Category: Wealth

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.

The Wilder Manifesto, Complete With Otis

“Okay, whose job was it to feed the butterflies?” – The Venture Brothers

What do you call a unicorn’s dad?  Popcorn?

I remember reading a story as a child – I’d give the source if I could remember, but too many years have passed since I read it.  I’m at the age where I’m having trouble remembering names – mine for starters.  But some stories stick with you, especially when you can relate to them like I relate to batteries.  I mean, like batteries I’m not included in anything, either.

In this particular case, a young Japanese girl sat in a classroom.  Her desk was near a class project.  Inside a terrarium, a caterpillar had spun its cocoon and was slowly turning into a butterfly.  Each day, the young girl would watch this metamorphosis.  Finally, the butterfly was finally ready to emerge from the cocoon.

It struggled.  The little girl watched, sympathetic to the beautiful butterfly that was trying to free itself.  She could hardly wait – little kids are like that.  Every minute the butterfly tried to escape, she was torn.  It worked so hard!  Finally, she couldn’t help herself, and helped to tear open the cocoon for the butterfly.

The butterfly fell to the bottom of the terrarium.  It walked along the bottom of the terrarium, pitifully.  Soon enough, the butterfly died.  The little girl saw this happen.

That butterfly knows what it did.

The teacher pulled the little girl, who was now crying, aside.  “Did you help the butterfly get out of the cocoon?”

“Yes,” the little girl replied.  “It was struggling so!  I couldn’t stand watching it fight so hard!”

“You have to understand,” the teacher responded, “Only by struggling to escape the cocoon does the butterfly build enough strength in its wings to fly.”

Then he straightened up.  “You KILLED IT!  You’re so stupid!” screamed the teacher and then sent the little girl to the Japanese PEZ® mines.  Okay, in the story I read, the teacher didn’t scream that at the child, but I like my ending better.  In my defense, The Mrs. says I’m a high-functioning sociopath.

Butterfly and PEZ© mines aside, a repeated, tragic, repeated lesson of humanity is this:  misplaced compassion destroys.

I apologize.  John Gruden made me make this meme.

Misplaced Compassion

The median world household income is sort of a guess.  In 2013, Gallup® estimated it was about $10,000, and I haven’t seen a more recent number.  So, if everyone made the global average income, per capita, we’d each make about $2,900.  Per year.

The average family in the world is really, really poor.  But, hey, give a poor man a fish and he eats for a day.  Give a poor man a poisoned fish?  He eats for the rest of his life.

If you needed an explanation of why people are attempting to come to the United States, even the poor people here generally make more than $2,900 per year.  Welfare benefits for illegals (in the scale of their home countries) is big bucks, plus they get free schools.  The magnet driving the illegals is the wage imbalance (if they want to work, and many do) plus social programs (whether they want to work or not).

Being poor in the first world is better than being above average income in most countries.

Huh.  They called that a traitor when I was a kid.

This is not sustainable, because there’s a problem.  People rampage across borders in endless waves, yet capital flows freely.  Even as people flood the border, and I’ve heard estimates of 3,000,000 this year, industry flows away.

Capital flows freely, it flows without respect to any sort of morality.  Add in zero tariffs?  It’s a race to the bottom.  The economy hollows out even as millions come to partake in it.  Heck, if it gets bad enough, Google® might have to lay off some congressmen.

Just kidding.  Google™ would have to lay off all the congressmen.

The lure is simple.  Short term, we all get to buy lower-cost stuff.  Long term, however, it results in a shell of an economy.  Supposedly, one of George H.W. Bush’s economic advisors said, “It doesn’t make any difference whether a country makes computer chips or potato chips.”

That’s true.  Unless you live in what we call the real world.  Check the wages of people who work at either place.  Get back to me and tell me it doesn’t matter.  That’s the sort of short-term thinking that leads to long-term poverty and the eventual destruction of a nation.

What do you call a sad Italian parasite?  A hopeless Roman tick.

Venezuela Effect

The other problem with the social safety net is that the money and effort spent in creating and maintaining it is money and effort that isn’t spent advancing the economy.  Even if we had infinite amounts of money (spoiler alert:  we don’t) we have only so much effort.

Socialist giveaways lower motivation and destroy economic productivity.  I even made the argument with a Leftist friend that we should delay the implementation of socialism so we end up with better technology.  He agreed.  But, let’s be fair – in a pure capitalist economy, it’s man exploits man.  In a socialist economy, it’s the reverse.

What we are morphing into is a government of the takers and the oligarchy versus those that produce, perhaps the worst possible combination of crony capitalism and socialism combined.

One model of this is Venezuela.  The government replaced the leaders of the oil company, PdVSA©, with loyal commies.  A company that previously was one of the leading economic winners in the country (heck, the continent) was transformed over a decade into a basketcase that had to import fuel.

Yes, Venezuela is sitting on one of the largest deposits of oil in the world, yet they degraded their economy so they couldn’t make fuel.  It’s like Hollywood having to import movies, or Washington, D.C. having to import corruption, or a Biden having to outsource sexual depravity.

Biden met with his cabinet today.  And argued with his desk.

