Wealth – Page 20 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

2020: More Strange To Come

“So the other shoe drops, and crushes us all.” – The Boys

Bad news – 2022 is going to be the same as 2020, because it’s 2020, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the biggest surprises, the biggest events of 2020 haven’t yet happened. I’m kidding, of course. I love being the bearer of bad news.

I’ll fully admit that 2020 has been the most crisis-filled year of the United States, at least as long as I have been living. Each month a new, explosive event.

And, it’s still 41 shopping days until the election.

In August and September the press has been focused on the presidential race. For the last month, there has been a “major” story every week attacking the President. By my reckoning, at this point Trump hates babies, troops, and burns thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in an open pit behind the White House to increase Global Warming as fast as he can.

You’d think that she’d be in favor of Global Warming, given how much she hates ICE.

On the Biden side, his painfully obvious quickly progressing dementia has been explained as . . . well, it’s just been ignored. Biden’s primary advantage to the Left is that he’s not Trump. His other advantage is, well, you know. You know the thing.

They fail to talk about his biggest positive, his mind. Biden’s mind is as sharp as my computer’s browser when I have 23 tabs open: 21 tabs are frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

In October I’m expecting some new mainstream news media attack against Trump every day. Here are a few from my top 10 attacks that I expect Trump will see:

Sources say Trump to personally use Social Security checks stolen from elderly widows to buy new golf clubs for smashing bald eagle eggs while humming the Soviet anthem.
Rumors indicate that Trump to give paper cuts to caged illegal immigrant orphans, pour lemon juice in wounds, sell video to YouTube®.
Washington Post® reports that Trump “uses stairs” to taunt disabled veterans.
New York Times™ exclusive that Trump demands his taco salad be made from freshly ground kitten.

I tried to use “snowflake” as a password, but after I typed it a second time, my computer told me, “Sorry, your passwords are not alike.”

Trump criticized for debate performance – “Why should he talk when Joe is interrupting him?”
News that people of Botswana are upset and no longer think the United States is leader of the free world because of Trump’s insistence of turning into a werewolf and killing the cattle during droughts.
California Governor Gavin Newsome accuses President Trump of being able to control the weather and intentionally starting the fires on the West Coast using only his mind, later admits it was really Drew Barrymore.
Exclusive to MSNBC® – “Trump is the reincarnation of that dude who shot that Austrian royal guy with the big mustache, and this started World War I, so all of that is on him.”
Outrage builds as Trump receives three scoops of ice cream at dinner, rather than the two given to other guests. Nancy Pelosi incensed, because Trumps scoops looked bigger, as well.
Russians are interfering in the election, according to CNN©, by blocking the Chinese working to get Biden elected.

In any other year, I’d say that the election would be over by Election Day or the day after, and we could move forward. It won’t be. Why?

It’s 2020.

What’s the difference between the Green New Deal and a dumpster fire? A dumpster fire produces affordable light and heat.

There will be mail in ballots “found” a week or more later in just the right numbers to offset leads in crucial states. A Federal court will rule that, “ballots are valid only if they favor Biden, because his name is first in the alphabet.”

The very best case is that the election nonsense is finished a week later. But has anything about 2020 been best case? The good thing is that it should be cold enough to discourage riots in most places.

I think that people are hoping that once 2020 is over, that 2021 will be a magical year of rebirth. In reality, the tension has been building for four years. In 2020 we built outrageous amounts of debt. We also lost tens of thousands of businesses.

And when the pizza place goes bankrupt, you know they’re out of dough.

In terms of being Antifragile® (Fragility, Resilience, or Antifragility) we are spending all of the cash we can, which makes us vulnerable. This is at the same time that businesses all across the country are finally giving up and closing up for good. This combination of spending all the cash while losing the ability to have a productive economy reinforces into a downward spiral. I’m expecting the President elected in 2028 to use the slogan, “Screw it, we’ll spend all the tax money on lottery tickets.”

Echoes and ripples from 2020 will nearly certainly continue into 2026 – and that’s if things go well.

The consequences of this are more than academic. In my current job, I get a few emails from salesmen a week. I ignore most of them. Today? I got three calls in an hour to ignore.

Businesses are now desperate. You can keep doors open for a while without revenue, but when the business slows down and there is too much capacity, the only solution is that the most vulnerable business collapses. Heck, my gym went bankrupt, which allowed me to walk by and say, “Well, who’s the quitter now?”

Repeat those business losses until you reach stability. The downside of this process is that is a negative spiral. Investing, as I’ve tried to convey, will be chaotic – and whoever wins the presidency may very well regret it. It’s bad enough that even governmental flows of money at the state level aren’t certain.

I hear that the pine tree is the most common California tree, followed by the Ash.

Take California. Please.

California is taking the genius move to tax the rich so that their rate (combined with the Federal rate) might be as high as 54%. California forgets that rich people aren’t potted plants. The result? The rich will move to places that don’t treat them like a rabid poodle treats a pork chop or Rosie O’Donnell treats a chocolate bar.

So, if California owes you money? You might be in trouble.

We’re in strange times. They haven’t peaked yet.

And I enjoyed letting you know.

Magic and Money: More Related Than You Think

“It was the most amazing magic trick I’ve ever seen.” – The Prestige

Mimes aren’t magicians, they just have obstacle illusions.

This is a post about finance. It’s an awesome one, so bear with me.

I’ve always been a bit of a ham. When I was in third grade, I got up and did impressions and sang a song. This was in front of the entire school on talent night, Kindergarten through Senior, and all their parents. My impressions were horrible. My singing was worse.

The next year, I got to play a drunken uncle in our fourth grade play. I’m not making that up. I had a flask and everything, and the teacher pinned the neck tie of my costume up over my shoulder, since drunks apparently can’t wear a tie properly. However, you can bet that I delivered my lines with the best drunken slur a fourth grader can muster.

It was another time and place, where we could make jokes with the idea of being funny. If they did a play like that today, I’m sure that the school district would be shut down, burned, and exorcised from Twitter™ and Facebook®. I mean, the parents in the play were a man and a woman played . . . by a boy and a girl. And they were married. And they didn’t have tattoos.

Sacrilege!

The floor collapsed during the fourth grade play. I guess I was going through a stage.

As I’ve mentioned before, I lived pretty far out on Wilder Mountain. The nearest kid to my house lived nine miles away. The nearest McDonalds™ at that time was a two hour car trip. So, a trip to a magic store was entirely out of the question. But then came college.

Where I was still a ham.

In college, I was living near Capitol City, and they did have a magic store. So, I bought three magic tricks. All three were fun, because they were professional grade, and if you had the mechanical dexterity to open a beer can, you could do very professional, close up magic.

One was a coin trick.

COVID shut down the mint? It makes no cents.

It’s still my favorite trick. I haven’t done it in years, but it’s fun to do. First, I’d show the person I’m doing the trick with (we’ll call them “Mark”) two coins – a United States $0.50 coin, and a Mexican 50 centavo coin. Then, I put the coins into their right hand. By the time the coins are in their hands, it’s not a half dollar and a 50 centavo piece – it’s now a half dollar and a United States $0.25.

I’d then ask Mark to put one coin in each hand, while his hands were behind his back, so I can’t see them. Once each hand has a coin in it, I ask them to hold their hands straight out in front of them. I’d then guess where the $0.50 piece was.

That wasn’t the trick.

Then, regardless of if my guess was correct, I’d bet them something (say, a Coke® or a beer – remember I was in college) that they couldn’t show me the 50 centavo piece.

They’d smile, and then open their hand, and then show me the quarter and look amazed that it wasn’t the 50 centavo piece.

Except the first few times, it didn’t work. At all. It’s not that I messed up the trick, one hand had $0.50 in it, and one hand had a quarter. But the first few times I did the trick, the Mark immediately recognized that it wasn’t the 50 centavo, and knew it was a quarter.

