Category: Weimerica

The Five Laws Of Human Stupidity

“Don’t call me stupid.”  – A Fish Called Wanda

I hear of you hold a pistol like that, you can hear the Rittenhouse.  Alternatively, this might be an Alec Baldwin gun safety video. 

Carlo M. Cipolla is a dead Italian economic historian.  So, not a dead economist, because we know that a dead economist was at least right one time.  I don’t know much about him, outside of:

He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker.  He’s a stiff.  Bereft of life, he rests in peace.  If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch he’d be pushing up the daisies.  His metabolic processes are now history.  He’s off the twig.  He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.  This is an ex-economic historian!

Sorry, I went full Monty Python on you.  Never go full Python, unless of course, you’re pining for the fjords.

But, Dr. Cipolla is dead, as I think I have abundantly established.

About the only other thing besides his condition of demise is that Dr. Cipolla is most known for writing a goofy little essay called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.  He wrote this essay originally in 1976, which proves that he might have had time to meet Joe Biden before writing it.

What do you get when you cross an economist with the Godfather?  An offer you can’t understand.

Text in italics (and those in quotes) beyond this point are direct quotes from the former Dr. Cipolla, except the snarky things I say underneath the memes I have handcrafted in the Wilder Meme Lab.

The First Law:  Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Tongue in cheek, Cipolla notes that “any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate.”  So, it’s clear that there exists a nearly infinite and inexhaustible supply of stupidity in the Universe.  I have observed this in action:  I have been to the DMV.

The Second Law:  The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.  

Cipolla felt strongly that stupid people weren’t made stupid, they were born stupid.  And, just like the First Law would predict, they are numerous and everywhere.  They inhabit colleges (I think Harvard™ is full of them) the government, and the Pentagon.  Stupidity can also be found at McDonalds®, but that’s excusable.  If When someone is stupid at McDonalds©, an order gets screwed up and I get not a Sausage McMuffin® without the muffin, but just a warm muffin (this happened) at the price of a Sausage McMuffin©.

When someone is stupid at the Pentagon?  They get promoted after the cover-up.

It has also been my experience that if you ask the right questions and listen to the answers, it’s amazing where you will find intelligent people.  Just like there is no bound on where you will find stupid people, there is no bound on where you will find intelligent ones.

Roses are red, violets are blue; no one in Washington cares about you.

One personal example is that every time (not occasionally, but every time) I felt full of myself, soon enough an intelligent person from a place I’d least expect would correct me.  The lesson I learned?  Listen.  Ask questions.  Just as idiocy hides everywhere, gems of wisdom are often when you don’t expect.

Great stuff.  But what, exactly, is stupid?  That’s what the Third Law is for.

The Third (and Golden) Law:  A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

The third law is what really caught my attention.  Here, Cipolla defines what stupid is – and this is an especially interesting definition:  a stupid person screws something up, and doesn’t get any benefit.  At all.  Here Cipolla constructs a chart to define it:

One of my girlfriends in high school was arrested for bank robbery.  She made out like a bandit.

Cipolla dices up the world into two parameters: do they help or hurt society, or do they help or hurt themselves?

Help Self, Help Society:  This is the quadrant that Cipolla reserves for the intelligent.  They end up creating a harmony where they help not only society, but end up helping themselves in the process.  Take the makers of PEZ®, for instance.  They make money by selling the sweet, sweet PEZ™, and society benefits, because, PEZ©.  In this instance it’s a win-win.  Society wins, and the makers of the product win.

These are the people that create the upward drive for society.  They make things better, and they make the people around them better, too.  This is SpaceX® Elon Musk.  He’s revolutionizing space transport and making it cheap to hit orbit ($25 a pound within 10 years???) while raking in piles of cash.

What next?  The helpless.  Helpless people, by Cipolla’s definition, are those that make bad deals.  The bad deals end up helping someone else (even society at large) but end up hurting the people making the deals.  Note:  this wouldn’t be people who help others and get joy from it – they’re getting a benefit.