Welcome to our future under Brandon, er Biden.  Being a tick is a great business model until there are so many of them that they kill the host.  But I guess that the reason for that is real socialism has never been tried?  From a tick’s point of view, I guess they just need more dogs.

Also, the social safety net isn’t based on any moral concept, either at the source of the money (which is not freely given, but taken) to the recipient, whose only requirement is to fit a category and be breathing.  Forced charity isn’t charity.  Unworthy recipients are little more than thieves.

I mean, not that I have an opinion.

Potterville

In It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart’s character is shown a world where he didn’t exist.  The same thing happened to me, but it was just called “Tuesday”.  In Jimmy Stewart’s case, it was Potterville – a town where everything that wasn’t illegal was fair game for capitalists to exploit.

And exploit it the Potterville that was the United States, they have.  The “money” monopoly was made possible by the end of the Cold War.  With enough nukes, pretty much everyone is going to take your cash.  So, the idea was to print money and get stuff.  As long as that worked, the party could go on forever.

When I win a journalistic prize for this blog, I’m going stick my finger out to Joe Biden and say, “Pulitzer.”

This was built on the idea that there was a check on political financial abuse.  Bill Clinton was famously quoted as saying, “You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f*****g bond traders?”  In the 1990s, there was a check on the excesses of the Left.

In 2021, apparently, those f*****g bond traders have no real place to invest or are “all in” on Weimerica, so the printing presses go brrr.  Why make (spins wheel) tires when you can make them with nearly no labor costs and no safety or environmental regulations right where they grow the rubber trees?

And if a plucky guitar company (Gibson®) wants to make guitars in the United States and they don’t agree with you politically?  Why not go after them for a non-crime for “importing wood” from countries that wanted to sell them the wood?

Sounds like Potterville to me.

Another Way

Our choice isn’t only between Potterville and Venezuela, or the strange blend of the two that we are becoming.

First, we have to have a nation.  Nations matter.  The second thing we have to have is morality and virtue.  As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And he was right.

The choice is the “Lived Experiences” of the Leftist mob creating a new Venezuela combined with Global Capitalism creating a Potterville, or the other way:  Mayberry – morals based capitalism, a self-moderating system.

  • The failure of Potterville is that something being legal doesn’t mean it’s moral.
  • The failure of Venezuela is that universal socialism is jut theft from everyone.
  • Combining the two leads to Purdue Pharma® selling poison while the government pays for it.

Rebirth is possible only with morality, not a reversion.  1992 will always turn into 2022 unless the morality changes.

And he likes his martini shaken.  Or stirred.  Or unmixed.  Or still in the bottle.  He’s not picky.

Politics is downstream from culture.  Culture is downstream from values and morality.  What values do we share?  What morals do we share?

Who do we serve?

In the end, misguided compassion will destroy more than the economy.  It will destroy us all, as will capitalism without morality.

There is another way.

I believe in America.  We will find our way.  It will not be what came before.  Like a butterfly, we will struggle.

Let us hope that struggle builds our strength.

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.

Bikini Economics And The Money Supply

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

One of the few things that Pa Wilder left me in his will was his bed. I guess you could call it an heir mattress.

On April 5, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order that made the owning of more than trivial amounts of gold by individuals illegal. Owning gold wouldn’t be legal again until Gerald Ford signed a bill into law that reversed that abomination of a policy.

That law went into effect on December 31, 1974, and people could once again buy gold.

In 1933, the price of gold was fixed: $20.67 per ounce. It didn’t vary, because the value of the dollar was pegged to the price of gold. The Fed© couldn’t print dollars unless they had at least 40% of that value in gold to back it up.

Pro tip: If you have a balloon elephant that won’t fit in your backseat, you can always pop the trunk.

What did the government then do?

It defaulted on the dollar. A dollar had been worth (around) 1/20th of an ounce of gold. After the government stole it all, they decided that a dollar was now only worth 1/35th of an ounce of gold. Poof. Immediately, and with the stroke of a pen, the government stole 43% of the value of every dollar in existence.

The penalty for “hoarding” gold was a big one: a $10,000 fine and up to 10 years in the slammer. I guess the government didn’t (and doesn’t) like competition when it comes to stealing.

It was the biggest heist in history – until Nixon severed the link between the gold and the dollar completely. After that, people could own gold again. There was no real reason for the government to not allow them to own it: they had now stolen the rest of the value of the dollar.

If you rob a vape store, is that a Juul® heist?

And it only took 41 years from 1933 to 1974 to convince people that was acceptable.

Since Nixon removed all gold connection, a dollar is worth (today) about 1/1800th of an ounce of gold.

But that isn’t enough to feed the beast.

The (metaphorical) printing presses have been shoveling money into the economy under the mistaken assumption that all we need is additional debt to keep the engine going. It’s like a demented congressman who doesn’t understand engines deciding to open up the hood of an F-150® to just pour gasoline on it using the dim understanding of a toddler that, “gasoline makes engines go, so if I pour enough gasoline on the engine, it will be as fast as a spaceship.”

That’s really what passes as logic in Washington, D.C. now. I keep writing about the economy in the slim hope that whatever passes for an intellect in the halls of congress will get distracted enough to spend at least a minute or two learning before returning to the concept of, “Ugh, free stuff good. Grug pay for stuff easy because all money free. Wonder why Grug’s armpit’s stink?”