Well, that sucks.

You have no idea how long this meme took.

But then I thought back – at the magic store where I’d bought the trick, the salesman performing the trick had said, “notice how much smaller the 50 centavo piece is than the half dollar.” I tried that the next time I did the trick.

Perfect.

Mark, merely by my suggestion, had developed the mental image that the 50 centavo piece was small. Every time I’ve done the trick using that phrase, and I mean every single time, ever, it worked like a charm. Without saying “notice how much smaller . . .”? Over half the time the person could tell that the second coin was a quarter.

The next refinement was the reveal. Remember when I told the Mark to hold his hands out front, and I’d guess which hand had the fifty cent piece in it? Amazingly, 90% of people put the half dollar into the same hand. Which hand? I’m not giving up all of my secrets.

I would, on purpose, guess the wrong hand after telling Mark not to show me the coins, right or wrong.

They’d smile and tell me I was wrong. They felt awesome – they’d beaten the magician. Obviously, the trick was going wrong.

All part of the plan.

The next thing I said was, “I bet you a beer Coke™ that you can’t show me the 50 centavo piece,” and then they opened their hand to see an ordinary quarter? After seeing the quarter, I’d ask Mark to open the other hand where they’d see a normal fifty cent piece. They were always amazed when I did it right, but in order for the trick to work, I had to say the right things.

The trick paid for itself in, um, beverages and things. And the Mark didn’t mind – Mark was amused, and I got paid a small fee for that amusement.

But the things that sold the trick wasn’t the mechanics and metal, it was what I was saying, and how I was saying it, and, even being intentionally wrong was part of the final sale. You can buy this trick yourself, for about $12 – search “Scotch and Soda Trick” on Amazon.

You’re welcome.

But what does this have to do with money?

A lot, actually.

His version of Purple Rain was awful.

Number One – People who sell stuff know how to sell. Like my magic trick, salesmen do trial and error to learn what works. If you buy a car every five years from a dealer, and they have contact with 30 customers a week, who has the upper hand?

If you’re listening to a politician who’s spent his entire life just getting elected, what likelihood to you have of understanding their real character and values? They probably don’t remember them themselves. If you’re buying a car, a house, or even a burger at McDonalds, they know the game. There’s a reason that every well-trained McDonalds© employee asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

They know the game. McDonalds® knows that a potato costs them pennies, but a basket of fries can go for $3. Profits may be fleeting, but the pant size increase is forever.

One of the tricks that Bernie Madoff used with his customers was to dress very frugally. Despite the fact that he was stealing billions ($20 billion by the best estimate I found), he knew the game better than his Marks. He also was selective with clients – he wouldn’t accept just anyone. No, you had to apply and be approved. You had to know someone.

Number Two – Knowing the trick is everything. When I did the coin trick, only I knew what was coming. It was all scripted, and I knew exactly what the outcome was going to be. When I asked people to let me guess which hand the coin was in, they thought that was the trick. No, the trick was that there was no fifty centavo piece. But because I created the structure, I knew where the trick was.

That’s a tremendous advantage. I can use that knowledge to create a scenario where I can manipulate emotions to get the reactions and responses I want. Why? I control the conditions. I control the reveal.

What sorts of tricks are out in the world?

“No money down.”
“I never got your text.”
“Yes, I’ll hold your beer, there’s no way this could go wrong.”
“No interest for the first six months.”
“Housing prices always go up.”
“CNN – The Most Trusted Name in News.”

Number Three – Things are rarely as they seem. Mark saw only what I wanted him to see during the trick, and I carefully made sure by closing his hand around the coins after I put them there. Then I told him to not let me see when he put the coins in each hand. Why? Because I didn’t want him to see what was really going on.

One of the biggest illusions that most people don’t recognize is that our money is entirely made up. The $ and € and ¥ and £ only have meaning because we give them meaning. The United States dollar has no backing other than . . . the promise to trade it for a dollar. That’s it. And people keep playing the game even though the Federal Reserve™ tells them the dollar will be worth less every year. On purpose.

Oh, and the Federal Reserve©? It’s not Federal, and it doesn’t have a Reserve. Discuss.

Generally, people didn’t believe that the government had a super-secret plan to eavesdrop on all electronic communications from anyone. Then Edward Snowden showed . . . they have a plan to monitor all electronic communications, everywhere. When Snowden joined Twitter® he soon had more followers than the National Security Agency. That’s okay, the NSA follows everyone.

I knew there was a reason my computer has a sticker that says “Intel Inside.”

Number Four – It’s super easy to suggest things to people. This shocked me. One time Scott Adams mentioned that in a line at a copier, if you have to make a copy, all you have to do is have a reason to jump the line. He suggested, “Hey, can I cut in front of you? I have to make a copy.” Note that making a copy is exactly what everyone else was doing, but the request, coupled with a reason, seemed to work. No matter how stupid the reason.

Yes, there’s a reason you want ice cream.
What, you thought that was impartial?
“The Arctic will be ice free by 2013,” – Al Gore. Hmm. Trust me. Next time it really will be.
Asking them to do you a small favor. Oddly, this creates a pattern where people are much more likely to do a big favor for you later. Oh, while you’re at it, hit the subscribe button. Don’t cost nothin’.
Never trust a flatterer. I had a boss that, one month after he joined the company, wrote a performance review that would have made me think that I needed to apply for the job of Messiah. Except in my case it made me never trust him. I was right.
Peer Pressure. People like to do what other people consider acceptable, since being socially acceptable is important. If everyone is doing it, well, I should, too. I went against the grain, and now Wal-Mart® insists that I wear pants from now on.

Number Five – The person proposing the bet may not have your best interest at heart. In the example above, I ended up getting a few beverages. The person involved got an equal exchange. No one was ever mad – if they had been, I’d have told them to ignore the bet.

But.

I used the name “Mark” for a reason. It’s what conmen (ever notice that the Politically Correct Police don’t object to that one?) call the object of their scam. I’ve even been at carnivals where a guy running a game called out, “hey, Mark” to someone walking by to try to get them to break a balloon and win a poster of Gillian Anderson. Only five dollars a dart!

I wonder if the aliens believed in her?

There are probably a few other examples that I could bring up, but it’s late, and I have to go practice not singing. Bonus points if you can tell what two impersonations I did in third grade in the comments.

See, I told you this post would be awesome.

Tesla: Overvalued, But Pays For The Best Space Program On Earth

“You guys taking it all in? Because this is what it looks like when Google acquires your company for over 200 million dollars. Look: Dustin Moskovitz. Elon Musk. Eric Schmidt. I mean, Kid Rock is the poorest person here.” – Silicon Valley

I hear Elon Musk’s car insurance premiums are astronomical.

I’m a fan of Elon Musk. Singlehandedly, he’s shown that even though getting to space is very, very hard, that he can do it. Beyond that, when working with NASA®, they noted that working with SpaceX™ they accomplished in a month what would normally take NASA™ a year. NASA® kept saying the work was too Falcon Heavy.

Musk has also proven that if you focus on getting things into space, you can do it. NASA® gave up on getting things into space right after Von Braun died and is now a jobs program that hires gender and grievance studies majors. I’m not kidding. Really.

Instead of, oh, going into space, NASA© chases imaginary offensive names of astronomical features (NASA© corroborates this here – LINK). From the press release: “The Agency will be working with diversity, inclusion, and equity experts in the astronomical and physical sciences to provide guidance and recommendations for other nicknames and terms for review.”

If Elon Musk’s wife breaks up with him while he’s on Mars, will that make her his Space X?

Because that’s the important thing, right? We don’t want people thinking of the Eskimo Nebula or Siamese Twins Nebula. Because . . . colonialism? I forget. Is there a scorecard I could download?

One thing I’ve been fairly consistent about, though, is that Elon Musk’s car company, Tesla® is a scam. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great scam. I’ve heard that the cars are wonderful. And from a speed standpoint, the Tesla™ can go from 0-60mph (that’s 27.39 parsec per eon) nearly as fast as any car on the planet.