The biggest group I can think of that represents the Helpless group in 2021 are Biden voters.  Man, I’m thinking they’d take that back if they could.

Joe Biden’s press staff is mainly women, I guess because he doesn’t have to pay them as much.

So, that’s two out of three.  That leaves most politicians bandits.  Bandits, according to Cipolla, come in two flavors.  The first is the net zero bandit.  A net zero bandit just takes $20 from one person and keeps it to spend on themselves.  Bernie Madoff and most conmen are net zero bandits.  They take money and then enjoy it themselves.  Society as a whole (outside of the trust and breaking the law things) isn’t hurt.

Bernie Madoff may make a lot of rich people angry, but he’s not going to create the fall of western civilization because his clients can’t afford to donate money to Harvard© so Harvard™ will let their third-rate children in.

The worst kind of bandits are the asymmetric (my term) bandits.  These bandits cause an outsized amount of trouble for a small gain for themselves.  I can’t think of any real-life examples, but what if some politicians subverted the monetary system just so they could buy votes for themselves while causing massive inflation?  Of course, something that crazy could never happen, right?

That, of course, leaves the subject of the essay:

Stupid People.

Most people do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is represented by the stupid people who normally show a strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavors.

Stupid people, Cipolla opines, are even more dangerous than bandits, because they screw everything up.  Stupid people take wonderful ideas, destroy them, and then hurt themselves in the process.  They’re the equivalent of a six-year-old sticking a knife in a toaster and getting knocked out, and then doing it again.  Repeatedly.

Think of it as evolution in action . . .

Again, from Cipolla:

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvers and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

And because there’s no rationality to the attack it’s impossible to defend.  How do you defend against a naked person covered in sex lube attacking you with a rubber chicken?  No, really, how do you do that?  I don’t ever want to be in that place again.

This takes us to . . .

The Fourth Law:  Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

This should be called the Rittenhouse Law.

Kyle was attempting to help society.  And, perhaps he did because I don’t think the world is a worse place off after he was done, but stupid people managed to ruin his night.

And, remember that stupid people vote.

Stupid that night, stupid on the stand.

The Fifth Law:  A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.  Corollary:  A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Here is where Dr. Cipolla might have lost me, but only because, perhaps, he never imagined that bandits could operate on the scale that they do in 2021.  What if you could steal from everyone at once?  Just print money, and you can.

What if you could get yourself two (or six!) more years at a job in Washington, D.C. and all you had to do was bankrupt the country?  That’s banditry that, perhaps, aspires to stupidity.  The end of the system will end up being the end of their banditry.

See?  Stupid.  So, maybe he was right after all?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Are We There Yet? (Part II)

“Brandon, come on, let’s go . . . Brandon?” – Brightburn

Midnight?

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

I’ve bolded both 9. and 10.  That’s the lead story.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful.  Things could change at any minute.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Making The Call, Part II? – Violence And Censorship Update – Models For The Future, It’s Personal – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – After Virginia – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 600 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

Making The Call, Part II?

Last month we spent time discussing whether or not the United States has met the international criteria for being in a civil war.  The answer (in my opinion) is that we are close enough that it’s hard to tell.  Some people are solidly on the “it’s already going” and some are not.  One bit of criteria that was sent to me by a faithful reader – thank you 173d VietVet.  Mike Shelby (Forward Observer) wrote up a short missive on this question (LINK) and came out on the “no” side.

That’s fair.  He put forward some criteria, and I thought they’d be worth discussing this month.  These four bullet points are direct quotes:

  • domestic military action (i.e., not just police)
  • government involvement as a belligerent (i.e., not just a tribal war between citizens)
  • capable fighting on both sides of the conflict (i.e., not just a genocide)
  • at least 1,000 combat-related deaths in a 12-month period (i.e., sustained fighting)

My responses are in bold:

  • domestic military action (i.e., not just police) – Have you seen the police recently? They have equipment that most world militaries would love to have.  Heck, our police even have stuff we didn’t leave for the Taliban.  To require military action seems irrelevant. 
  • government involvement as a belligerent (i.e., not just a tribal war between citizens) – The trend in our current generation of warfare explicitly uses the citizen as a belligerent, if not the main belligerent. In my mind, it is more than enough that the government aids and abets citizens to kill others.  This is indisputably happening right now.
  • capable fighting on both sides of the conflict (i.e., not just a genocide) – This is the best point of the bunch. The violence (at some point) must go both ways.  Right now, it is observably one-sided, and is looks much more like a genocide.
  • at least 1,000 combat-related deaths in a 12-month period (i.e., sustained fighting) – Another valid point, but remember, in dirty wars, state sponsored combat looks like . . . crime. I do hope the violence level drops, but there is no sign of it now. 

Again, I have nothing but respect for Mr. Shelby, but the reliance on his past military background provides an analysis lens that I do not share and he perhaps parses the terminology a bit more finely than I would.  Thankfully, there’s room for both of us to be right.

If A is for apple and B is for banana, what is C for?  Explosives.

I’m not going to (besides the notes above) belabor the point.  I don’t care if the gun that shoots me belongs to a private from Louisiana or a cop or a Mexican cartel gunman.  I’m still dead.  And if the government is encouraging, it’s either genocide or, if the fighting goes both ways, it’s civil war.

There is more from Mr. Shelby a bit later in this edition of the Weather Report.

Violence And Censorship Update

Not a lot to add to violence this month.

Censorship, continues in full force.  At the beginning of the month, Congress had a Facebook® “whistleblower” as the main witness at hearings where . . . she said the big problem with Facebook© is that they don’t censor nearly enough.

What does the “p” in Facebook© stand for?  Privacy.

Yup.  That was the story.  But then it came out that that the “whistleblower” spent last October making sure that information that could damage Joe Biden was censored from Facebook™.  She was on the team that made sure that information related to Hunter Biden’s laptop was suppressed.

I’m shocked, shocked that she was wanting yet more censorship from Facebook.

Applying for work at Facebook® is easy.  They already have your details.

Since it’s November, I thought I’d remind everyone of a picture from last year.  Consider it a stroll down memory-hole lane.

There was more fraud in the 2020 election than in a Thanksgiving Wilder Family Monopoly® game.

Again, if you want free and fair elections, it’s absolutely certain that you block windows so the public can’t view the vote counting in any way.  Stalin said it well:  “Those who vote decide nothing.  Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Models For The Future – It’s Personal

I mentioned above that we’d see more from the Forward Observer, and here’s an excellent article where he discusses the model of the Irish Troubles as a model for potential future difficulties.  You can read it here (LINK).

Similarly, Mary Christine put forward a fictional piece at The Burning Platform in 2019.  Those set as a fiction, it describes how conflict escalated from the political to a guerilla war in Missouri during the Civil War.  You can read it here (LINK).

A third model to think about would be the Second Boer War, where the British defeated the Boer Republics and forcefully integrated them into British South Africa.  Like the other two, this conflict was based on guerilla tactics.   To defeat them, the British finally just started putting Boer civilians (women and children) into concentration camps with all the expected brutality and tragedy that is implied by that.  Tens of thousands of civilians died in the camps.

These models all have several things in common, but what strikes me is the utter brutality in each of them and the sometimes-targeted attacks on non-combatants.  Conflict of this type is marked by tragedy in a way that lasts for generations – it becomes and remains personal.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and our perception of violence is holding steady.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it ticked up this month again, mainly on inflation fears.

Economic:

Economic measures ticked upwards in October – despite my prediction that they’d drop.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels last three months, and this rate is 4x the rate from any previous year in the last four.

After Virginia

Virginia has scared the Left, badly.  In their minds, Virginia had become a permanent Blue state – a Leftist outpost where statues could be taken down and Critical Race Theory could start along with hormone treatments for kindergartners.

Then they lost.  Big time.  And it wasn’t just a loss, it was a loss that was a psychological blow.  Biden is in political free-fall, and is less popular than COVID-19.

