make progress over time.  Dumb people with billions of dollars?  We call that the opposite of progress:  Congress.

There are three problems with fracking:

One – fracked wells are most productive in their first year of production.  Oil companies often run a rejuvenation process that increases flow after a few years, but mostly the later years are just a trickle in comparison to the initial years of production.  So, to have a continuous supply, you have to keep drilling, which is not boring.

Two – you have to keep drilling.  If the price drops and drilling stops, then the quantity of oil available drops quickly.  Then the price goes up.  Then everyone drills.  Because everyone is drilling, then the prices drops again.  And everyone stops drilling.  This acts like a “crack the whip” on the economy, since, as mentioned above, high oil prices act as a tax.

Why fracking?  Because I hear drilling is rigged.

Three – there’s more than profitability at stake.  Let me give an example:  if I have to walk to the grocery store to get food, and then I walk back home, that sounds healthy, right?  Sure.  I’m burning energy to go to the store.

But what happens if I burn more energy to go to the store than is contained in the food that I buy at the store?

I lose weight.  I’m actually spending more energy to get food than the energy in the food I’m consuming.  Plus, I’m rubbing my thighs together so I can stay warm.

What might be good for me is devastating as an economy.  At some point, it will be so difficult to get energy from oil, that, just like my trip to the store, we’ll be spending more energy to get the oil than the oil will provide us.  The energy return on energy invested will actually deplete the amount of energy available for us to use.

The more energy we use?  The faster we run out of energy.

I spent an hour on the treadmill yesterday.  Tomorrow?  I might turn it on.

Our primary energy source is that thermonuclear reactor that shows up every morning.  Our secondary source is tens of millions of years of stored sunlight from that same reactor, which just happens to show up in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal.  But the sunlight striking us every day has a problem:  it’s so diffuse that it’s difficult to make profitable use of it.  Sure, it warms us, it tans us, it makes the wind for our turbines, the photosynthesis for our corn, and the rain for our hydroelectric.  Energy is only useful when it becomes concentrated in some way.

You can’t generate energy with a tan.  Unless it’s a really, really good tan.

Are we at the point where it takes more energy than it’s worth to get energy?  A wind turbine in a good location will return 10 to 20 times the energy it took to make it, though that’s over the course of 20 years.  In a bad location?  A wind turbine will never return that energy, though I hear they love music:  they’re huge metal fans.

So, are we there yet, where the production of energy costs more than the energy we get?

I don’t think so.  Not quite yet.  When we do get there, it will become a cascading failure – every bit of energy we produce will actually dig us deeper into a hole.  Just like the Red Queen I mentioned last week:

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Never take a racing snail’s shell.  That makes it sluggish.

To keep a world of 8 billion people alive and with enough energy to consume Doritos® and Disney™ and Facebook© takes an ever increasing amount of energy.  2020 was an aberration – people stopped driving and energy prices (temporarily) went down faster than Kamala Harris’ . . . approval rating.

The last question was “what happens next?”

Currently (today) oil is about $70 per barrel.  The analysts that JPMorgan® have chained up in the basement of their skyscraper say that oil will jump to an average price of $125 per barrel in 2022, and then pop up further to $150 per barrel in 2023.

Double today’s prices.  Yikes!

What about the Energy Information Agency (EIA, a .gov that seems to be actually interested in energy)?  They say that in 2022, oil will average about . . . $72 per barrel – nearly the same as today.

It’s funny, because to know the price of oil, you have to know what is happening with economic growth, oil demand, and inflation.  If any of us know any of those things with certainty, we could make bets and double our money or better in six months.

Why did Biden win the golf tournament?  Because he finished it with one big stroke.

If JPMorgan™ has that genie in a bottle, they certainly wouldn’t be sharing it with mere mortals like you and I on the Internet – they’d make private trades and be zillionaires.  The fine folks at the EIA probably don’t make nearly as much as the analysts at JPMorgan©, but they do have the abject despair of working at a government job every single day.

My prediction?