But the price of Tesla®, even after losing 25% of its value in the last few days, is ludicrous. Tesla’s™ market cap is $307.7 billion dollars. Volkswagen® is worth $77.5 billion, Toyota™ is worth $210.8, and Ford™ is worth $27.5 billion. So, if Elon looked under his couch cushions for some spare change, he could trade Tesla™ for VW®, Toyota©, and Ford™.

But at least communism means always having enough to eat, right?

Is Tesla® a good company? Sure. But Tesla™ made 367,000 cars last year. Ford©, Toyota® and VW™ combined made 27,000,000 cars. That’s nearly 74 times the number of cars that Tesla® makes.

I think most people have invested in Tesla® because Elon Musk gets things done. And, it amuses me that Elon Musk takes the money he’s earned from Tesla™ to work on arguably the best space program since Apollo, back when NASA™ had real engineers working on real engineering problems and done it in his spare time.

Tesla® is a symptom.

I hear that Coronavirus symptoms start right off the bat.

When money is flooded into a market by bankers looking to prop the market up, it flows oddly. The faster the flow? The bigger the imbalances. When people are rushing to put money into the market, they look for the shiny objects. One of the shiny objects in this case is Tesla®. There are others. Dozens of them.

It is my theory that the entire market is filled with imbalances right now. The money that was flooding in to prop the market up is leaking everywhere. Reasons don’t matter. That’s the way that markets work over the short term. Silly things happen – you’ve seen it earlier this year with toilet paper. What I’m saying is that, yes, Tesla® is just like the toilet paper of the stock market.

The best way to steal a Tesla® is to put it on auto-pirate.

The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 was just that – markets working in a panic. The world is ending, so what do I do? Make sure that I can poop in comfort. Like getting into a war with Italy as one of your allies, it’s not a great strategy, but is a strategy. In mid-late 2020, the market is flooded with money, attempting to buy whatever looks best and prettiest.

Just like the TP 2020 Terror®, the Reinflation Bubble of 2020© isn’t at all rational. And, like Tesla™ lost 25% of market value in a few days? It’s my theory that will happen across the whole market. Note – I’m not a financial advisor, so use the advice of a random guy on the Internet as just that. I pulled my money from the market, mostly, in February. After that, I’ve been spending my time collecting the three precious metals: gold, silver, and lead.

As I get older, I’ve discovered a simple truth – I have no idea if my kids will enjoy getting shares of Tesla® when I die. But I do know that if they each got a suitcase of untrackable gold and silver, half a dozen rifles and a few thousand rounds of ammo at my funeral, they’d smile.

My buddy Ty won a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics®. China won’t give him the medal because they won’t recognize Ty won.

I know this column is short, but I stared at that last line for about an hour and wouldn’t change a word. Not a bad place to end. Let’s call it a day. I know that NASA already has . . . .

Investing? Invest In Yourself.

“If M.A.D starts making gold out of lead, it will undermine the world economy!” – Inspector Gadget

I invested in a series of walking trails for mental patients, but it failed. I guess Psycho-Paths® was a bad name.

By the time the stock market crashed to signal the beginning of the Great Depression, the economy of the United States had already gone through an amazing decade of change. Electrification was moving rapidly across the country, and prisons could finally retire the acoustic chair. Radio was a miracle that was now bringing masses of people together as the radio waves propagated across the country at the speed of light. Natural gas, long a nuisance in the oil patch, was being piped and compressed and shipped across larger areas of the country, bringing instant heat (and some explosions, since they hadn’t added the stuff that makes it smell bad yet) to millions.

Perhaps one of the biggest dislocations was that horses were rapidly being replaced by cars and trucks. The economy was being motorized. Some have even come to the conclusion that part of the dislocation in the economy was that the millions of horses required to plow, move freight, and move people weren’t required anymore, leading to an oversupply of horses. That’s not a situation that lasts long – the oversupply of horses, can, um, be solved. I mean, too many horses for the barns? That’s un-stable.

But if once the oversupply of horses is solved what about the oversupply of food for the horses?

Well, what are they going to do with all of that farmland, now suddenly made even more productive through the addition of tractors and cheaply made nitrogen fertilizer?

Produce more. Which drives prices down. Which leads to . . .

Deflationary depression.

It’s hard for the Amish to travel – their system is a little buggy.

I would say that “for the want of a horse, and economy was lost,” but in hindsight the real problem was the bankers. The bankers during the 1920’s and 1930’s even developed the first birth control – their personality. The Federal Reserve Bank® (which is neither part of the government nor really a bank) managed to destroy the economy through poor currency manipulation choices.

Part of the secret of the efficiency of market economies is that there is no controller telling people to start restaurants or PEZ® vineyards or bikini ranches. The feedback from the economy is measured in customers buying the product, and if the product is good enough, profit encourages people to make it.

The flip side of that is business failure. I originally wrote that was the down side. It’s not. Businesses, in a normal economy, that can’t produce a viable product should fail. Note that I’m forced to write in a normal economy. 2020 has created the situation where tens of thousands (I’m not exaggerating) of businesses have failed due to the restrictions from the reactions to COVID-19. It’s even been an international problem – Finland closed their border. No one will cross the Finnish line.

The riots in Detroit don’t get many news stories, but I heard the rioters there have caused $20 million in improvements.

That’s not normal, of course. Hair styling places are failing in the more restrictive states. In Modern Mayberry? Not so much. But in San Francisco? You can’t get your hair styled, unless you’re Nancy Pelosi. I guess that the rules prohibiting business operation are only for common people. St. Nancy can go in and get a cut and a blow dry when no one else can. Sadly, Nancy wasn’t wearing a mask, which was the only positive thing about CoronaChan since the whole thing started.

In normal times, business thrive or fail, and both of those things lead to a stronger overall economy. The services and goods that aren’t wanted anymore go away, like Beanie Babies®. Thank Heavens. But in these times of artificial economic crisis? Good, strong businesses fail.

Regardless of the type of crisis we have now, it is upon us. Whether or not the business would have failed is irrelevant. The only real question is what happens next.

One thing that is sure, the economy after this crisis passes won’t look like it used to.

I’ve posted about possible good investments in the past – if I were betting, I’d bet that gold in ten years would be a better bet than Netflix® or Tesla™, even if Tesla© starts its own religion, and builds Elon Mosques. But who knows what the economy will even look like after this crisis? I can’t guarantee any of it.

I hear that Space-X has designed electric grass for Mars. They call it E-lawn.

So what to invest in?

Yourself.

Time is potentially quite short. How should you invest your time? In yourself.

There are so many skills that are required of a human. PowerPoint® is probably not really high on them, so I wouldn’t spend much time there.

The first place I’d begin to prepare is mental. In the United States, we have become very used to the most modern conveniences. Air conditioning when it’s hot. Central heat when it’s cold. Even in Modern Mayberry, day or night I can go and get gasoline, a gallon of milk, and some beef jerky. Fast Internet that allows me to stream a television show that’s been off the air for nearly 20 years.

What happens when you don’t have those things for a day? A week? A month? When you’re used to being able to see what the temperature is in Moscow, Manila, Manhattan or Manchester, what happens when the weather becomes a mystery?

At least Biden can hide his own Easter eggs.

When you’re used to seeing real-time riots in Kenosha or Portland, what happens when you don’t know what’s happening in your own city?

I’m not saying that’s going to happen – the Internet is robust, and the systems we have built for delivering milk, gas, electricity and natural gas have redundancy.

But still, these things are possible.

Have you put your mind in a place where they have happened? What would you do? I mean, if your spouse convinces you to go to a psychiatrist, will your couch talk you out of it again?