I swear, AOC couldn’t spell “cat” if you spotted her the “C” and the “T”.

See, economics can be interesting!

The Fed® has gone all-in on this economic shadow puppet theater, shoving pools of money toward banks to shore up their balance sheets. Some of the people who are on the winning side of this great wave of money being sloshed around have even spent some.

Blackrock® buying up all the houses for sale? Yup. They see what’s coming. All the rich and powerful buying farmland that will never produce enough via crops or cattle to justify the price? They see what’s coming. They’re moving as quickly as possible to use this money to buy everything they can.

And people are happy. “Hey, I sold Ma’s old house after she passed away for twice what she paid for it in 2000! I made out like a bandit.”

It’s not all bad. Thankfully, the velocity of money is down.

What’s the velocity of money?

That’s how fast a dollar gets spent. Poor people move money the fastest – a dollar comes in and, poof, out it goes again. They have to spend it because they don’t have any spare money. They get paid on Friday and on Saturday it’s turned into rent payments and insurance payments and Cheetos® from Target™.

Roses are red, roses are blue, depending upon their velocity relative to you.

But the velocity of money is now slower than Joe Biden when he’s asked difficult questions, like, “What is the year, Joe? Hey, we’re talking to you. Dammit, he’s gone catatonic again. Someone get those squeaky toys he likes. And keep Kamala out of the vodka.”

Things would be far worse if the velocity of money hadn’t dropped so far that it was moving as slow as Oprah trying to get off of a couch. Since poor people slosh it around so much, that means it’s exactly where the Fed® put it: with the rich people.

So, if the money supply has gone vertical, then why hasn’t the price of everything doubled?

And most of it is sitting in pools right now. Except for the early adopters who are looking for something, anything to buy so that when the dust clears out of the coming inflation that they are richer than ever and Oprah has even more Twinkies®.

I’m not against capitalism – but this isn’t capitalism. It’s a rigged card game where your money evaporates – first slowly, and then all at once.

The engine of debt isn’t driving economic growth anymore. What the debt is doing is papering over the holes in the system so that it keeps going another week, another month, and hopefully another year.

But the downside to this is the longer a failing system is kept going by speeding it up, the more energy it stores, the bigger the crash, the bigger the collapse.

Why did Princess Diana cross the road? Inertia.

The economy has inertia, though. Even though it’s working on the most significant collapse in the history of the United States, people still believe. They take dollars because they believe. They believe the rules aren’t going to change.

They will.

Since we’ve seen this game before – we can take at least some steps to protect ourselves. I suppose it’s time to buy PEZ® before the rush . . . .

Emotional Bank Accounts – Another Form Of Wealth

“I’m yours, Lurch.  My heart.  My soul.  My bank account.” – The Addams Family

If it’s 2% milk, what’s the other 98%?

I generally try to be an upbeat person.  I’ve got good reason to be.  So far, at least, most of the worst things in my life have led to most of the best things in my life.  And it seems the worse the initial event is, the better the final outcome.

The track record is pretty good.  I’m optimistic.  Heck, with a small thermonuclear war, who knows how good things will get for me!

Optimism is one of my personal keys to life.  And it’s key to my relationships.

One thing I’ve learned (besides the fact that cats float but don’t like it) along the way is this:  what I get out of my relationships is just like my job or any other aspect of my life.  The more that I put into the relationship, the more that I get out of the relationship.

“I have become Fluffy, Destroyer of Worlds.”

Stephen Covey called this the Emotional Bank Account®.  I put the little ® there in this case because Stephen Covey ® almost everything under the Sun.

The idea of the Emotional Bank Account™ is simple:  every relationship that you have is one where you’re either doing the things that build the relationship or doing things that cause the relationship to fade faster than Johnny Depp’s career.

A ramen noodle warehouse burned down.  Dozens of dollars in inventory were destroyed. 

This is a simple and important concept.  In my career I’ve worked in lots of different office environments and seen lots of different characters that quickly developed an overdraft situation with me:

  • The Complainer: There’s a problem with everything, in the view of a Complainer.  It’s like working with Goldilocks, but the porridge is never, ever the right temperature.  There is no topic that isn’t complained about.  Heck, if they were the manager of the Tesla® plant, they’d complain that the place smelled musky.
  • The Helpless: Helpless people simply cannot do any particular task, and need help each and every time they do it.  If you allow it, they’ll pawn off as much of the task to you as they can, each and every day.  What’s the name for a collective parasitical group of people like this?
  • The Woe-Is-Me: This is a perennial victim.  Everything in their life that’s bad?  They’re not responsible for it.  How bad is their life?  They have to shop at Wal-Martyr®.
  • The Untrustworthy: Think you’ve told them a secret?  Soon enough the entire office knows.  And untrustworthy people who use marijuana are worse.  They’re guilty of high treason.
  • The Emergency Room Doctor: Everything has to be done now – it’s all urgent.  And there’s a sense of criticality about even the most mundane tasks.  I mean, if your parachute doesn’t open, why panic?  You’ve got the rest of your life to fix it.