  • If the economy crashes and the stock market implodes, oil will follow. People who aren’t working don’t need to go to jobs.  Will oil hit $40?    Depends on how low the stock market goes.
  • But! If inflation spikes and the government keeps shoveling cash like coal into a train firebox, well, $150 per barrel oil might seem like a bargain that would be cheap enough to take a shower in.

Crappy prediction, right?

It is.  Because with all of the difficult issues we simply don’t know.  The easiest bet is that oil will be more expensive because once inflation is unleashed, it’s hard to put back into the bottle.  The 1970s looked like this, so that would be my best bet.

Regardless, expensive energy has almost always been the enemy of freedom.

Prepare accordingly.

Bikini Economics And The Red Queen

“You heard Marcellus threw Tony Rocky Horror out a four story window for giving me a foot massage? And you believe that?” – Pulp Fiction

Ahh, Chuck Norris, with his hair feathered like the wings of a majestic eagle . . .

We have a built-in bias that there is a way that the world should be, rather than spending effort on understanding how the world it, and adjusting accordingly.

When something “big” happens, the default human condition is to assume that things will eventually go back to the way that they were before the event.  This is normal.  I recall reading in Taleb’s The Black Swan about how his relatives in Beirut kept expecting Lebanon to go back to the way it was before war broke out in the 1970s.  It hasn’t.

And it won’t.  And Lebanese police have it the worst:  they have to investigate restaurants if they hear of a bad hummus side.

Our economy is that way.  It is built, in large part, on inertia.  In January 2020, a broad definition of money (the Federal Reserve® calls it M2) was $15.5 trillion dollars.  Today, it stands at $22 trillion dollars.  Keep in mind that this includes money just sitting in accounts, gathering dust.

The money supply has increased by at least 43%.  How?

This graph is somewhat misleading – it doesn’t explain that savings accounts were added in the adjustment to make that big vertical line.  The totals I have in the text above are the latest I could find at the Fed®.  All I can suggest is that you find someone as interested in you as the Wilder Spokesmodel® is interested in economics.

The government printed it and then spent it.  The banks lent it, since there is essentially a zero reserve requirement now.  Regardless, what it means is that dollars are being printed at an ever-increasing pace.  The latest spending bills just add trillions to the mix.

Through all of this, economists are pretending that 20% inflation is growth.  As prices go up, the Gross Domestic Product goes up. But inflation is increasing faster.  We’re in recession, but that recession is hidden by inflation.  Our economy is shrinking even as printed money makes it seem larger.

Oddly, there are plenty of jobs at lower wages that are going unfilled.  Why?  Because with current stimulus spending and government benefits, in some cases it doesn’t make sense for people to go back to work.  Work for $15 an hour, or play vidya and eat Twinkies® for $12?

Not a hard choice for many.

Did you hear about the Amish topless bar?  Not a bonnet in sight.

What about people who want to work but don’t want to take the “jab”?  Those wages are going up phenomenally as companies work to compete for a shrunken pool of labor.  Think EMTs.  Firefighters.

It is a weird recession – prices go up, wages are going up (but not as much as prices), labor is scarce, but the GDP is down in constant dollar terms.

Looking around the corner, this simply cannot last.  I’ve written about the Red Queen before.  The Red Queen said to Alice in Alice in Wonderland’s sequel, Through the Looking-Glass as Alice asks the Red Queen why they’re running and not getting anywhere:

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Well, it’s almost a bikini picture.

Printing dollars like we are is just keeping the economy (sort of) in the same place.  It’s the monetary equivalent of using increasing amounts of crack to cure a junkie, or using electrical shocks and massive amounts of medication to keep a doddering 79-year-old Alzheimer’s patient mobile enough to give a rambling speech off of a teleprompter when wheeled out in front of a crowd.  But in either case, a Biden and pudding are involved.  So there’s that.

I’ve begun to wonder if Hunter might not be the best of the two for the Oval Office, at least he has goals.  Prostitutes and crack cocaine are goals and there’s a chance he might not show up for work at all in a four-year span.  He’s good at taking jobs and getting paid for nothing.

But this ignores a basic principle of fact.  When I print a dollar, I have created nothing.  To explain this, I’ll go back to the writings of dead French guy Frédéric Bastiat.  Bastiat asked a simple question:  what happens if someone breaks a shopkeeper’s window?