After the mind, invest in your body. If you’re out of shape, get in better shape. Anything will help. Get out and run. If you can’t run, walk. Being able to count on your body is always good – and if you’ve been neglecting it because of work, it’s time to pay back that debt, with interest. I am fortunate enough to already have the body of an athlete already – a sumo wrestler.

Hmmm. Maybe I need some work, too.

I got a sumo wrestler for Christmas one year. I had asked for a heavy sweater.

What other ways can you invest in yourself? There are thousands of skills that are valuable, no matter what the future brings. Can you do basic medical care? I’m not asking if you can sew up a lung, but can you clean a flesh wound? Do you have Band-Aids® and Neosporin™ for a year or two? Iodine? All of that is cheap and available now. Will it be in six months?

The Mrs. bought a book on medicinal plants that showed up the other day. I was surprised that it didn’t list thyme as a remedy – I heard that thyme cures all wounds. What kind of books do you keep?

Can you garden? Annually, The Mrs. spends about $117.53 to grow about seven tomatoes. I would make fun of that, but I would also say that The Mrs. has learned lots of ways to not grow tomatoes, too. Her gardening knowledge is better than mine. It’s a little late to invest in gardening this year, but it wouldn’t hurt to start to understand what it takes. There’s a whole Internet. Heck, you could practice by killing some houseplants, like I used to do.

This isn’t a bad time for a hobby. What kind of hobby?

Lots of farms have auctions and I’ve seen farmer forges there.
Carpentry, with and without electricity.
Small engine repair. Small engines can do a great deal beyond weed eating.
Always easier when ammo isn’t so dear, but we are where we are.
Making wine or whiskey – both are great for barter, and legal to make in most places.
Fixing things around the house. When’s the last time you patched a leaky roof?

I could probably come up with a dozen more in ten more minutes, and I imagine the comments will fill up with them. Again, in some circumstances, these are nothing more than hobbies, and if you pursue them with a local club or group, you’ll build more community in addition to building yourself.

Regardless of the future we will see, investing in yourself pays dividends. Plus? It’s always better to try to grow tomatoes and fail when failure is just results in a humorous story.

Houses, Money, Stocks, and Bikini Girl Graphs

â€œCan the stock market survive a nuclear holocaust? Yes, says our next guest, and he’ll tell us whatÂ stocksÂ to buy and what to sell in the event of a thermonuclear exchange right after these messages.â€ â€“ Head Office

SupermanÂ® wonâ€™t take Bitcoin as payment after dark.Â He avoids crypto night.

â€œHousing prices only go up.â€Â I first heard that in the 1990â€™s when I was buying my first house.Â The realtor was quite clear that a house wasnâ€™t just a house, it was an investment in the future.Â He had no idea what my kids could do with SharpiesÂ®, hot sauce, and matches.Â And that was just the living room carpet.

â€œThe dollar is as good as gold.â€Â I havenâ€™t heard that one used about the dollar in my lifetime, because the dollar hasnâ€™t been backed by gold since August 15, 1971.

â€œThe stock market is the place to put your money.â€Â Thatâ€™s still what people are saying.

One thing that Iâ€™ve found throughout my life is that, generally speaking, if everyone believes in it, itâ€™s wrong.Â The major exception to this is physics, which explains gravity well enough that almost nobody can argue with it.Â I read a book on anti-gravity once â€“ couldnâ€™t put it down.

I always fall for gravity jokes.

This is especially true in human systems.Â If the entire crowd believes it?Â Itâ€™s nearly certainly wrong.

As mentioned above, a perfect example of this is housing markets.Â It was really common knowledge in the 1990â€™s that, barring a setback in a recession, housing prices always go up.Â Buy a house, wait, and sell it 10 or 20 years later, and youâ€™ll make a bundle.

In certain times and places, thatâ€™s true.Â And during the 1990â€™s and the early 2000â€™s, the idea that â€œhousing prices always go upâ€ became firmly fixed in the minds of, well, most everyone.Â That made it true, for a while.Â As the banks noticed this, they decided that mortgages werenâ€™t a risky investment at all, unlike when I broke COVID-19 lockdown to go play board games.Â That was a lot of Risk.

On top of that, banks decided to make changes to the way that they had lent in the past.Â Houses were a sure thing, right?Â They could make them even safer by creating mortgage-backed securities.Â Some of these were really unique.Â You could buy the â€œbestâ€ performing loans out of a group of loans.Â If there were 100 houses in the group, 90 would have to default on their mortgages before your security was impacted.

This mastery of risk was amazing!Â Now all you need are more people to loan money to.Â But not everyone qualifies, which is a problem.Â They tried offering 0% loans, but there was no interest.

Solution?Â Everyone qualifies.Â No income?Â No job?Â No problem.Â These were even called NINJA (no income, no job) loans.Â The pool of borrowers expanded more rapidly than Joe Bidenâ€™s memory loss.Â And if we add in refinancing of home equity?

That added even more borrowers!

What could go wrong?

And, hey, housing prices have reached new records.Â Certainly they wonâ€™t fall?

Well, gravity kicked in on housing prices.Â They dropped.Â And when they dropped, the entire industry built up around building houses dropped.Â And then the industries that supplied lumber, and pipe, and wire, and pavement, and concrete for driveways . . . dropped.

This mathematical fiction based on a delusion created a massive recession.Â But, hey, housing prices always go up.

Except when they donâ€™t.

Just like the dollar fell from its perch.Â Originally, the dollar was backed by actual, physical gold.Â Thatâ€™s when the phrase, â€œas good as goldâ€ was first used.Â Why?Â Because at any moment, you could go and change your dollars into gold.Â Walk into the bank with a $20 bill, and walk out with $20 in gold.

This wasnâ€™t always the case, there were periods in the history of the country where this wasnâ€™t so (greenbacks issued during the Civil War backed by the credit of the country), but it was generally the case.Â But after Franklin Roosevelt made gold possession by Americans illegal (yes, this happened) then you couldnâ€™t go in and get gold for your dollar.Â Once that link was broken, the government was free to print money more or less at will, creating inflation even in a â€œgold backedâ€ currency.

You can plainly see that women are shorter now that the purchasing power of the dollar has dropped.

Now?Â The dollar isnâ€™t worth but a few percent of what it was in 1940.

And other countries realize it, too.Â As the multiple trillions of dollars are printed this year to prop up everything from the airlines to the banks to the stock market, the value of the dollar has dropped.Â Why?Â The rest of the world can count.Â There is only so much printing you can do before it starts to add up.

The dollar has dropped 10% in the last three months.

The dollarâ€™s fall is fast, but not as fast as when I fell into the coffee.Â It was instant.

Good as gold?

No.

Which brings us to the stock market.Â Money in the stock market is always safe, over a long enough term.Â It took six years to recover from the Great Recession.Â In real terms (inflation adjusted) it took from 1928 to 1955 for the DowÂ© to recover from the Great Depression.Â It took until 1994 for the Dowâ„¢ to recover from the 1964 peak.Â So, if youâ€™re good waiting thirty years to break even, the stock market is a sure thing.

Speaking of up and down â€“ I got a free yo-yo.Â No strings attached!

While the economy is still stuck in lockdown in many parts of the country, massive unemployment, and a â€œriot-a-dayâ€ social structure, the Dow Jones Industrial AverageÂ® is only down 3%.

I wonder, just maybe, if everyone is wrong?

The Data That Drives Advertising . . . Could Decide The Election?

“Never theorize before you have data. Invariably, you end up twisting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Mark Zuckerberg has been banning bots from Facebook™ before the election. Trump has made Mark turn on his own kind.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Mrs. used to be in radio. On one of her jobs, she did the news, sports, and weather for a collection of stations. The thing that fascinated me was that The Mrs. was the one that selected which news stories and which sports stories to put on the air, even to the point where she interviewed Senators and Congresscritters as part of the press pool. The Mrs. might be a wizard, but she couldn’t really select the weather, so the weather was what the weather was.