Those people are draining.  Don’t be one of them.  How do I know this?  Once I was going through a rough patch, and was slipping into Woe-Is-Me.  I could sense from my friends that I had ridden that pony a little too long, or maybe I needed to up my deodorant game.  I decided to stop complaining.

Then The Mrs. complained that I don’t buy her flowers.  I have no idea when she started selling them.

I decided that if I had a problem worth complaining about, I’d deal with or shut up.  Even my best friends have a max tolerance level for dealing my emotional complaints.  The Mrs. is even more direct.  When I whine, her only comment is:  “And what, exactly, are you going to do about it?”

Oddly enough, though, I found that (in most circumstances) when I’m a positive person, people like to see me around more.  They ask me for help.  They offer help.  My account balance is full.

It’s not just at work.  It’s not just my friends.  It’s my family, too.  If every interaction that I have with them is negative, people aren’t exactly happy when Pa comes home.

Hopefully, this knife joke wasn’t too edgy. 

Being a positive, productive, trustworthy person?  When times are good, it’s important.  When times aren’t good?

Maybe even more important.  And when we talk about wealth, being surrounded by good, trustworthy people is wealthy, indeed.

The Command Economy, Coming Soon To A Nation Near You

“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.

Cathedrals, Buzz Aldrin, And Changing The World

“You know, most people think that the name Buzz Aldrin has some huge meaning behind it.  Nope, he was afraid of bees.” – Frasier

What’s the difference between Joe Biden and Buzz Aldrin?  Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon.  Joe Biden likes kids to rub his leg hair.

I think back to the builders of the European cathedrals.  The construction of Notre Dame was started in 1163 A.D., not long after the Norman Conquest of England.  Notre Dame was finished in 1345 A.D.

182 years.  I might not even live that long, and I take vitamins and eat only a diet of meat that I hunt half-naked while armed only with stone-tipped spears.  The people in Wal-Mart® have gotten a bit tired of the spears, but it doesn’t technically violate their weapons policy.  And I use a Visa™ to pay, though they make a “eeeew” face when I pull it from my fur loincloth on a sweaty summer day.

Think about that.  NO!  Not my sweaty fur loincloth, the cathedral.  Think about the motivation that it requires to get up every morning when the thing you’re trying to accomplish won’t be done in your lifetime.  Or the lifetime of your child.  Or the lifetime of their children.

That requires motivation.  Also, I have no idea what they used for alarm clocks, and their humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid and complaining about how French they were and how they hoped the Germans would never invent panzers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame sure had a twisted back story.

Motivation, though, remains key in everything you do in life, even if you’re not building a cathedral.  One motivational mistake is to aim too high.  When someone aims too high, they run the risk of being disappointed by results.

As I’ve discussed with one of my friends, he noted that research shows the most happy people in the Olympics®, overall, are the bronze medal winners.  Third place isn’t so bad.  Since I heard that the intelligence of dolphins was second only to man, that means Leftists should be happy, being in third place and all.

For the bronze medal winners, well, here they are on the world stage.  They did really well.  Were they close to winning it all?  Sure, close enough to get a bronze medal.  But, there’s the guy over there with the silver medal, so, he and another guy were better.

Most bronze medal winners can be happy that if they’d been just a little bit better, they’d have been in . . . second place.  If they’d worked a lot harder, they’d have still been only one place better.  So, third isn’t so bad.  They might even get the Junior High Marching Band to lead a parade when they get home.

The silver medal winner, though, will always have it eating on him:  what if he hadn’t skipped practice that week?  What if he had pushed a little harder in the weight room?  The silver medalist is plagued with a bushel basket of “what if’s” that will wake him up in the middle of the night.  Second place is tantalizing.  It is the story of near success, like England’s soccer team.

Helen Keller never saw a movie about pirates.  Because she’s dead.

The gold medalist?  It depends.  In many cases, Olympic™ level athletes work for two decades to get the skill and experience to win Olympic® gold, to be, literally, the best in the world at something that no one will pay them to do.

Sure winning’s great, right?  But what happens when the dog finally catches the car?  What then?

Let’s move sideways a bit more, and return to one of my favorite people in history:  Buzz Aldrin.  It will all make sense in the end.  I’m a trained professional.

Buzz was a guy who did a lot of things that were world-class.  He went to the USMA at West Point.  He was a fighter pilot who shot down commies in Korea, but still didn’t get to kill as many commies as Mao or Stalin did.  He got a doctorate from MIT on rocket navigation.

And one other thing.  What was it?

Oh, yeah.  He was the second man on the frigging Moon.

That’s really cool.  But there appears to be a downside to that.  It wasn’t a just something small and fleeting like an Olympic® gold medal, it was one of the ultimate gold medals in all of human history.

Ever.

How do you follow that up?  Get a Denny’s® Franchisee Award for cleanest bathroom in Des Moines?

I hear Santa’s bathroom is clean because he uses Comet.

Neil Armstrong figured out how to follow it up.  That man was always kind of spooky and Zen and perhaps was okay owning a Denny’s© in Des Moines, selling Moons over My Hammies™ and Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity® pancakes.