Well, he must go buy another window.  If that costs 6 francs (7 and 3/16 liters) then the glassmaker has an economic gain, which he could invest in increasing the size of his glass manufacturing, or, more likely (since he is French) use it to buy cartoonishly long wands of bread, cheap cigarettes, and berets.

So everyone wins, right?  The shopkeeper gets a new window, and the glassmaker gets a profit.

Well, if that were correct, then all we would have to do is enjoy the George Floyd Economic Plan®:  burn down cities and everyone gets rich when we rebuild them.

Obviously, that’s nonsense, primarily because the economy is (at best) the same as it was before.  At worst?  Every dime spent to replace broken glass is a dime that wasn’t spent making the economy wealthier:  many profits are spent to increase capacity or efficiency.  Increased capacity increases the wealth that the factory can produce.  Increased efficiency lowers their cost.  Both of these things are (generally) good.

Breaking windows, like printing dollars, is just theft.  Whereas the shopkeeper has his window destroyed, the people can have all that they worked for and saved destroyed.

My friend patented a cold air balloon, but it never took off.

Printing cash is theft, but theft from those that have been productive to those that either leech off of the system or those that are insiders.  But I repeat myself.  In the bailouts following the Great Recession in 2009, billions of dollars were offloaded to Wall Street insiders for taking no-risk positions in mortgage-backed securities.  If the insiders won, they won and kept the money.  If the insiders lost, the U.S. Treasury (that is, us) lost.

The games have gone on too long – the economy is a lie, and politicians of both flavors are happily breaking windows to keep it going just a few more years until they get theirs.

I’ll point out that I’ve correctly predicted five of the last three recessions, so I do tend to be a bit on the pessimistic side.  Regardless, I’ll maintain that all of the elements exist right now for significant and lasting decline.  All of the “emergency” spending bills, the “Build Back Better” bill – all of those have one purpose – to feed the Red Queen so we can go faster and faster.

To stay in the same place.

Why do I never eat before a marathon?  I fast.

As much as we might like to go back to a simpler time – a rewind to the 1990s, perhaps, we cannot.  Resets don’t really exist – the only actual outcome is to create a new (or the same) set of winners.  We are on the verge of a strange and dangerous new future.

It starts the moment printing ceases to have any effect.  That’s just around the corner.

Time to stock up.  I think there might be a lot more broken windows by the time we’re done.

What Is Truth?

“She’s always hungry. She always needs to feed. She must eat. All she gets is nasty Orcses.” – LOTR, Return of the King

I saw a wanted poster for Schrodinger’s cat.  It said, “Wanted Dead And Alive.”

I have a general routine that I start before I write.  I interact with my family because they seem to want me to do so.  I then retire to the Wilder Tub of Genius where I smoke a cigar the size of a crutch that Tom Cruise might use.  It’s not a huge cigar, since Tom isn’t that tall.  But it is a mighty cigar nonetheless.

Then I generally enjoy life.  Unfortunately, sometimes the muse hits me while I’m happily hanging out in the hot tub, and it pulls me away from the three pages (yes, it was that many) of notes I had prepared for you.  Whenever that happens, I always, and I repeat always, go for the muse.

The idea of a muse is simple:  it is creation.  It’s an untamed force that hits you and takes over.  It’s not exactly like The Mrs. hitting me in the face with a raw chicken covered in Ranch® dressing, but it’s close.

That’s tonight.  Fridays are often that night where I go where the muse hits me

What hit me tonight?

Tonight it was this simple idea:  controlling what goes into your mind is the key.

https://youtu.be/VYEU-12U32A

Except the dormouse. I hate that guy.

I start every post with a quote.  There’s a reason why I do this – it sets the mind of the reader into a familiar idea.  If the reader (you) doesn’t recognize the quote, it’s okay.  The quote isn’t necessary for the magic that follows, but if you know the quote, you are nearly instantly transported into the ideas that will follow.