The Mrs. didn’t like the NBA®, so during basketball season she refused to cover it. At all. If you would have listened to her broadcast, you wouldn’t have known that basketball was a sport. Despite that the NHL® didn’t have a “local” team, The Mrs. covered hockey, even though after a storm the farmers care more about grain wetzky than Wayne Gretzky.

I’ve told that story before, but it’s been some time since I mentioned it so I know it’s new to some of you. I think now is the perfect place to mention it again.

I used to tell radio jokes, but the reception was poor.

Why? That will become clear.

But let’s start with this idea – you’re a product. Almost six years ago I heard a quote in a Wired® article (LINK) about the predictive power of social media interactions:

In the end, the researchers found that with information on just ten Facebook© “Likes,” the algorithm was more accurate than the average person’s colleague. With 150 “Likes,” it could outsmart people’s families, and with 300 “Likes,” it could best a person’s spouse.

Imagine the power. With enough data, Facebook® could sell data to companies with complete certainty that they’d be able to understand your income level, age, health problems, fears, and what it takes to sell you a product. By knowing when you went to bed, they’d be able to predict if you were a night owl, though I didn’t predict The Mrs. reaction when I replaced our bed with a trampoline. She hit the ceiling.

It’s not just Facebook™, and in my mind they’re not even the worst. I make it a point to never use my work computer for personal “stuff” – I don’t log in for email, social media, or any other site where I log in. Heck, I made it a point to minimize my surfing to the point where most of my Internet use at work was work related. I learned that they really don’t like you surfing YouTube™ videos at work during the six hours I spent at a job as an air traffic controller.

I’ve never been an air traffic controller, but I hear that their motto is: “If the pilot screws up, the pilot dies. If the air traffic controller screws up, the pilot dies.”

But one day I went to a weather site, and saw ads about something I’d searched for at home – something I was thinking of buying.

If it were a normal thing, that would make sense. In this case, it was a fairly obscure outdoor product. Boom. Right there on the weather page. It wasn’t just one product, which would have been a coincidence. People who are interested in the weather might be outdoorsy, right?

Nope. It happened again and again. Somehow, Google® (my guess) had figured out that John at home was the same guy who was using that work computer. I had noticed years earlier that Google™ gave one set of results on a search at work, and a completely different set on my home computer. That almost made sense – people at work are usually not looking for the same results as people at home. For instance, always make sure when you Google™ the actor Gary Oldman that you type in an “r”.

But look at all of the sources of data that exist on you, primarily (but not always) generated via social media. Just your search history tells the companies serving the Internet a lot about you. The Mrs. is a writer and was looking for ways people die for a book. She joked that the FBI® probably would arrest her if anything ever happened to me. But I don’t trust the FBI™, since the last time I was at the dentist they wanted to do a cavity search.

I guess if Google® made Lucky Charms©, they’d be tragically malicious?

Facebook’s™ statement that with 300 likes they would know a person better than their spouse is nearly six years old. How much better than that are their computer systems now? I would imagine much, much better. Now they have data stretching across years that would likely predict a lot about a person’s outcomes.

Several years ago YouTube® used to suggest me content that was much edgier than I had initially searched for. It was as if I watched a video about the Right and got fed another that was six steps farther Right than the previous video. YouTube™ was giving me more and more “extreme” content. Why? Because more extreme content drives emotions. It pops chemicals into my brain and stimulates more viewing time.

YouTube™ was optimizing based on getting more viewing minutes. The best way to do that? Show me videos it predicted would increase emotion, especially outrage. And, as we all know, it’s easier to get strong emotion with anger rather than happiness.

I watch chemistry videos periodically.

For a while, I was on Twitter® – there is still a John Wilder account, but I had some fun with a parody account that was since deleted. But I noticed the same pattern at Twitter™ – keeping eyeballs through generating emotion.

What happens when you aggregate all of that data?

You can be told a story that’s unique to you. Immersed in information that is designed to drive your economic behavior – understanding what you’re most likely to spend money on, what time of day to best provide an ad, what phrases cause you to click, and which ones you ignore.

I’ve cut back on social media. Facebook® is only used on a single browser, and I haven’t opened it in months. Since I never understood what was fascinating about Facebook™, that’s super easy. It doesn’t need a replacement. Likewise, it’s been months since I was on Twitter©, although I do spend some time on Gab®.

I’m cutting back on YouTube™ and moving towards BitChute© – YouTube™ in the last year has been on a tear of censorship and herding – trying to move people farther Left. Some things are harder to find on BitChute™ – it has the worst search I’ve seen. But when I can find the people I listen to normally on BitChute®, I go there.

Dracula got caught uploading illegal content to YouTube™. He’s got the problem – a count suspended.

And browsers? Have you tried Brave™?

Understand that Google©, YouTube™, Twitter®, and Facebook® (among many!) are creating a product based on you, and attempting to sell you to whoever they can. Heck, if YouTube™, Twitter®, and Facebook® merged, they would have an amazing amount of data, but they’d be stuck calling themselves YouTwitFace®.

If it were just that, we’ve been facing less sophisticated versions of advertising for years. As even the Romans said: “Buyer beware.”

But with this immense power, what are the odds that they are consciously attempting to craft a narrative to change what you believe? Is there an agenda behind the stories that are presented to you, the way the headlines are written? Is there an agenda behind the stories that you’re not allowed to see?

I wanted to buy a skating rink, but my realtor only gave me a ballpark estimate.

Most people coming to this blog are pretty good at making up their own minds. But this fall’s election might be based on the votes of perhaps a 20,000 people or less, who have no idea who they’re voting for right now – elections are won by convincing the undecided.

I wonder what narrative Facebook™, Google©, Twitter®, and YouTube™ will try to spin for them?

I’m betting it has nothing to do with hockey.

If You Live In A Big Leftist City – Why Haven’t You Moved?

“I don’t know what you do in New York, but around here we don’t give a man a funeral unless we’re pretty sure he needs one.” – Green Acres

I think I ran over Schrödinger’s cat. Not sure if I feel guilty or not.

Growing up, Green Acres was one of my favorite television shows. I was far too young to have seen it in the first run, but the local television station showed reruns that were on after the school bus made it all the way to the top of Wilder Mountain. The bus rides were long, but I learned a lot about kindness – one time I saw someone give up their seat for a blind student. In retrospect, the bus driver probably showed poor judgement in letting that blind girl drive.

For those of you that haven’t seen it, Green Acres was about a New York attorney (Oliver Wendell Douglas) that decided he was through with city life. Mr. Douglas quit his big city life and moved to the rural town of Hooterville. The show never discusses exactly where Hooterville is, but the best theory is that Hooterville is in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri.

The show was funny in a way that television isn’t now. Oliver always tried to fit in, but never could quite adjust from his city ways. A lot of the humor was making fun of that disconnect between Oliver and the humorous cast of townspeople, though the relationship between Oliver and his wife was loving, strong, and funny. Here’s a scene when there were looking for clothes to donate:

Oliver Douglas: Why don’t we give away this one?
Lisa Douglas: No that’s the dress I graduated from high school in.
Oliver Douglas: How about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the dress I wore the first day of college.
Oliver Douglas: [holding a black, low-cut dress] What about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the one I got expelled in.

Why do I bring this up?

If I ever get a barn I’ll make sure I have an Internet router in there, so I can have stable wifi.

This weekend, The Mrs. and I were snoozing and were listening to the Watchdog on Wall Street, a radio show about investment. In the latest episode/podcast (Expedition New York – LINK), the host advocated what he called the Sam Kinison solution. Give good people U-Hauls® so they can leave the cities that are turning into scenes from Mad Max. “The reality of many urban areas is . . . it’s going to take a long, long time to come back.”

“Move.”

I was slipping in and out of sleep, but discussed the show later with The Mrs.