Buzz didn’t figure it out, probably because his work in physics and killing commies did not prepare him to make a decent pancake.  Imagine:  Buzz was 39 and there was literally no way his life hadn’t peaked.  Nothing, and I mean nothing he could ever do again would match up to what he did.

First a week passes.  Then a month passes.  Then a year passes.  The hollow feeling inside of Buzz grew.  How do you move forward?  How do you top yourself?  I mean, you could make a really great pancake, but it would have to be the best pancake in the history of pancakes.  Dang.  That still doesn’t beat being on the frigging Moon.

He was stumped.  He had fame.  He had the ability to get whatever money he wanted, more or less.

But he had peaked.

What to do?

Buzz crawled into a bottle.  Eventually, after leaving the Air Force, Buzz even spent time selling used cars.  Sure, that worked for Kurt Russell in the 1980 film, but Buzz was awful at it.

What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a COVID-Jab advocate?  The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

As near as I can tell, Mr. Aldrin finally pulled himself out of his funk.  He finally decided his place was being an advocate for manned spaceflight, specifically to Mars.  He even helped to create a transfer orbit to make a trip to Mars the most time-effective that he could envision.  You could say that Buzz figured out the gravity of the situation.

That more than anything, I think, helped him.  Buzz found something that was so big, so important, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it in his lifetime.

Mars.  A worthy goal for mankind.  A goal that is meant for brave dreamers, for people who might want to change humanity.  He had found his cathedral.

Again.  Buzz had already done it once.

Mr. Aldrin is an unusual case – one of the highest achievers in a generation of high achievers.  Many mornings I’m just glad that the alarm managed to wake me up.  But I’ve had my share of success in the business world, reaching as high as I ever really wanted to go, doing the one job I wanted to do.

When Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins went to meet President Nixon after the Moon mission, Mike had to spend the entire time driving around the White House.

Where Buzz aimed high, perhaps I didn’t aim as high, but I still got there.

Then what?

My writing is a part of that.  Where do you go when you have whatever you want?

You find something important, and you start building.  You start building something more important than you.  I think Neil Armstrong found that when he started teaching.  Perhaps he got his satisfaction from helping the next generation learn.

I can’t be sure.  Neil didn’t really say.  He seemed happy that the attention had passed.  My Apollo-gies if I got that wrong.  And this isn’t about him, anyway.

The lesson I learned from Buzz was a simple one:  have a goal.

Find a cathedral to build.  Find something so much bigger than yourself that you’re willing to build it even though no one alive on Earth will ever see it through.  Make it something that you can care about.  Make it big enough that, at best, you can help build only part of it.

If you can find your cathedral, you will have the rarest of gifts:  you will shape the future.

Remember, not all cathedrals are made with stones, and the best ones are built in the minds of men.

Why?

Because rent is cheaper there.

Investing The Oligarch Way

“Even for billionaire playboys, three o’clock is pushing it. The price of leading a double life, I fear.” – Batman Begins

I tried to find a good joke about carpentry, but nothing wood work.

Most of my life I’ve lived in places that were sparsely populated.  On Wilder Mountain during the school year, the nearest kid between the ages of 5 and 16 was about 8 miles away.  Ma Wilder would tie a pork chop around my neck so the dog would play with me.

I kid.  The solitude was nice.  I hiked by myself.  Some people “summered” there, meaning they had enough money to turn a season into a verb.  That was nice because that meant the same kid would show up year after year and we would go fishing or biking.

Right now, I have probably a hundred neighbors within a two-mile drive.

By many standards, that’s sparse, too.  For me, it’s just on the edge of “crowded” but since my daily commute consists of one stoplight that’s generally green, I can make it work.

You want scary?  North Korea has a missile that can hit New York City.  If it can make it there, it can make it anywhere.

The trend, though, isn’t small towns like Modern Mayberry.  The trend is amazingly large and increasingly dehumanized cities.  I was watching the zombie movie set in South Korea, Last Train to Busan, with Pugsley last year.  It was really Seoul-crushing.  I decided to use the Internet to find pictures of what South Korea looks like when zombies aren’t chasing mass transit.

I was shocked by the density.  It turns out that South Korea has an average population density of 1,326 people per square mile, which is even more zombies per square mile than that German zombie movie, Shambler’s List.

Sure, you say, South Korea is only half of the population density of the city of Houston.  But that’s the urban part, and not including the ‘burbs.  The country of South Korea is, on average, nearly twice as dense as heavily populated suburbs.  On average.  That includes forests and rice paddies and zombie storage lots, er, cemeteries.

Despite the obvious inferiority for personal defense when the Moderna©-Pfizer™ Vaxombies inevitably show up (That means it’s working), cities continue to draw people to them.  The biggest reason, I suppose, is jobs.

Ever think that the evil aliens from They Live were a lot nicer than the human leaders we have today?

Having never grown up in that density, when I lived in a Houston ‘burb that had a population density of around 800 people per square mile.  I always felt lost and anonymous in that number of people.  With the flow of traffic, a five-mile jaunt to the supermarket could take 15 minutes or more.

Why did I do it?  My job.

