“Enjoy it while it lasts, I have a feeling there’s going to be a shortage of cold beer this summer.” – The Stand
Well, well, well.
“Pop, what was your first car?” Pugsley asked.
“Do you mean the first one I owned? Or . . .”
“No, the first one that was, you know, yours. Like how mine is the pickup.” I knew that was the question he was asking, but sometimes dads like to tease.
I replied, “My first car was a 1975 green GMC® truck. Stick shift, just like yours. It had a rubber floor, no A/C, and all the radio you could want, if you liked AM. And it had a vinyl bench seat. Vinyl bench seats were nice. When your date got in, she could slide right over next to you.”
And in college, this one girl said we didn’t have chemistry together.
I smiled, remembering the first time I took a girl on a date. I tried to capture that first date magic with The Mrs. for our last anniversary, but she got mad when I tried to drop her off with her Mom and Dad.
Even though it was only “my” pickup for two years, it was a wonderful little truck with the worst engine that you could imagine. I think it put out at least a dozen horsepower. But it was my first taste of freedom.
“Yeah, weird that there’s a shortage of trucks now,” I said.
“What?” Pugsley laughed. “What’s the joke?”
As most people know, that’s not a joke. Because of a semiconductor shortage, new trucks are in short supply. They can make the rest of the truck, but they can’t make it work without computer chips.
Since people keep their old trucks longer, spare parts for older trucks are in short supply, too.
Shortages tend to build up and have ripple effects.
And my brain is now randomly deleting memory, too.
I started thinking and realized that, with the exception and weirdness of the Great Toilet Paper Famine of 2020, Pugsley has lived in a world of abundance. In his world, people don’t have to line up for products, the products line up for the people and wait for them. Probably the only shortage he’s used to is a shortage of spending money.
That was intentional.
In my life as well I can’t recall any real shortages of anything. I recall (vaguely) my parents talking about a gas shortage. I guess that impacted the people in Flint, Michigan a lot: I heard they had a shortage of unleaded.
The only other shortage I recall was the normal shortage of fruits and vegetables when they weren’t being grown. Strawberries? “Get some frozen ones,” Ma Wilder would say if I wanted strawberries in winter. “Strawberries are out of season.”
I got a strawberry stuck in my ear once. My doctor had cream for that.
Back then, the technology didn’t really exist for the behemoth national chains to manage global logistics to get strawberries in winter. Now? Fresh fruit and vegetables are flown across the globe. I read that one particular species of fish (don’t remember which one) was caught in Chile, flown across the ocean to China for processing, and then flown to the United States for consumption. Teach a man to fish and he has fish for life. Give a man a fish and he’ll create a multinational logistics chain to optimize profitability.
This is efficient. It makes use of low labor prices in China for processing. But, as we’ve discussed, again and again, efficiency is bad. Efficiency is why we have a shortage of electronic chips for trucks to move that fish today. I don’t think the British have this issue – I keep hearing about their fish and chips.
One consequence of efficiency is concentration. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company™ (TSMC) was named with all of the characteristic creativity of a colorblind engineer whose parents were introverted accountants.
“What are we making?”
“Semiconductors.”
“Where are we going to make them?”
“Taiwan.”
“I have an idea. Now you might think it’s crazy . . .”
One thing about excellence is that it brings smart people with similar skills together to work on tough problems. The more they learn, the more smart people show up because as they solve one problem, another one comes up, and, pretty soon (if the solutions are profitable enough) there are lots of smart people around. Give the nerds enough time, and they will solve enough problems that they will know more about the subject than anyone else on the planet. Unless it involves deodorant.
And the movie came out in the early 1980s . . .
That makes for very efficient, centralized production. Detroit sprang up around the auto, New York around money, and Paris around wide, broad avenues that were perfect for a panzer parade.
But these centers of excellence are centers of vulnerability. TSMC™ has recently illustrated the vulnerability of companies all over the world to a single manufacturer. Even going back into the deeper past, during the period of the Roman Empire, most porcelain plates and cups were made in the south of France. When the Empire fell, everyone was stuck eating out of Tupperware™ from that box in the garage with all their college stuff in it for five hundred years.
Another danger from plastic storage tubs? Developing Tupperculosis.