“He’s right you know. The era of law in those big cities is over. The District Attorneys in those large metropolitan areas have been bought and paid for by the far Left (LINK, LINK, LINK and I could go on forever with links). The DAs are no longer concerned with Justice,” I said. “These DAs are concerned with Social Justice. Try to defend yourself in a lot of these large urban monstrosities, and you’ll find out what the inside of a jail cell looks like pretty quickly. And that scares me because my brother got stabbed in jail. We took Monopoly® just a bit too seriously when I grew up.”

“Well, they can’t move here. We’re full.” That’s not exactly what The Mrs. said, but I can’t repeat it exactly since this is a family-friendly blog.

Although The Mrs. isn’t a social butterfly, she doesn’t exactly hate people. And it’s not new people moving to Modern Mayberry that was bothering her. It’s Leftist ideas.

I donated $50 to a Leftist group the other day. I hope they find a cure.

“They residents of those cities are the reason the cities are in the condition that they’re in. Then they’ll move here, and want to turn Modern Mayberry into what they left.”

The Mrs. is not wrong. Here’s an example.

My brother, John Wilder had this problem in his midsized town. (Yes, his first name really is John as well. Our parents were caught in a soap opera episode and got amnesia and forgot they had him and named me the same thing by mistake.) He was at the neighborhood homeowners’ association meeting when they were selecting a trash company. They recently had an influx of people from the United Soviet Republic of California who had gotten approval to leave the state from the Supreme Soviet.

“Well,” one transplant said, “we certainly must be environmentally friendly. We should pick the trash company that offers the mandatory recycling. They only cost $35 more a month.”

After about an hour, my brother talked the homeowners’ association into picking the cheaper trash company. Is recycling bad? Not at all. Junkyards have been recycling cars for decades. Aluminum recycling makes beer cans cheaper. But in my brother’s town, the only thing that was really recycled was aluminum – the rest of the trash went into the dump whether or not it was neatly sorted.

That’s what scared The Mrs.

I always get sad after crushing aluminum cans – it’s soda pressing.

Modern Mayberry is nice because it doesn’t have those things the big cities have, including all of their problems.

And the economy appears to be in a pretty bad state. The dollar bubble appears to be in the first phase of ending. The gold bubble may be inflating, and inflation will follow a deflation of the dollar, which is exactly as I predicted, but it’s about six months earlier than I had expected.

The median price (right now) for a house in San Francisco is $1,108 per square foot. In Modern Mayberry, I couldn’t find a single house that cost more than $100 per square foot. Sadly, you have to do without all of those San Francisco amenities like people pooping in the streets, riots and the San Francisco 49ers™. On the plus side, the Oakland Raiders® have moved, and if San Franciscans are lucky, what goes to Vegas stays in Vegas.

This is a true statement.

If I were in Seattle or Portland or New York or any of a dozen other large cities I would be moving if I had children. The best time to move is ten years ago. This gives you time to build the relationships and integrate into the community. In Modern Mayberry, I’m still one of the New Guys, even after a decade.

The second best time is now. The worst time to move is after the bottom drops out and escaping from New York looks like something that even Kurt Russell couldn’t do on his best day.

And, if you decide to move, here’s hoping that you find a place as nice as Hooterville. I hear they have good hotscakes there.

Remember that the worst time to move is one day too late.

But What If You’re Wrong?

“What if you’re wrong, Evil? What if Dandridge is a vampire and he thinks you know it? Would you walk down that alley then?” – Fright Night

How many vampires are good at math? Can I count Dracula?

“Indeed, none but the Deity can tell what is good luck and what is bad before the returns are all in,” wrote Mark Twain.

Yet, so many people are certain that they can determine what good luck is with great certainty. As I get older, like Twain, I’m not sure that I can tell good luck from bad on any given day. So, I try to take it as it is. Rain? Good. We needed rain. Hot? Well, the air conditioning works. Snow? Great – it will kill the insects. A massive hail of arrows that blots out the Sun? Excellent. We can fight in the shade.

I came to this conclusion after one day when I looked backward at my life around the age of 32 – the things that I had hoped for – recognition, money, and a bountiful supply of PEZ® hadn’t made life better. The things I had tried to avoid – a near zero bank account, 16+ hour days as a single dad with a job, and life without a spouse made me a better man and made me think about the relationships between virtue, money, and meaning.

The time of plenty hadn’t made me better, but the time where I spent six months raising kids by myself before I had a spare $150 to buy a used Fender® and an amp at a pawn shop had. Huh? How could that be, especially when I got cheated on the guitar – “no strings attached” had a different meaning in that pawn shop.

I gave up and sold the guitar to a guy in town who doesn’t have any arms. I asked how he was going to play it, and he said, “By ear.”

It was then I decided that getting everything I wanted would have been the worst possible thing for me. Instead, getting a tougher life made me better. I was in my 20s when I had that revelation, and it has stayed with me. It also has led me to always ask myself:

What if I’m wrong?

Not wrong. But really, really wrong?

In some sense, people might call this indecision, like I don’t know what I want. I mean, indecision was when I couldn’t decide between churros and sopapillas for desert, which caught me off guard – no one expects Spanish Indecision. But this is different. I call this humility. I might have a clear sense of what I want, but have no real idea what is good for me. Call it the Twain Zone.

It leads to some interesting thought experiments – what if the exact opposite of what I’m expecting happens?

Historically, I can give numerous examples of surprises that “no one” was expecting – where nearly everyone was wrong.

The U.S.S.R. looked strong and invulnerable in 1985. Rocky IV and Red Dawn reflected the public mood that the Soviets just might win. By 1987, cracks were showing, by 1989 areas were in open rebellion, and by 1991 the U.S.S.R. voted itself out of existence on December 26. That’s a shame. I heard that Soviet bread was so good that people would wait in line all day for a single piece.
Stock prices have reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau,” said Irving Fisher, Yale economist, on October 10, 1929. October 24, 1929 was Black Thursday, where the market lost 11% in a single day. Oops. I will say that COVID-19 makes it feel like 1929 – the stock market is tanked and the bars are closed.
On August 9, 1974 Richard Nixon resigned, less than two years after crushing his opponent George McGovern 520-17 in the Electoral College, winning every state but Massachusetts, where the penalty for drunk driving is re-election to the Senate.

Spoiler alert: Nixon’s decorating crimes would not stand. He resigned office and quit eating spaghetti on the same day – it’s all in the pasta now.

In a financial sense, I think everyone reading this post knows that something is horribly wrong with both the currency and the stock market. The old line attributed to Gary Shilling rings true, however: “The market can remain irrational much longer than I can remain solvent.” Just because you or I might have seen that real estate was overvalued in 2006, doesn’t mean that the market did. Irrationality can persist longer than logic, especially when everyone says, “Real estate? It never goes down.”

Okay, John, you’ve convinced me. Now what?

Well, that’s up to you. I can’t judge your situation unless you send me a few goats, some silver, and a throwout bearing for a 1973 GMC pickup. But what I was hoping is that you’d look yourself and ask a few questions:

If you think that we’ll have unending prosperity and no shortages, what if you’re wrong?
If you think that the riots in (INSERT YOUR CITY HERE) won’t reach your neighborhood, what if you’re wrong?
If you think that things can’t get better than this mess we’re in, what if you’re wrong?
If you think that things can’t get worse than this mess we’re in, what if you’re wrong?
If you think that the stock market can’t go up, what if you’re wrong?

I was also wrong about my chiropractor. I stand corrected.

The situation that the United States enjoyed from 1945 until recently was the most prosperous in (perhaps) the history of the world so far. A good weather forecaster’s most accurate forecast is to say that tomorrow will be like today, obtuse (as in greater than 90 degrees). Until it isn’t. The hot spring day is followed up by the tornado – the winter storm strikes furiously from the north.

So, not knowing where the wind is coming from, I’m okay with it. Hot today? I’m fine. Cold tomorrow? Great. Hurricanes? Wonderful, let’s get to sea in our shrimp boat.