Before writing this, I wasn’t sure how long this could go on.  A quick DuckDuckGo® search quickly told me the answer – Houston.  Certainly farther than Houston density:  one slum in Mumbai has a population density of 720,000 to 870,000 people per square mile depending on the source you choose to believe.  That’s a square (roughly) of six feet by six feet for each person, which includes streets.

36,300 people would be mashed into my five-acre lot.  I hope the ones that get assigned a space in the lake can tread water.  At heart, I’d prefer an Italian slum to an Indian one – I think I’d do okay in a spaghetto.

In other news, I now count as a family of three.

I’m pretty sure that mankind wasn’t designed in any way to live in conditions like that.  One article (which attempted to make the slum sound a lot less like a war crime) still mentioned the smell.  I guess in India none of the houses had base-mints.

Again, a slum in India isn’t a how-to manual for human habitation on Earth, but that’s a major trend in the United States today.  When I joke that they want you to live in the pod and eat the bugs, keep in mind that’s more than a joke to the powers that be.

See, I’m not kidding.

The solution, of course, is to own actual land.  Bill Gates and the other members of the Oligarch Class certainly have figured that out as well.  Bill recently bought 242,000 acres – enough to hold nearly 1.8 billion people by Mumbai-slum levels of packing ‘em in.

Although Mr. Gates is recently become exposed as über-creepy, no one accuses him of being stupid, except for the time when Melinda Gates told him, “Bill, this marriage isn’t working.”  Bill responded, “Well, let’s get divorced, remarry, and see if that doesn’t clear up the problems.”

The land rush is on.  Generally, these booms are followed by busts.  But when one of the things that is likely going to go bust is the currency itself, well, a small fluctuation in land prices doesn’t seem to matter much.  It must be a good deal, too.  Nearly half the land in Scotland is owned by just 432 people.  That might be why people are unhappy there – I hear even their flag is cross.

They want you to have a Land Rover® and a landlord.

Over time, the Oligarch Class has managed to create a pretty good way to hang on to wealth for generation after generation:  massive tracts of land, art, and precious things.  The Oligarch Class isn’t stupid – they keep the land and art in trusts so it moves from generation to generation seamlessly.  They never own it, but they control it.  I imagine that it would be even to imagine some of the assets tied up in trusts by the Oligarch Class.

Art?  If you have art in your family for 100 years, well, it’s bound to be worth something.  If you have it, you can sell a Picasso when revenues are down, and buy a Monet or a Manet when revenues are up.  And jewels and gold are great ways to move lots of assets in a small package.

The nice thing about being in the Oligarch Class means that no one ever gets to tell you to live in the pod and eat the bugs.  Heck, they’ve already got every need covered.  I thought about trying to set up a charity for the Oligarch class after the last land bust, but then I realized they already had one:  the United States Treasury.

Is it possible to generate this type of wealth?  Sure, some people have done it.  It’s not easy, and something tells me that behind most amazingly large fortunes are amazingly large crimes.  But after a few centuries?  Most people just forget about the crimes as you marry your kids off with other members of the Oligarch Class after they meet at Harvard™.

Getting in with the Oligarch Class is tough – entry level isn’t measured just in billions, it’s also measured in years.  Newly minted guys with just a billion or so need not apply.  They have to have standards to keep the little people out.

I’m not a hermit, at least I’ve never heard anyone call me that.

For now, at least, I live in a part of the country where I have instant and unfettered access to hundreds of acres of land to hunt on, shoot on, or just visit.  It may not be Wilder Mountain, but it’s much closer to that than Houston was for us.

Now, did I leave that Picasso in my other chalet?

What Advice Would You Give A Kid In 2021?

“My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors® last night. I guess it’s pretty serious.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

What does a German scientist say when he runs out of beer glasses?  “Nein stein.”

One thing I’ve done with my kids is try to give them the best understanding of the world as I know it.

The problem with advice is that it assumes a set of conditions where the advice is valid.  If you’d assume that learning how to balance a checkbook would always be useful, sending you back to 1066 or forward to 2036 would probably convince you otherwise, though the Normans might find your penmanship amusing.

The most common set of conditions that we assume is that tomorrow will look a lot like today.  That works pretty well most of the time.  Heck, there are entire millennia of human history where tomorrow looked exactly like today.  “Uhh, Grug make rock into pointy spear, kill mammoth, maybe get Mammothlix and Chill with Samantha.”

A second set of conditions is that today’s trends will continue.  This is similar to the first one, but involves, well, trends.  One trend is that electronics keep getting more advanced, and the pace of technological change keeps increasing.  That seems logical, but . . . well, look around.  It’s not like we’re getting any smarter, so there’s a limit there.

There are times when neither of these things is true.

Hobbits may not be smart, but they are well rounded.

A few years ago (has it been that long???) The Boy and I were discussing his future college plans.  There were two good state schools he was seriously considering.  He was also considering either Annapolis, West Point, or Colorado Springs.  His swimming looked much like a swan attempting to change a tire on a 1993 Buick® without a lug wrench.  I mean, it’s possible, but there is a lot of unnecessary motion involved.  And feathers.  Feathers everywhere.