Covid-19 triggered shortages have exposed how precarious an efficient world is. We are often dependent upon single sources of materials and innovation from areas all across the globe to bring us something as simple as the Large Hadron Collider, even though most people think they could construct it from spare parts to a 1993 Buick™ and that old refrigerator that they have in their garage.
Efficiency has made us vulnerable. I have no real reason that while we’re in the midst of the ‘Rona Retreat around the world to think that this will change for the better soon. As freedom collapses, and as efficient markets based on low inflation implode, we aren’t headed for a time of plenty.
Soon we may miss the time when stuff waited for us in the grocery store, and the thought of that might bring a happy memory like the thought of a long-gone 1975 GMC® truck.
With bench seats . . . .
An oldie but a goodie:
The best bread makers in the world? The Soviets. People would stand in line for hours for a single loaf.
We may challenge that record pretty soon.
That is a good one. Wonder if we’ll have the discipline to stand in line by then?
This one hits close to home: my son has a 2003 pickup, which looks great, and would probably run great if the ECU was still good, but as is the mileage is terrible and the exhaust stinks. The Engine Control Unit has apparently failed. He can still drive it, but it won’t pass the state-mandated emissions inspection. But he only needs to drive it a few miles to work and back, so it’s going to pollute less per week than the guy driving a Prius 50 miles each way. Replace the ECU? Ha! ECUs are apparently tailored in mysterious ways for specific engines and options, and his is no longer available as new-old stock at any price. Who knows whether there’s a close-enough match to keep it running? There’s no documentation about what it has to do, or the connectors that need to mate, the signals it needs to transform, so there’s no “Cuban-style” reverse-engineering of the part you need. Putting this old truck out to scrap wouldn’t be such a problem if there was a normal supply of replacement vehicles, but (of course) there isn’t.
Meanwhile, Son tells me that a large number of new vehicles were flooded in their storage lots by recent tropical storms. So, maybe it’s going to take more than a big box of ECUs to relieve the vehicle shortage.
And hopefully you don’t lose a transmission (like we did). Still worth it.
But, clearly, t*****s are the one thing on earth we’re not about to run out of. But I hear the replacements have issues with finding the right gear…..
JW – it wouldn’t let it post without an edit.
There’s probably a manual versus automatic joke in there, but I’ll let it ride.
Also worth noting, the problems in the supply chain are not the result of the Chinese coronavirus bioweapon, it simply exposed the problems that were already there. We saw this all the time when heavy snow was forecasted and stores were stripped bare, Covid just made it worse and more sustained. The whole system, and not just the supply chain, runs on a combination of blind faith and sorcery.
That’s exactly the case. They system was going to fail – the only question is what was going to push it over the edge.
Shortages may be unknown to entire generations today, but they did happen in the distant, black-and-white past. I recall that when I was a child there was a brief sugar shortage, during which sugar rose to the unfathomable price of a dollar a pound (*gasp*). There was also a beef shortage, if memory serves. Art Buchwald wrote a grisly*, humorous piece at the time about a family that traded its children, one after another, for a decent cut of meat.
And I certainly recall the infamous “energy crises” of the late 1970s. Insufferable knob Jimmuh Carter lectured us on conservation while wearing a sweater that made him look like an Andy Williams fanboy. I wasted more than a few hours on gas lines as a new teen driver back in 1979 to feed my Chevy Nova 305 V8 with its 12 mpg gasoline habit.
Don’t recall breadlines or soup kitchens, but I’m sure the Biden circus is working on that as part of its Make America Depressed Again campaign.
*gristly, if you prefer.
Bread lines and soup kitchens pre-dated SNAP (food stamp) payments, so even the “government bread” is virtual now. And even at that, there’s a food pantry in my town that has people lined up an hour before opening on Saturday mornings to get their bag of staples.
The people working in the old soup kitchens could see with their own eyes the conditions of the people who they served, and could judge how thin was the line separating those who served from those who were served. The people who manage the SNAP cards probably think of themselves as “knowledge workers”, technicians in the modern service economy, with little sympathy for the poor who depend on them.
Mr. $2, I think John might hire you. That, or banish you as being pun-competitive.
Part of the energy crisis is that prices were controlled, too. Once the controls went away, prices shot up, but lines disappeared . . .