I guess the reason I’m so agreeable when the conditions of the world would indicate that I should be grumpy is that I’ve seen one thing again and again: when I try to divine the future from my current situation, my track record is horrible, since the returns aren’t yet all in.

Okay, I looked it up and the blue stuff is either water or alcohol. Either way I wouldn’t drink it, since if it’s methanol, you won’t see what hit you.

So, evaluate where you are, ask yourself, “What if I’m wrong?” and live a life worth living. I don’t get to choose all of the events in my life, but I certainly can choose how I react.

Unless I’m wrong about that.

Capitalism and Crisis

“Four-alarm fire in downtown Moscow clears way for glorious new tractor factory. And, on lighter side of news, hundreds of capitalists soon to perish in shuttle disaster.” – Airplane II, The Sequel

I know how they feel. When my alarm goes off late – I end up Russian all morning.

Capitalism is a great system for allocation of winners and losers in an economy. It does this more or less automatically, because the transactions are voluntary on both sides. If I want weasel snouts and have money, and you have weasel snouts and want money, as long as we can come to an agreement, we both win. Nothing better than a warm weasel snout on a cold night.

Capitalism is good at creating rewards for those win-win transactions. Because it’s good at that, capitalism is probably the best creator of abundance the world has ever known outside of Bernie Madoff. Capitalism is also set up to be very compatible with those on the Right.

Transactions are based on free will and free exchange of goods, even transactions for things like natural gas. Here in Modern Mayberry, if I don’t want natural gas, I can cut firewood and burn it to heat my home. My insurance company would probably prefer me to get a fireplace first.

But natural gas is amazingly cheap because, thanks to capitalism-inspired innovation, it’s abundant. I would be foolish to try to heat water in my house over a wood stove in summer when I can spend the $12 or so a month for hot showers. I choose that because of free will, and also because I don’t want The Mrs. killing me in my sleep. I think that was one of the things on her list before she accepted my marriage proposal – “Does he sleep heavier than me?”

Veganism is like socialism. They’re both fine, unless you like eating.

Capitalism has positive incentives – make someone else happy with the transaction, and you win. If you do it in a significant enough way? You can win bigly. If you don’t win bigly? You can at least do better than your parents.

That has been the fuel of what we’ve called the American Dream, the idea that you could have your own struggle and the outcome is determined largely based on your effort, along with a bit of luck. Heck my boss gave me a raise yesterday. He said he wanted my last week here to be happy.

The United States has been a place of abundance for the last 75 years. Have there been recessions and setbacks along the way? Certainly. Has there been poverty? Absolutely. I like to do my best to fight poverty, but I’ve found the homeless aren’t very good at wrestling.

Where can you hear songs about poverty? Singapore.

One of the things that has been proven by President Johnson’s attempt to make a “Great Society” is that, despite trillions in .gov spending on poverty, it will always be with us. Even before Johnson’s “Great Society” program, the poverty rate had dropped to below 15%. That’s why a Mercedes-Benz® and poverty are the same: Princess Diana couldn’t stop either of them.

Since 1966, poverty has bounced around between 11% and 15%. Perhaps, in some fashion, these programs have prevented higher levels of poverty during recession? It is certain, however, that we didn’t even have an official poverty measure until 1959.

The structure of the economy, however, began to change. A typical factory job, obtainable with a high school degree, provided enough money for a house, car, and necessities for a family. Note I said job – wives working was something that happened before the kids were born and after they were in school, at least in the growing middle class. The middle class has learned that, while money can’t buy happiness, poverty can’t buy anything.

Even though a typical family is now supported by a working husband and wife, things had been good. At least some of the additional wages from both spouses working went to an upgraded lifestyle – capitalism was more than happy to provide new things to buy with the income, like Zima® wine coolers and Dan Fogelberg™ CDs. Capitalism had taken us from the scarcity and hunger of the Great Depression to abundance and humongousness of actual obesity caused by an abundance of cheap, excess calories.

Although it’s trivially easy to prove that communism is nearly certainly the most evil system ever devised on the planet, capitalism has its faults, too: Capitalism has no soul. It is a blind force that will sell you anything, even if it’s something bad for you. Taken to an extreme, capitalism will provide more than just immoral items, it will provide things that are illegal. And never mix Islam with capitalism – they don’t like profit jokes.

Capitalism also provides incentives to manipulate. Advertising does a wonderful service when it makes us aware of new products that can help us, but advertising can manipulate desires, like Edward Bernays’ propaganda campaign to convince women (who didn’t smoke at the time) that smoking cigarettes was exciting and fashionable. Now? Type “women smoking” into Google®, and you’ll get 810,000,000 matches.

Another fault of capitalism is that it produces products that are designed to fail. Want your iPhone® to last five years? Good luck with a battery that lasts only three. Apple™ did one better: it made software changes that slowed older iPhones™ down. Why? To get you to buy a new iPhone©. I did click on one of those, “You just won an iPhone®” pop-ups. Thankfully, it was just a virus.

It could be yours, for only 36 payments of $375,221.43.

Making your products bad isn’t new. Lightbulbs, when initially manufactured, lasted too long. A cartel devised a standard that made sure that light bulbs were constantly failing. Why? So you would have to buy more. Another example?

Two words: printer ink.

Those failures of capitalism, however, are a symptom of abundance. People can afford those things, so companies do whatever they can to get as much of their money as possible.

I fear our economy may be slipping into scarcity. Not next week, not next month. But as we see increased tensions, the possibility of prolonged outages of things we take for granted are likely. Higher rates of unemployment are likely, too.

There is a sign that the government attempting to prop up the economy is starting to create disastrous distortions. From today’s news, this story (LINK) describes how the Federal Reserve’s® pumping of trillions of dollars into the system is having the effect of blowing bubbles in the economy. Color me surprised.

Abundance of the “one income for a family” type is gone for many professions, if not most. If the Fed™ decides that it wants to keep blowing bubbles with trillions of dollars just made up on the spot, the result will be inevitable: a currency reset.

People will blame this on capitalism. I won’t. The condition we find ourselves in is the result of decades of currency manipulation. You can’t print money forever without an impact. What we will be left with is a contracting economy. What system works best in an economy that’s getting smaller, not larger?

I know what will be sold – communism. The reason people keep falling for this one is in times of difficulty is that they believe that it will solve their problems. The reality, every single time, is that communism will end in murder, scarcity, and hunger – it’s like a game of Russian roulette, but in this game a few hundred million die. But, hey, maybe this time?

Unemployed leather workers have nothing to hide.

Capitalism has been the only reliable way to deal with economic crisis in the past. The incentives it provides minimized the hunger and the pain of the Great Depression. But it’s not the “capitalism” we see today. The people of the United States in the 1930s helped each other, and capitalism was a way to run the economy, not the highest moral good.

Was it a massive Federal program that saved people during the Great Depression? For the time during the Great Depression, the spending of the Federal government tripled compared to years before the Great Depression. In my reading, the Federal government enacted thousands of policies, many contradictory to each other. Unemployment was still 14%+ when World War II started. The war clearly ended the Great Depression.

But people helped each other back then during the Depression – Great Grandpa and Grandma McWilder even took in kids from families that couldn’t afford to raise them. The United States was a far more united place, and the shared morality was more than a shared economic morality, like we see today. Did you get aid only if you were moral and upright, or a widow?

If you get to choose what Hell to go to, pick the communist one. It will be out of coal and molten sulfur.

Yup. If you could work, you were expected to work. But yet, in 1950s America before the advent of our current bouquet of welfare programs, did citizens let people starve?

No.

The best answer is capitalism, but a smaller, more local, and more moral version of it. Nearly every problem we have in the United States was created by increasing power in a large central state and huge metropolitan areas.

More on that in Friday’s post, where we’ll talk about how the problems created by modern life are more than economic.