The Left is realizing the hard truth:  they won’t sweep into a victory, everywhere and forever.  The comments section in Leftist areas?

Calling for a peaceful split.  Previously, when winning, they wanted it all – they were sure they were going to win and establish a socialist paradise from sea to shining sea.

This was a sea change.  They realize that the attitude of the Right is changing, and they realize that they’re managing to make Trump look good to the swing voters.  Is a consensus building for a split?

Is this where we might beheaded?

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky.  Thanks so much, Ricky!!

From Sea To Shining  Sea

Brooklyn 1:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1NR_DWUeKI

Brooklyn 2: https://twitter.com/i/status/1454903434046578688

Lancaster PA: https://youtu.be/-Ch2q0Gw5Vg

Washington DC: https://twitter.com/i/status/1447913542674522117

Chicago 1: https://twitter.com/i/status/1445784277807890436

Chicago 2:https://twitter.com/i/status/1445483216475885576

Minneapolis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_6hA9PgICc

Mobile AL:https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1449214856138305536

Berkeley Campus: https://youtu.be/dYB9-o5QklE

Army Boot Camp: https://twitter.com/i/status/1449910120364879880

Marine Field Exercise: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10159949/Royal-Marines-commandos-force-troops-humiliating-surrender-training-exercise.html

 

Bad Guys…Guns…Good Gals

https://alphanews.org/78-instances-of-fully-automatic-gunfire-in-minneapolis-so-far-this-year/

https://buchanan.org/blog/who-is-killing-10000-black-americans-every-year-158601

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls

https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article255162407.html

https://www.wthr.com/article/news/local/more-women-especially-black-women-are-becoming-gun-owners-ownership-firearms/531-49622eec-5ac8-4793-ab89-cfa0213ebff4

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-winsome-sears-becomes-virginias-first-female-lieutenant-governor

 

Election Tidbits

https://twitter.com/GlennYoungkin/status/1448396312098050048

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/breaking-fulton-county-georgia-ordered-one-million-absentee-ballots-printer-days-2020-election-knowing-no-time-mail/

https://www.wtnh.com/news/politics/emails-released-to-news-8-show-a-flurry-of-confusion-over-mass-absentee-ballots-mailed-to-guilford-voters/

https://www.defendflorida.org/canvassing

https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/secretary_raffensperger_calls_on_department_of_justice_to_investigate_allegations_of_fulton_county_shredding_applications

https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/ap_news/gbi-chief-not-enough-evidence-to-pursue-gop-s-ballot-fraud-claim/article_edd11901-b7a1-524f-9815-6bedbdd4bc98.html

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis/kline-zucks-bucks-were-illegal/

 

Secession – Thinking Nationally

https://link.medium.com/yNzD8Sxhzkb

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/dan-rodricks/bs-md-rodricks-1010-civil-war-20211008-sy33rtzmind5vnsawrshjh2tw4-story.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/he-saw-americas-crackup-coming-in-2011he-says-its-worse-now

https://alt-market.us/in-a-civil-war-the-authoritarian-left-would-be-easily-beaten-but-it-wont-end-there/

https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-initiative-explores-deep-persistent-divides-between-biden-and-trump-voters/

https://www.salon.com/2021/10/09/a-new-confederacy-and-the-have-already-seceded/

 

Secession – Acting Locally

https://mises.org/wire/three-reasons-start-taking-secession-seriously

https://www.sanjoseinside.com/news/california-secede-one-group-got-a-key-approval-last-week-to-try/

https://www.axios.com/atlantas-whitest-neighborhood-may-secede-7ae8755d-d378-4aa1-8534-f90faf029356.html

https://dnyuz.com/2021/10/22/bye-maryland-lawmakers-in-3-counties-float-a-plan-to-secede-from-the-state/

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-canada-health-public-health-idaho-0d2015c826bb01a2cd04b31254c870c5