Wondering if this is, at heart, an argument against capitalism? Or perhaps just the obsession with maximizing profits. Hyper efficient Just In Time One Worldism is great, but the smallest hiccup (or ship stuck in the Panama canal) can screw things up globally. If we had a few chip factories of our own, and Stalinistic laws that said “buy our stuff first, regardless of price, which we set to be mostly reasonable”, we wouldn’t be in this jam. But we’d have more local pollution from production. Or if we threw away the global model, or even the urban-centric model, and just did local production of most things (which is how I think France operates, what with them going to market twice a day on ugly French bicycles, however the only soap factory in France is way down south in Bayonne), this could be alleviated somewhat. It would also put more people to work. On the third hand, egad, we could just step back from our high tech fixation. I don’t want to bring back carburetors, but 90s tech vehicles ran just fine, without the latest generations of digital wizardry, so perhaps their chip needs were simpler? And my 7 year old cheapo smart phone still works just fine, without 5G or ultra-retinal display or super dooper CPU.
Vis a vis the French and soap…you know they invented perfume for a reason, right?
I’ve had thoughts along those lines. The Founders seem to have assumed that the proper way to finance the (miniscule) federal government they had in mind was … tariffs. There, I said the Deplorable Word, “tariffs.” They could be very simple. Not aimed at one foreign country more than another, as instruments of imperial policy as we do now. And, if they’re used to fund a government on the small scale that’s proper, they could be quite small. Just something like, “All imported goods and raw materials, from anywhere, are charged a 3% tariff.” This would serve as a modest incentive to produce things onshore, without imposing an excessive burden on those things which make a lot of sense to buy imported: your Beluga caviar, your French wines, your Swiss chocolate, and so on.
How to get it done? Well, all they’d have to do is appoint me president, the congress, and the supreme court, simultaneously. And, if they do that, well … there’ll be LOTS more changes coming!
Actually we live in a version of the New World Order that worked toward no tariffs with the numerous free trade alliances. That approach has led to the heavy export of American tech and jobs. But we did not increase oversea sells because the damn foreigners taxed our goods and imposed heavy, targeted regulations. This applies to China, Europe, and even Canada. Trump was the first sensible president in 40 years to fight our stupid acceptance of the condition.
I had generally agreed with free trade (that was equitable). However you have made an excellent point that is contributed to the issue of over-centralization, especially in foreign lands. The centralization is an issue both commercially as well as militarily. As serious issue is the military moving to drone warfare, but with all the electronics built in China and Taiwan. We might have to fight China over Taiwan just for access to the chips! 15years ago there was a big push to build memory chips in the USA and it continues today, but big production is overseas. BTW: A major chip factory costs over $1 billion to build using cheap foreign labor.
After WW2 our main goal for trade agreements was to hold together an alliance to fight communism.
Currently our main goal for trade agreements is to profit the mega rich who somehow are also communists.
There is no “free” trade if production can be outsourced to China, who openly uses slave labor.
Either repeal the 13th amendment, OSH Act, etc., or slap tariffs on China and other countries with “inferior” labor laws.
If you promise to exempt chocolate from import tariffs, I’ll vote for you as many times as my local Dominion voting machine allows.
And Stock Corporations only had a life of 20 years.
The problem isn’t “capitalism”, the problem is that we’ve had to adopt just-in-time production and shipping, all around the globe, to offset inflation caused by the fiscal and monetary malfeasance of the USG for the last hundred-plus years.
Capitalism as an ideal is a horrible system. Capitalism/ socialism have been set up as a false dichotomy for us to choose between, with both being horrible if taken to extremes. For similar reasons, if you dig deep enough. Somewhere in the middle is the right answer, and that answer will differ depending on what culture and what group is involved. Even Thomas Jefferson liked welfare programs if done correctly.
What’s so bad about capitalism? Being able to keep the product of your labor, or being able to voluntarily exchange value for value?
Welfare is great, so long as my taxes aren’t paying for it.
Here’s hoping you’re just a kid who thinks he knows enough to venture out into the wilds of the internet. Maybe you’ll learn something eventually, but that’ll require that you shut up and think.
This is what I mean by a false dichotomy. All you can see is capitalism and communism, with nothing in between, and you don’t even know the real definition of capitalism or it’s long term harms. Which is odd, since those long term harms are manifesting themselves daily.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAhAHAAH!
iTs a FaLsE DiChOtOmY!
There is freedom and tyranny. I know what side you’re not on…mine.