Money, Power, Politics, and Soros

“What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it?” – Dilbert

My superpower is hindsight. But I can see that won’t help us now.

When I was a kid between the ages of 10 and 14, sometimes my dad would take me on his business trips. They were always to the same city – the capital city of our state. It was hours away, so it was quite an adventure. Where I grew up there was exactly one elevator (in a two story building at the college) and one escalator (at the JCPenny®) building within a 130 mile radius from town. We were so isolated that our Democrats were against communism all the way into the 1990s.

Did I mention I grew up in the sticks?

Pop Wilder was a small town banker, and sometimes the meetings in Capital City were at the Big Banks®, which were inevitably in huge skyscrapers. It was quite a thrill going up into those buildings. I’d sit in the lobby on the 20^th floor, reading science fiction while Pop did whatever it was he was there for in the meeting room. One bank in particular amazed me because the bathroom, on the 30^th floor, had a full length clear window – you could stand up and pee and stare out at the city below. There is probably a joke about Big Banks™ in there. I’ll let you fill in that particular blank – this is a family blog.

These trips were fun.

I kept getting checks from the banks during the COVID-19 social isolation – the kept leaving me a loan.

But one trip, we went to visit the majority owner of the bank that Pop Wilder ran. I recall this trip rather vividly, since we didn’t go to one of those gleaming towers. Pop pulled the car into a strip mall. Not a nice strip mall, but a dingy one in a sketchy area of town. Pop never talked about why he was having those meetings, so I wasn’t exactly sure why we were there. Perhaps he was going to sell me for a kid that didn’t keep his room in a condition that was specifically listed as containing elements of a war crime as defined by the United Nations?

Pop and I went up to one of those unmarked doors you see sometimes – just a steel door with a small diamond of glass about head high. You could tell it was a classy area, because the glass was the kind with the wire mesh inside. There was a buzzer next to the door, and Pop pressed it.

A voice answered, “Who is it?”

“Pop Wilder.” The lock on the door made an angry buzzing sound and Pop pulled the door open. We went up a flight of stairs – this particular strip mall doorway led to a second floor.

The Mafia chemist wanted the brake lines to rust – that way it would look like an oxidant.

I hadn’t seen any mob movies at the age of 12, but after watching them when I got older, the office had that feel. Run down. Dingy. Like the world had passed this neighborhood by on its way to making those gleaming towers that were miles away in the downtown area.

A secretary (they were called that, back then) didn’t say much more than, “He’s waiting.”

I walked into the office with Pop. The office had a feeling that I associate with movies from the 1940s or 1950s – dark, smoky paneling, a thin, worn carpet. Even the desk was ancient, but not in the “oh, cool antique” way, but in the “early prison work camp warden furniture” way.

The man Pop was planning to meet sat behind the desk. He didn’t get up as we entered. His only acknowledgement that we were there was a glance, like an annoyed man staring at what was on the bottom of his shoe. He looked, and I kid you not, exactly like Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. So I’ll call him that. After reviewing information on the Internet, I’d estimate his age at that time as about 85.

Pop Wilder: “Hello, Mr. Potter. This is my son, John. I mean, my other son, John.”

Pop didn’t really say that, but it amuses me to write it, since my older brother’s name was John as well. I guess he was Juan one, and I was Juan two.

Mr. Potter’s gaze fell upon me. It wasn’t pleasant. Normally, when I met an adult, they at least pretended to be interested and would ask some questions and make small talk. Not Mr. Potter.

“Hi,” I said, more to break the silence than anything.

He never said a word to me. Pop Wilder handed me the keys to the car, and said, “You can go wait outside, son.” That was fine with me – I had a book.

Bad puns? That’s how eye roll.

Mr. Potter, as I mentioned, was the majority owner of the bank that Pop ran. Pop and his brother owned a fairly small amount of the shares, but Mr. Potter owned the vast majority of the bank. From snippets between my parents in those conversations that last the length of a childhood, it turns out that Mr. Potter was far more than an angry bank owner working from a shabby office. He was actually a kingmaker in state politics. He was a Democrat, and no one got “the nod” unless he approved. He had spent decades of his life building up connections with every important person in state politics.

In today’s terms, the big, shining gleaming banks had Money, billions of dollars. This was the sort of Money that Mr. Potter didn’t have. Sure, Mr. Potter had millions back when millions meant something, but Mr. Potter also had raw, naked Power. Want to be governor? He couldn’t guarantee it, but he could probably make sure it didn’t happen if you made him mad.

Money and Power are different things – most people equate them, but it’s not really so. Elon Musk has Money, but he certainly lacks Power. Yes, there’s another fill in the blank joke in there about Tesla™ and power. If Elon Musk had Power? They wouldn’t have closed his car factories due to WuFlu. Power is where the governor would have found some way that the factories were found to be “essential” businesses. Real power is when the governor does what you want before you even ask.

Elon Musk has Money, but as only one out of 157 or so billionaires in California, he doesn’t have Power. But he does have $46 billion dollars*, so don’t feel bad for him. *That’s because it’s mainly in stock – a big Tesla™ crash, and it could be discharged. See, I finally made that electrical joke.

Soros was going to organize a riot of amputees, but he was worried it would get out of hand.

George Soros, on the other hand, only has a listed net worth of a little over $8 billion dollars. But Soros has invested heavily in politics. He’s created and funded a vast network of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that drive politics globally. How many connections does Soros have? According to Discover the Networks (LINK), which looks to understand who funds all of the Leftist organizations, Soros is associated in one way or another with 210 organizations that are hard Left. How hard Left? How about “Catholics for Choice”? It’s like I created a group called “Muslims for Bacon”.

But $8 billion. That seems low. Can you plot a Leftist overthrow on the cheap? Not at all. Soros has spent a staggering $32 billion on his foundations since 1984, including a recent transfer of $18 billion to his Open Society Foundation®. Heck, it once took Jeff Bezos a whole month to make that kind of money.

George Soros is just like that Mr. Potter I met, but on a global scale. Just a single one of his initiatives is active in over 120 countries in the world.

I heard that George Soros is the Lucky Charms™ evil twin – he’s tragically malicious.

What drives that kind of raw lust for Power? I mean, it must mean something to Soros, since he’s given away tens of billions of dollars to get it. Soros gives us a clue in his own words in a book he wrote about his favorite subject, himself: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood.” It’s no wonder that Soros looks like the evil Emperor from Star Wars™.

And what drove Mr. Potter? I have no idea. It wasn’t luxury – his office reminded me of the chief psychiatrist’s office at the asylum that all of those movie serial killers break out of. Notoriety? He had a very sparse Wikipedia page a decade ago – it’s gone. So not that. Philanthropy? Nope, none I know of.

I am always concerned about the motives of people who seek Power over others. Is it ego? Is it insecurity? Is it a genuine desire to help others?

Always remember what Mao said: “Power flows from the barrel of a gun.” You can have Money, but when Josef Stalin has the NKVD pick you up, you’ll learn quickly the difference between Money and Power.

Soros has evil lessons with Satan every week. I have no idea what Soros charges.

While mentioning Money and Power I’d be leaving out one very important part of the equation if I just kept in terms of those two material concepts.

There is at least one other type of Power – and that’s Personal Power. You can call it Spiritual, you can call it Virtue, or you can call it a dozen other names it goes by. It’s the Power that comes from standing up for what’s right despite the storms that will come. It’s telling your boss, “no” when he asks you to do what you know is unethical. It’s standing up when everyone else in the world seems to be against you, but you know that you’re right.

I’d take that Power over any Power that Mr. Potter ever had. And Soros? He may gain the whole world, but he’s already lost his soul.

Charles Peguy said, “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.” I think this was sometime before his last quote, “Germans, what Germans?” at the opening of the Battle of the Marne during World War I.

Tyranny seeks Money and Power. Yet?

Freedom keeps winning.