Category: Wealth

What If The Mess . . . Is All Planned?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when your government is making war on you?

Seriously – if a foreign government would try to:

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least he’s not French Vanilla Ice.

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

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

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

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

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

Fun fact:  he never ran for office.

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

After the elite have bought all the stuff they want?

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

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

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

Energy in 2022? I Hope So . . .

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

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

Energy is freedom.

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

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

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

But energy is freedom.

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

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

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

I’ll start with “what’s up?”

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

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

I hear their swimmers are always in the lead.

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

It worked.

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

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

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

Also?  When exposed to pollen, bees develop hives.

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

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

There are three problems with fracking:

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

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

Why fracking?  Because I hear drilling is rigged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last question was “what happens next?”

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

Double today’s prices.  Yikes!

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

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

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

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

My prediction?

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

Crappy prediction, right?

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

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

Prepare accordingly.

Bikini Economics And The Red Queen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a hard choice for many.

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s almost a bikini picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To stay in the same place.

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

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

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

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

What Is Truth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What hit me tonight?

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

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

Except the dormouse. I hate that guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be careful of what goes inside your head.

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

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

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

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

This is just the setup, however.

What goes in your head?

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

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

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

What goes in your head?

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

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

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

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

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

Step back.

What, really, is the Truth?

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

What, then will you choose?

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

The “Take This Job And Shove It” Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re done, too.

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

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

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

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

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

The lowest point?

Right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They see it.

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

They see the fraud.

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

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

What does that lead to?

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re gone.

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

We’re close.

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

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

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

What is a tax?

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

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

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

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

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

Child labor laws act like a tax.

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

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

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

It’s a tax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People who have extra cars to sell.

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

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

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

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

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

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 . . . .