See you on the battlefield.
As has been said by others, wiser than I: (and paraphrased – because I can’t find the original)
“Capitalism is the worst system of economics, except for all the others”.
Meaning that – of course there are problems with Capitalism, but the alternatives are enough worse to find ways to live with it.
Not so much against capitalism – but against the soul-free global version that focuses on short term, and considers anything that is legal to be good.
For or against Capitalism is not the root of the problem. Rampant greed is. When the market will bear $5 for a widget anyone who can make one for less can make money. If you follow retail logic of old, the $5 sale number was typically 2x of cost. So, if you lower the cost, you can, (a) lower the sale price or, (b) make a larger profit. When (b) is the choice you get three things happening; (1) competition gets frozen out as the lower cost-to-produce/deliver item can force out competitors and then (2) you get shortages if there is a hiccup in the delivery chain followed by (3) higher prices for less-than-quality merchandise. Rinse repeat until there is only one supplier/manufacturer left. And then it is only a matter of time before there is a final snafu that ends the line. The good news is that at the end of the line is a new start-up making $5 widgets.
1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, gold with a black textured top. Could do 0 to 35 across the intersection, and then lay rubber. The car tilted to the right when you revved the engine. Never had any problems with the engine or transmission. The body, however, was made of rust. Thin, cut-rate rust. My parents sold it when the floorboards fell out. The wooden boards that had replaced the original metal.
Oh, yeah, shortages. Our grocery store shelves here in Eastern Midwestia are not bare, but noticeably thinning. We recently bought a used car for about 50% over what it would have cost a couple years before, because it was the best deal available.
Nice! Mine could burn out on a gravel road, if the gravel was loose.
John – – Sobering thought….shortages are definitely in our (colllective) future. One would think that a global shortage of micro processors would generate entrepreneurs to start a factory to fill the gap. Don’t hold your breath for that one. It isn’t happening because the startup costs are prohibitive.
Bad luck (fire burned down Japanese microprocessor factory so 15% of manufacturing disappeared) and bad timing (Covid lockdowns) and stupid corporate leaders (knew they had just in time parts and failed to see tenuous supply line fragility of critical components) have given us this situation.
Now add to that Western state droughts and inflated farm supply costs and shortages will hit us in both our wallet and our stomach.
So if you thought 2020 was a Doo-Zee, and were then surprised at 2021 becoming a Doo-Zee on Mega-steroids, hold my beer……2022 will be the Doo-Zee-ist Doo-Zee yet !!
Beer, you say ?? The Stand was right about 2022: “Enjoy it while it lasts, I have a feeling there’s going to be a shortage of cold beer this summer.”
I’ll have one tomorrow night . . . and you should, too!
Port of LA is totally swamped.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/01/supply-chain-delays-wont-be-easily-fixed-and-trouble-will-continue-into-next-year-commentary.html
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-08-25/supply-chain-problem-port-delays
Watch it real time. Scroll out and see the mess all over the Pacific.
https://www.cruisin.me/cruise-port-tracker/united-states/los-angeles-california/
There is a huge shortage of truck drivers to deliver all that product sitting off the coast of California waiting for a spot at the docks in San Pedro.
Yup – Amazon is out of (some models) of Kindles. Go figure.
The Mandatory Vaxx will be used as a further excuse to mask actual shortages removed from the transportation issue ( not that there aren’t plenty of sidelined Semi’s needing spare parts ). Fun Filled Fact, our local food bank just announced the mandatory clot shot, so I can already see that as a reason they no longer will have government food to hand out. And a note to John, thank you. This site is one of the few making my reluctant return online enjoyable. You rock, dude.
Fun Fact:
Since around 2007, RecreationVehicles with diesel engines use Exhaust Fluid.
Apparently cobbled from whatever spare parts are laying around, their injectors fail at a rate of about a hundred percent…. often minutes after purchasing the rig — ON THE WAY HOME FROM THE DEALER.
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Repairs involve replacement.
No replacements are available.
The rig is driveable… in ‘limp’ at a walking-speed not ramming-speed.
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If you, Bold Explorers, venture out of your bunker and away from your compound, anticipate vacationees at a much more relaxed pace from now on!
Ah, yes, DEF. Have to have every engine the same for problems that are local in several small areas. Regulator thinking.