Part of me was hoping that The Boy would be interested in one of the military academies.  He had the grades and the athletics, and certainly the love of country.  He rejected them.  Perhaps he saw then what I see now, that the United States military is being very quickly absorbed into the Leftist collective.  Or maybe he just decided that the military would keep him from his ambition of starting his own cryptocurrency and buying Paraguay.

Who can say?

I hadn’t anticipated the change in the rank and file of the military, so quickly.  The military has had issues over time, but I expected that the Oath would matter more than the occupant of the White House.  Everything I see now points as evidence that the Left is moving exceptionally quickly to politicize the military.  The idea is simple:  drum those out who don’t conform.

So, me telling him to go to a military academy would have been very bad advice.

I guess if you’re hungover at West Point, the advice is to use breath mints, like Tac-Tics®.

What other advice doesn’t ring true in 2021?

How about, save money and buy a house?

That has been wonderful advice since, oh, 1945 or so.  Before then, I assume, you wandered into the great frontier and hewed a cabin out of logs.  Oh, wait.  The Great Depression caused a previous mini-mansion real estate boom to collapse.

My bad.

But does it make sense today?  In many urban areas, would it even be in the realm of possibility for a kid today?

Not in San Francisco.  The median home price there is now $1.4 million bucks.

  • What about Miami? $385,000.
  • Minneapolis, a city I regularly make fun of? $325,000.
  • Salt Lake City? $485,000.

If I do the math, just the payments on a $450,000 loan are about $2,000 a month.  Add in taxes and insurance and you’re probably closer to a monthly payment of nearly $3,000?  At that point, even an average home in Salt Lake City is out of reach of most people under 30, unless of course, they were bringing home in excess of $120,000 a month as a family.

Possible?  Sure.  But at that level of debt payment, there’s very little margin for error.  Mom loses her job making PowerPoints® about (spins wheel) “Overcoming Group Synergy Issues In Dispersed Work Environments” and now the entire family is just a month or two away from knife fights with bums over great overpasses to put a box under.  Well, I guess that’s still real estate.

I tried to offer 0% loans for houses, but there was no interest.

Oh, that brings up other old advice:  save your money.  I consider savings great.  It’s a moral thing to do, and virtue should always pay off in the future.  Unless, of course, the Fed® is printing money as fast as the computer can add zeros.  Then, what you saved soon becomes worth less, and eventually worthless.  Spend it as fast as you can on pantyhose, PEZ® and elephant rides because tomorrow you won’t be able to buy a used disposable razor with that cash.

So, there’s another value inverted.  Honestly, I’d rather suggest that my kids save money in Bitcoin over the dollar.  At least the Fed® can’t (yet) print Bitcoin.  If I were to give my kids advice, I’d say to stock up on all the silver they can.

At least silver holds value.

If the werewolf was clueless?  He’d be an unwarewolf.

Or it has in most times and places.  After the Romans left Britain, though, silver was pretty much ignored because the concern was getting food after civilization collapsed.  Newsflash:  you can’t eat silver.  Yes, that’s a very cherry-picked example, but there are circumstances where even precious metals cease to be precious.   Except for the One Ring.

What about education?

I used to be a “if you can go to college, go to college” guy.  I am not any longer.  College is like any other business proposition.  If a degree has a positive rate of return?  Go for it.  That’s probably limited to a few select degrees in 2021, especially with the price of college.  It certainly doesn’t include any degree that ends in “studies”.

If someone else is paying for most of school, it probably is a good idea to choose a degree that’s in demand, that can’t be done online by someone from Mumbai or Shanghai at $0.43 per hour and has a credential that an illegal alien can’t (yet) get.  Remember, if a degree can be replaced by a machine or computer program or an Internet search?  Don’t do it.

But if it’s not going to cost a kidney or require later “repayment” to gentlemen from extortionist rackets, like organized crime people who make student loans.

Then, go to college.  Otherwise?  Get a job that requires a credential that an illegal can’t (yet) get.

The best advice I’d give today is this:

  • Be adaptable.
  • Be useful.
  • Be optimistic.
  • Learn skills, and understand that learning never stops.

What skills?  Figure out a strength that helps people and earns your keep.  Then get good at it.  Then learn a skill that complements it, a next-door neighbor, if you will.  Then?  Repeat.

Here’s my example:  I always tested well and performed well in language stuff, umm, things.  But for most of my career it was just a complement to the other work I did.  Since I’ve been writing these blog posts I think I’ve gotten a bit better at writing, and much, much better at editing.

Why could the Bible have used a better editor?  Well, to make a long story short . . .

The big result is that I can now tear through an amazing amount of communication-stuff at work with little effort.  They don’t seem to like the bikini memes I keep throwing into emails, though HR keeps laughing.

The world has changed.  Bigly.

Not all of the Millennials and Zoomers are lazy.  The advice Pa Wilder gave me was tried and true and lasted for decades before he shared it with his odd Gen-X son.  Mostly, it worked, and worked really well for me.

But society has moved on.  And, after my study of history, I cannot see the trends we see before us lasting for more than a decade.  Herbert Stein (Ben’s dad) said it very well:  “If something cannot go on forever, it will, Bueller . . . Bueller . . . anyone . . .  stop.”