It’s like a subtle form of hypnosis, but one in which I don’t require you to pretend you’re a duck who has just created an egg out of chocolate and plutonium.  Well, not more than once.  As far as you know.

I use that because I want to create a mental space where the ideas that follow will sit well.  If you’re already on familiar ground, the ideas will flow more smoothly.  It’s a stupid idea, but it’s grounded in reality.  Besides, I like movie quotes.

The reason I chose movie quotes is because they are the most shared of our experiences.  Millions have seen, say, Ghostbusters®, while only hundreds of thousands have read Dostoevsky.  Heck, I told my buddy who was an Orthodox priest that I was reading Dostoevsky and he shook his head and said, “John, that’s a little heavy, don’t you think?”

There was a really bad joke about ghosts.  It still haunts me.

When a guy in a Russian cassock tells you that Dostoevsky is a bit heavy, well, it’s probably not the best way to reach people.  By the way, spoiler alert:  It’s Russian literature, so everyone dies.  And then it gets worse.  It’s almost as bad as reading a German instruction manual for a chainsaw – I tried reading one once all it gave me was a longing to invade Poland.

Or a British cookbook.  Good heavens.  The British have ruined pudding for me forever.  Well, maybe Cosby beat them to that, but, still.

So, here I am, admitting that I want to manipulate the emotions of my readers so that they are more receptive of the ideas of crazy people like Plato or Seneca or Aristotle or Twain (Shania, not Mark) and the message that follows will sound crazy.

Be careful of what goes inside your head.

You don’t think that color scheme was an accident, do you?

I’ve tried again and again to show this very simple point:  in 1900, the only regular contact any American would have had with the Federal government was the postman bringing letters.  Now?  When I get up in the morning I have nearly a dozen interactions with the Federal government before I leave my front door.  The alarm goes off, and

  • The lights (subject to Federal emissions standards at the power plant) come one and
  • I go to the shower (subject to both EPA water standards and EPA waste disposal requirements) and
  • Brush my teeth with toothpaste (subject to FDA requirements) and
  • Put on my clothes (subject to The Mrs. wanting me to not look too cool in public) and
  • Go into the Wilder Morning Den and drink a cup of (USDA approved) coffee and
  • Have some (USDA approved) bacon and
  • Pick up my (Federal Highway Administration Approved) keys and
  • Check my (FCC approved) cellphone for messages and
  • Walk upon my (Building Code Approved) floor and
  • Open my door (which is made of lead and plutonium) and
  • Start my (Insert a zillion Federal regulations here) car and drive to work.

Oddly, this little demonstration undersells the impact of government in my life.  There are dozens of regulations that I skipped because, well, I’ve been drinking.  Blame Jim Beam®.

This is just the setup, however.

What goes in your head?

I’ve told you how I try to make a post better by increasing your receptiveness to it.  My motives are simple – I am not trying to sell you anything except ideas.  And those Ideas are (mostly) the ideas of the most brilliant people who have ever lived on Earth.  I try to sneak a few of mine in, because, hey, my beard is awesome, so I might have built up some wisdom.

But who is trying to manipulate the ideas that go inside your head?

The Mrs. had a complement the other day.  She couldn’t listen to mainstream media coverage on a certain topic because Truth that I shared with her had infiltrated her brain.  Every Single Time the media tried to lie to her, she reacted in revulsion because . . . the Truth had set her free.

What goes in your head?

What do you feel that is real?  Why is that you feel that thing?

Those are very, very difficult questions, and are not for the weak of heart – what if you understood that most things you felt were truth were instead, lies?

This is a devastating lens.  What lies do you believe in because they are pretty little lies?  The more you examine them, the more they fall apart.

Communism sounds good on paper.  Unless you’re reading a history book.

I promise you that I have done my best to make every word as Truthful as I can make it.  But I ask of you this, can you understand the immense amount of propaganda you have been fed nearly every day of your life?

Step back.

What, really, is the Truth?

There is an entire industry made of tens of thousands who want to feed your head.  They want to bring their ideas into yours.  There is an amazing amount of money being spent to try to influence you.

What, then will you choose?

The pretty little lies, or the Truth that you know exists underneath?

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.

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.