That’s why the newest diesel trucks are made so you can’t “delete” the use of DEF by installing a delete kit and different exhaust system like you can on older trucks…such as my former 2014 Chevy Silverado HD. Those kits actually improve mileage and/or horsepower, depending on where the five position switch is set.
Always wonderful to see you, Lord Bison!!!!
Wow – Food bank requires it? Yikes.
A couple of things:
First, efficiency – in and of itself – is always great. What isn’t great is when gains in efficiency are realized at the cost of even greater gains in fragility.
Just-in-time manufacturing and distribution channels are a consequence of our need to outsource our inflation, which started in 1913, and has picked up momentum every couple of Presidents since (Wilson, FDR, Nixon, Clinton, most notably). This is due to the dollar bubble that we’ve created, and when it bursts, no asset class will be safe (with the exception, perhaps, of precious metals; you know which ones).
Second, the “great reset” is designed to usher in a global, socialist state. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you will, but at least offer a counter-argument. It’s worth noting that the only real difference between communists and fascists is that the former believes that socialism is a means to an end, whereas the latter harbors no such illusion. So, while trying to draw a distinction between the two is largely an exercise in futility, I will note in that socialist countries there are never shortages of goods; only surpluses of people.
Prepare accordingly.
In communist (and socialist) countries, the elites who run the Party also control industry. In fascist countries, it’s just the opposite: the elites who run the factories also control the Party. Totally different, yup.
I’ll assume you’re being sarcastic.
Yup, and the great reset isn’t meant to reset in our favor.
WRT shortages and abundance…
A whole lot of the difference between Americans and Europeans in particular, but basically “everyone else” is to look at their society and social systems thru the lens of abundance.
The US is a culture of abundance. We had land, free for the hard work of settling it… we had forests, great plains to flood the world with food, then factories to flood the world with goods. We came out of WWII with our manufacturing, mining, food production, and ‘human capital’ intact.
The rest of the world, but particularly Europe, is a culture of scarcity. The land was already all owned by others, arable land was under cultivation, if you weren’t a first born son, you better look farther afield. Jobs and opportunity were limited by where you where and WHO you were. They came out of WWII with their production bombed, fields fallow, and the best and brightest of two generations fertilizing the soil. The UK had rationing until what, 1965? They had coin operated HEATING ffs.
They embraced having someone control and distribute what little there was, we said, go out and get your own from that huge pile…
I think the distinction is as important as understanding high trust societies vs low trust societies.
And as we find ourselves moving into ever lower levels of social and societal trust, we are finding a lack of abundance for the first time in a while, and with the potential to be more severe and longer lasting than the previous short and mild times.
Stack it high while you still can. And if you are buying for yourself, buy the most durable and repairable version you can.
n
(as an example, after the freeze broke everyone’s plumbing in Houston, a man with a bucket full of yard sale plumbing fittings was VERY popular…)
Yup – and being inefficient will be a boon to those that have extra.
My parents were raised during the Great Depression. To add insult injury, they faced the rationing of the Second World War. They understood some things were unreachable. They, also, knew survival may depend on taking advantage of a little farmable land, and learning to cook with the basics. This stretched into my youth. My mother could feed a family of 7 for most of a week by eventually turning a ham into a huge pot of navy beans. The ham lasted until there were only enough slices for my father’s lunch, and the hambone was boiled with the beans.
There’s something to be learned from all of this, and it isn’t how to vent your frustrations on social media. The United States became lulled into complacency, important references have now passed on, and a spoiled society is having a hard time adapting.
Yup, and Ma Wilder saved . . . aluminum foil. Pie tins. She had seen it before . . .
My first vehicle was a 1953 3100 truck we got off a car dealers back lot. Needed a valve job which I did and then drove that truck for the next 2 years. It was Forest Green as I recall. That or Emerald.
Was a good truck. and parts were easy to get so there was that. it needed things but nothing terminal. I did drive it for a couple of weeks with only front brakes when a brake line rotted through.
I did fix it and that held for the rest of its life. My grand dad ended up with it and the motor transmission wound up in a bigger truck he had and the box became a trailer.
Good times . . . and a truck that kept on giving.
A Stand reference, well played, Sir. I’m no fan of comrade kommissar Stephen King but that is a good one.
A great meme shows Pennywise the clown in the storm drain saying, come on down Stephen we are all woke in here.