I see before us several things that are near their stopping point.  In reality, everyone before the Millennials and Zoomers had it easier.  No, not easy.  Easier.  We worked hard.  We put in the time.

But the old rules still worked.  Now?

Not so much.

Think about it:  what is the best advice you’d give a 15 to 30 year-old kid in 2021?

Cassandra Says: Look Out Below

“Doing so might allow the energy to escape, with potentially catastrophic results.” – Lost

What do you get when you cross the Titanic with the Atlantic?  Halfway.

There is a rumor in The Mrs.’ family, that her Great-Grandpappy, the banker, warned all of his clients to pull their money out of the banks before Black Monday on October 28 of 1929.  According to the legend, he was a hero because he saved that money for all of his friends.  I heard that as an old banker he was sad, because he always drank a loan.

I have no idea if he saved all of that money, but the legend serves a purpose:  it confirms that, in most people’s minds, that there are wise people who can see trouble coming.

I can do that, too.  When The Mrs. chucks a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew® at my head, well, I know instinctively that if I don’t duck I’ll end up with a crescent impression on my favorite noggin.  The Mrs. generally chooses stew instead of soup, because when she checked the pantry we were out of stock.

Pattern recognition and seeing trouble coming was something that the dead Roman philosopher, Seneca did fairly well.  Like a good Roman, he took a stab at it.

In one observation, Seneca noted that it’s really hard to build things up:  whether it be getting into good physical shape, or building a house or creating a civilization.  Purposeful, positive growth is hard and takes time.

Where did Brutus get his knife?  Traitor Joe’s.

But if I want to ruin my health it only takes half the time as it does to get into good shape.  A modern American house burns down so quickly that firefighters tell me that they don’t even try to save them.  If a Goodwill® store catches fire, they stay far away – they don’t want to inhale second-hand smoke.  If you want to destroy a civilization?  Well more on that later, but they evaporate much more quickly than it takes to build them.

Here’s what Seneca said:  “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”  Actually, he said something in Latin, but when you quote Latin it sounds like a doctor is trying to pick up on a lawyer while gargling vodka.

I came across this concept while reading Italian chemistry professor Ugo Bardi’s blog (Cassandra’s Legacy) back in 2011.  That initial post I read back then is here (LINK).  Since that time, Dr. Bardi has written two books and now bases most of his blogging on that one philosophical statement.  Some people ride that one pony and ride it hard, and it looks like Ugo has found his.

There are some other things I’ve noticed that are related to this concept:

Generally, things go on until they collapse.  Is it easier to tear down a system and build a better one, or keep the old one going?

Duh.  People don’t like change.

They aren’t mentally wired for change.  During the few times in my life when electricity was out for extended times at the house (think hours or days), I find that I’ll walk into a dark room and absently reach out to turn on the light.  My rational mind knows that the power is gone, but I expect it to be there.

I hear at this blackout, people in New York City were stuck on escalators for hours.

When things collapse, there is generally a lot of energy built up in the failing system.  People try to prop up the system with all of the duct tape and baling wire they have.  This rarely makes things better.  Filling a failing dam up with more water doesn’t make the flood that comes after the dam fails better.

It makes it more catastrophic.

Failures like I’m describing tend to have the following characteristics:

  • They are cataclysmic. The end state isn’t predictable.
  • They happen all at once. As systems fail, they trigger the failure of related systems.  And so on.  It’s a chain reaction.  To go back to the flood analogy, these failures scour the landscape, ripping out useful and useless features alike simply because of the amount of energy that was released.
  • The more energy that’s stored (i.e., the longer we push back paying the piper), the bigger the destruction and the worse the hangover.

What’s the difference between a dam and a sock?  Almost everything.

Examples of this sort of near-apocalyptic societal transformation are actually abundant in history.

  • The French Revolution. In just a few short years, the French monarchy was deposed and replaced by a ruling junta of Leftist animals.
  • The first United States Civil War. It went from zero to armed combat across half a continent in just a few months.
  • The First World War. The Russian Revolution.  The Second World War.
  • The collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • I could really keep writing this list until dawn, but at some point I need some sleep.

The penalties are tough for misgendering in France. 

Just because the initial change happens in an instant, doesn’t mean that those changes will resolve in an instant.  The French Revolution started in 1789.  If you date the unrest that started on that day, you could pick the date that Napoleon went into his final exile as perhaps the end.  That was in 1814.

A girl born in 1789 in France would have been, perhaps, 25 then.  She would nearly certainly have been married, and probably would have her own child by then.  When we study history we encompass entire generations within the span of a paragraph, though some say that Moses started history when he got the first download from a cloud onto a tablet.

As I said, The Mrs.’ Great-Gramps apparently saved the day for his depositors because he looked around and saw what was going to happen.  True or not, it sometimes happens in reality.

Michael Burry did it, and more than once.

Who is Michael Burry?  Well, he’s the guy who shorted the real estate market in 2008 and made $100’s of millions of dollars for himself, and nearly a billion for other people in the process.

Christian Bale was movie him in The Big Short.  Burry just might have an idea or two about the economy.  What’s his take?

I wonder if they could get Chris Hemsworth to play movie me?

All I can say is be prepared – a day too late is far worse than a year too soon.