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/10/10/civil-war-trending-on-twitter-after-comment-made-by-trump-supporter/?sh=3c6d9b0b1853

https://www.laconiadailysun.com/news/state/lawmaker-wants-new-hampshire-to-declare-independence/article_d2717e73-5b7b-55b8-a8b3-aa7a45da9bf2.html

https://www.unionleader.com/news/politics/voters/should-the-2022-ballot-include-a-vote-on-new-hampshire-seceding-from-the-united-states/poll_fc16f69e-161c-11ec-8c39-b318093e8de3.html

https://www.amazon.com/Break-Up-Secession-Division-Imperfect-ebook/dp/B07X9PWSVG

https://www.amazon.com/American-Secession-Looming-National-Breakup-ebook/dp/B07N94RL11

 

Secession – Everybody Calm Down

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/no-were-not-more-divided-than-we-were-during-the-civil-war/

https://www.governing.com/now/is-america-in-a-cold-civil-war-not-at-all

https://www.sunjournal.com/2021/10/10/rich-lowry-national-divorce-is-a-poisonously-stupid-idea/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/06/americans-national-divorse-theyre-wrong-515443

https://www.silive.com/news/2021/10/its-dangerous-for-pro-trumpers-or-anybody-else-to-want-to-secede-from-the-united-states-opinion.html

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043401926/russia-expert-fiona-hill-there-is-nothing-for-you-here

 

Secession – The Least Of Our Worries?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10154745/The-pace-China-moving-stunning-Americas-No-2-ranking-military-officer-said.html

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/moment-biden-casually-committed-ww3-over-taiwan-last-nights-town-hall

https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/secret-chinese-philosopher-lessons-for-america/

https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/

https://dokumen.pub/america-against-america.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/

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.

Manufacturing Consent: Say No

“This is a consent form to stick a wire into your brain. It’s important for hospitals to get these signed for procedures that are completely unnecessary.” – House, M.D.

Anyone else see a pattern here?

The Mrs. and I were both leaders (once upon a time) in that Paramilitary Organization, Boy Scouts of America®.  We were leaders before the lifting on gay membership was removed.

During that time period, we were asked to participate in a (rather) lengthy survey of leaders.  One night over a bottle of wine we started and finished the survey, working together.  There was question after question, and there was scenario after scenario presented, as well as spots for written answers.  In the end, we were firmly against inclusion of LGBTQXYZ children into Scouting™.  We were also against LGBTQXYZ leadership.

And, we really, really thought about it, and tried to see the situation from different perspectives other than our own.  Regardless, in the end, our feeling was shared and simple:  Boy Scouts™ had been doing fine for a hundred years holding the same membership standards, and changing them for 1-2% of the population (that probably wouldn’t join anyway) didn’t make any sense.

One thing that I notice while taking the survey, was that it was quite biased.  In question after question, it presented “edge” cases.  “A boy, having completed everything required for his Eagle® rank, admits he is gay.  Should he become an Eagle™ Scout®?”

Well, how many cases like that would there be?  In reality, nearly zero.  But scenario after scenario was presented, showing gay Scouts in the most flattering light possible in carefully crafted questions that were designed to evoke positive emotions for poor gay kids who just wanted to hike and have fun, darn it.  We didn’t come down against gay Scouts® because we hated gay people.  We came down against gay Scouts™ because it violated a basic principle of the program.

Simple as.

Hmmm, another pattern?

It came out that the national Scouting® decision had already been made before the survey.  The entire survey was just an attempt to change the opinions of leaders and parents.  The purpose of the survey was not to legitimately understand what the adults involved in Scouting® wanted, it was to get them to consent to the preordained change.

The BSA™ was engaged in Manufacturing Consent.  The response from the Left after every retreat from principle by the Boy Scouts©?  “It’s not enough.”  It will never be enough.

Manufacturing Consent is a book by a communist named Edward Herman and the much more famous communist Noam Chomsky.  Their primary idea was that the news media was beholden to special interest groups, and would gang up with capitalists to make sure that True Communism© would never be tried.