Fun Trivia-In the movie the Shining, the scene with the smashed red Volkswagen was directed at Stephen King as that was his vehicle of choice at the time and he didn’t approve of how the movie turned out.
The really good “horror” is funny and “scary” at the same time, kind of like Clown World!
The first car for me was a Chevy Cavalier and you could put .75 cents in gas in the tank and make it to point B but this before sand box war NWO one or Iraq.
Coffee filters, trash bags, peanut butter, toilet paper, are some short items locally and prices are going up and away with increases by the day.
Older brothers first car was a 1970 Camaro with the split bumper and we knew we had missed out on the good old days from an early age but you work with what you have been dealt.
I stopped reading King in 2006. I’d had enough . . . though I do like some of his early stuff.
My 1st vehicle was a VW Beetle, a 1966 model with a dashboard having three gauges, four pull switches (I think) and no radio. Last of the 6 volt battery powered VWs, the headlights were compared to birthday candles and birds at night which sat in the street often left at last moment, thinking a firefly was approaching.
My 1st truck – ’76 Dodge Adventurer, appointed same as your GMC. Power nothing, AM radio and yes, bench seat was perfect for dating. I bought used with camper for $3400 in spring 1984 and sold for $900 in 1998 with nearly 300,000 miles on odometer. I still miss it – you could actually wrench on that with basic tools and you had room to work. Not today.
Thanks for the post – I do agree, better put back your basic necessities or cry later. Down in Texas, living with no A/C would create rage beyond reason.
Yeah, I’ve become rather attached to the A/C, though I went without it for a year just to see what it was like.
It was okay.
Motorcycling during TheGasCrisis of 1973 offered wonderful new opportunities to stick-it-to-TheMan!.
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We simply traveled to a ‘Closed No Gas’ filling-station, and proceeded to fill our tanks from the residue in the hoses on the pumps.
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We used gravity to drain the hoses, independent of electricity or any sort of adult supervision.
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‘No way!’ you might scoff.
‘Way!’ I retort, showing photographic evidence of freshly-topped five-gallon tanks on my 1970 Harley Davidson FX with its ten-over spool.
I believe you – my buddy used to turn off the pump and drain the hose.
I do that also. Heck, there’s at least 20 or 30 cents worth of gas in the hose after you shut it off. Also, I got gas in my eye one time from a hose/nozzle with gasoline that wasn’t drained off when I pulled the hose out of the pump.
“Because of a semiconductor shortage, new trucks are in short supply”.
So much is by design it makes me wonder if this is also by design. No shortage of trucks, can’t remember if ford or chevy but the kentucky factory is still pumping them out. Put the one chip in drive it to the kentucky speedway parking. Park it with the hundreds of others. Pull the chip, Do same on next one.
Mid 2000’s truck. Will drop a new engine in it before the newer one’s with black boxes in them.
Remember: vote democrat to kick the rino asses to the street because of this again.
https://videos.files.wordpress.com/PXa8qWqv/1437981640547053572_ul5gp3pxmxlhqelo_mp4_dvd.master.m3u8
Yeah, and a vehicle designed in the next 10 years will be (on purpose) a spy factory for .gov.
Recently it took over a week to fix my car due to difficulty in getting parts for it. Chatting up one of the employees, they revealed that there are weird shortages of parts. For example, they recently couldn’t get a certain kind of spark plug for several days.
This is what happens when you don’t let people work, and when most money accumulates at the top rather than circulating down below. The latter was a big reason for the Great Depression lasting as long as it did, which was the greatest wealth distribution scam until covid.
Yup. There was only one transmission when we had to fix the truck, (five months ago) and it was 2x the normal price.
Such a timely & thought provoking post, sir, thank you. Much like in the Frost poem, it seems the time has come for us to choose between forked paths, though interestingly, in our story they ultimately lead to the same destination. Shall we consider the scenery, & even the cost, in our choice?
The bottom line is, ultimately, we can’t escape the supply chain vulnerability & disruption issues. I would submit that, given that, we therefore have no real choice but to reshore & de-globalize; willingly, consciously, & as soon as possible; thus proactively resolving the issue & doing so on a path that has much better scenery & much lower cost, in every sense of that word.
But why can’t we escape the supply chain vulnerability & disruption issues, you ask?