Those poor communists couldn’t get an even break!  I mean, Chomsky and Herman had to get by working in coal mines in cushy professorships, while scoring book deal after book deal and getting fawning reviews from an admiring press.  Chomsky and Herman argued that “the man is keeping me down” while, indeed, they were pampered pets continually sucking blood like a parasite from the civilization they were intent on destroying.

That doesn’t mean that they were wrong – the media was quite busy Manufacturing Consent, but the consent they were manufacturing for was Global Leftist State Control, the same people who bribed the Boy Scouts™ into giving up long held positions based on morality in exchange for big bux from corporate sponsors.

We see that today, as well.  News is elevated when it serves the purpose of the Global Leftist State Capitalism.  News is depressed when it doesn’t.  Even news of a sensational nature becomes muted outside of local boundaries when it doesn’t serve the purpose of Global Leftist State Control.

The Mrs. did that.  The Mrs. used to be in radio.  She got to put together the news, sports, and weather for a regional network.  She had fun at the job, but one thing she did that made me laugh was that she wouldn’t cover NBA® scores.  Football?  Sure.  Baseball?  Of course.  But no the NBA™.  When it was winter, she only provided . . . hockey scores.   It wasn’t (particularly) a hockey region, but she didn’t like the NBA™.

So, for her news segments, the NBA© didn’t exist.

The news media does that on a national basis.  Sensational stories are elevated to cover news stories.  There was a missing toddler who apparently lived with wolves during the weekend in Houston and then was found alive and well.  Sure, that’s wonderful, but why on Earth was this a national story on the news?  A local story, sure.

But national?  What story did that take the space of?

It’s not just in news, although certainly you’ve noticed that in “mass shooting” events that the story is very, very quickly covered up if the shooter isn’t a white guy.  It has to be both – the reason is that is the group that the Left wants to disarm.  If there’s a problem with the shooter, the case quickly disappears from the narrative.

Beyond the news, it’s also on social media.  Twitter® and Facebook™ are used on a regular basis to amplify Leftist views.  The recent “whistleblower” to Facebook’s© free speech “problem”?  She was apparently involved in the decision to censor information from Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election.  Her complaint is that Facebook™ doesn’t censor enough viewpoints of the Right.

Bots and/or paid users are used to put up comments that are supportive of whatever narrative is being sold.  Of course, the jab is the big one, and the first one to attract those sorts of shills to this blog.  Again, the concept is to create a situation where any idea opposed to the narrative is ridiculed.

Where do you think the phrase “conspiracy theorist” came from?  It was created in the 1960s to discredit anyone who had a narrative that was counter to the mainstream narrative.  It has become especially apparent in the COVID era, since any opinion counter to the narrative as it is known on that day is ridiculed by politicians on the Left and the full might of the news media.

Likewise, Google™ actively suppresses opinions it doesn’t agree with.  Google™ used to give this blog about ten times the traffic of DuckDuckGo®.  Now?  They’re about the same.  That was about 10% of my traffic, and when it dropped, I noticed it, since it all happened at once.  I’ve since recovered (and then some!) from that suppression.

Additional narrative suppression comes from, surprise, academia.  MIT just canceled a speech by a pro-climate change geophysicist because (drumroll) he was against race-based affirmative action.  Now, he wasn’t going to talk about affirmative action, he was going to talk about climate change, and follow the Leftist line there.  But to allow people who challenged another part of the narrative to talk?

Nope.  To be on the Left, understand you’re all in, or you’re out.  Will that shut up the next academic with politically unpopular views?

This brings us back to the Scouts®.  They had made a choice, and agree or disagree, that was where they were going.  The collapse in membership from around 2.9 million when the decision was made to 760,000 or so today (despite adding kindergarteners and girls) is nothing short of catastrophic.

That, in the end, is the problem with manufacturing consent.  It isn’t real consent, and it ends up destroying the thing it was trying to influence.  The parents and kids voted with their absence – regardless of the attempt to influence them.

The first step in not being manipulated by Manufactured Consent?

Be aware.

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.