It’s a problem with a binary choice at its base.
Binary choice: There’s either a policeman for the world, or there isn’t. (To protect trade routes.)
Policeman exists = no supply chain disruptions. No policeman = some amount of supply chain disruptions.
Americans have been that policeman since the end of WWII. But…
Americans don’t -want- to be the policeman for the world, and no one else is capable of doing it, for static & unalterable geopolitical reasons. (Though we’ve been forced to be the policeman for the world well past the time when there might have arguably been a need for it, security wise, for us anyway.)
So, either:
1) Americans are forced to continue to be the policeman for the world, very clearly against their will, which results in ever-increasing domestic conflict, which eventually results in war &/or collapse. (Because it costs us continued & accumulating loses in jobs, culture, industrial base, prosperity, & demographic declines.)
Or:
2) There is no world policeman &,
Supply lines will be more vulnerable to disruptions, as conflict & disruptions will naturally become a more common occurrence.
The deceptive thing is that either choice actually leads to this outcome, no policeman & more vulnerability to supply chain disruptions. It’s just a matter of what road we choose to get there & what is the attendant cost to that choice of paths.
One choice guarantees a tremendous loss of human life domestically & internationally, & perhaps even a global conflict; most certainly the death of the American -empire-; but most concerning, perhaps even the death of the Republic, -and- the civilization itself.
The other choice, while it accepts a certain amount of increased regional conflict at various times & places around the world, with its attendant disruption in supply chains, allows for the possibility of retaining our Republic & civilization, including importantly, the reshoring of our industries & the return of increased opportunity & prosperity.
The second choice is the obvious winner & is considerably less disruptive (& more humane), except it’s not less disruptive for the so-called “elite” & “ruling class” who are enormously dependent on the system remaining as it’s currently structured. The change will cost them tremendously, maybe even everything. This is why we see them fighting as if for their very existence right now, & importantly, why they won’t stop (& consequently, why we should be prepared for what that means). The why of it all is a rabbit hole too deep for the restraints of a comment section, but suffice it to say, the reasons the change would cost them so enormously include having to walk away from sunk costs in foreign lands & foreign markets; having to walk away from cheap labor & resources, & ultimately having to give up market share to new hungrier, faster & more nimble domestic competitors that will spring up in response to the need for increased industrial production which naturally comes along with reshoring.
The last ditch, Hail Mary, save-it-or-burn-it-all-down effort to save “globalism”, international trade in its current form, that we’re seeing from the so-called “elites” & “ruling class” will end either with their complete (but very short-term) victory, or with their complete & permanent defeat, & possibly even their removal from this plane of existence altogether. And crucially, their victory, however short-lived it may be, would mean our suffering & enslavement, as recent events should be making abundantly clear to anyone who’s paying attention. This is an existential fight. Us or them. Which makes it a pretty easy choice, at least for me.
This is a fight they will push to its bitter end, but ironically, it’s a fight they can’t win, because even if they were to succeed in the short term, as we mentioned earlier, -any- path still leads to the second outcome, no global policeman & chronically vulnerable & disruptable supply chains. It’s unavoidable.
It’s yet another case of a disease for which they’ve become infamous & seem to be unable to shake, their complete lack of ability or willingness to see anything beyond the short term.
That being what it is, it’s time we gave them the old one digit salute & started looking after our own interests, since they’ve very clearly abandoned even the pretense of that responsibility. It’s time to do what needs to be done for our civilization & our future. It’s time to start making decisions from a position of strength & doing what’s best for us, the people of this nation, rather than doing what’s best for a corrupt & parasitic group of criminals who amount to nothing more than a cancer on our civilization.
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(Yes, yes, I know. “They”, the so-called “elite” & “ruling class”, they believe in a global governance utopia, call it by whatever name you like, that will allow them to rule over us with ease & perfection in perpetuity. This false reality that they’re -still- in love with will work out about as well as it always has, under any of the other names it’s ever been tried & advertised under; badly & with much suffering & destruction before it collapses in a quivering heap of green oozing goo. Goo-a-topia 2.0 is DOA, just like every other previous version has been. Name changes don’t equate to fresh new ideas or different outcomes, no matter how much utopian true believers might wish it were so. Reality is intrusive like that.)
We’re headed towards chaos, and there’s no turning back. What will emerge? Who can say . . . ?