“You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices.” – Used Cars
I apologize – I didn’t mean to rehash a potato joke.
I had saved my money. It was near my birthday, and we finally went on a trip where I could spend it in the most elementary school way possible.
Living on Wilder Mountain, as I have noted before, we were a good 45 miles from the nearest movie theater. We were so remote, there was only one escalator (at the JCPenney’s®) within at least 120 miles of us. At that time, I think there was only one elevator (on a two-story building, no less) within the same range.
But on occasion, Ma and Pa would get a wild hair and we’d drive into a nearby largish city. What was large? More bars than churches. We only did that a few times a year, and I was excited. I stocked the backseat with comic books and off we went.
I took my few dollars ($10?) and bought a cassette. It was the first music purchase I had ever made with my own money. My music collection until that day consisted of three handmedown cassettes from my older brother, who for legal reasons I’ll call “John Wilder” since that’s his name, too. Turns out my parents got me in a poker game with a band of outlaw bikers. Their ante? An old Slim Jim® beef stick.
It was a rough day for them when they lost that hand.
Yes, this was one of the cassettes. I’ll never forget, “I’m leaving, on a small single engine plane, I don’t think I’ll ever be back again.”
All kidding aside, my brother’s first name really is John Wilder as well, but he gets a bit upset when I call him Juan, too. I think it’s because he’s older than me and all.
Anyway, the cassette I bought was Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits. After the clerk pulled off the big plastic “don’t steal me” antitheft device, I was thrilled. I poked my fingernail under the cellophane wrapper and skillfully slit the clear plastic open. The ride home was going to be over two hours, and I had a fresh set of C-cell batteries in the cassette player (mono) which was also a handmedown from big brother John.
Yup, that’s Groucho on the album cover. How he got there, we’ll never know.
As I slipped into the back seat of the Chevy® Impala™ coupe that was Pa Wilder’s 400 cubic inch pride and joy, I shared the backseat with the cassette player and Alice Cooper.
The Sun was bright as the pavement slid underneath the Impala™’s wheels and as Pa put his foot into it in the mountain air.
I hit play.
I don’t think it was quite seven minutes into side one of the tape when the cassette player stopped making noise. I hit “eject” and saw the carnage. The cassette player, which had never, ever eaten a single tape, had not only feasted on my brand new tape, but had also . . . broken it. No rewinding it.
The tape was dead. Oh, sure, I tried to resurrect it for a month with all manner of ideas that came to my fevered elementary school mind, but not one of them worked. $10, a fortune to me, gone.
I still liked Alice Cooper, though.
Yes, officer, that was the one that did it. I’m sure.
Eventually, my finances improved and I managed to get several Alice Cooper albums, and I had learned. I bought the album on vinyl and then copied it onto a blank cassette tape. I bought the album for Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits for myself the second time with my sixteenth birthday money.
Although it wasn’t on Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits, the song Generation Landslide by Mr. Cooper was always a fun one to listen to. It also has these lyrics:
Sister’s out till five, doing banker son’s hours
But she owns a Maserati® that’s a gift from his father
Stop at full speed, at one hundred miles per hour
The Colgate™ Invisible Shield© finally got ’em
And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies
Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies
Give it a listen. Good stuff.
As a banker’s son, (even from a small farm bank) I liked to imagine what a Maserati® might be. There was no Internet, so it was obviously Italian, but yet not made of pepperoni.
Even though I was a banker’s son, I ended up driving an old GMC™ pickup with the most gutless engine that GM© ever dared put under the hood of a pickup, vinyl bench seats, and rubber floor mats. It wasn’t a Maserati™, but the local fräuleins didn’t seem to mind too much.
I loved that truck.
But in 2021, I think of these lines from the song:
Stop at full speed, at one hundred miles per hour
The Colgate™ Invisible Shield© finally got ’em
I think about this couplet a lot. It’s not great poetry, but it has always brought to my mind a system, out of control. Everything is moving along, as fast as it can. And then?
Stop.
High speeds bring energy. A lot of it. The kinetic energy of a moving object in a non-relativistic reference frame (trust me, the readers of this blog will call me on that if I don’t mention it) is equal to the mass of the object times the speed of the object, squared.
KE=1/2mv2
That means that an object that is going twice as fast carries four times the kinetic energy.
So, speed matters.
A lot.
And the primary policy of the economic wizards that try to “manage” the economy of the United States is: putting the pedal to the metal is the easiest way to keep the party going. Whatever it takes to keep the economy growing and accelerating in that growth is the policy of the day. Who needs booze when you have meth?
If the economy seems to falter? The only answer is from both our government and the Fed® is, “faster, faster, put more gas to it.”
As most drivers know besides a Biden driving a car, the faster the car goes, the more vulnerable it is to any imbalances. Prudent drivers know when to slow down if the road is wet. Even fools know to slow down when the road is glaze ice. The main thing I try to keep teaching Pugsley and The Boy about driving on icy roads is this: turn or (brake/accelerate). Choose one. Otherwise, things tend to get spinny. Sometimes very spinny.
And it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.
I wonder how this plays out? Who could predict it?
Our economy has been goosed in the last decade (and even more so recently) by:
- Artificially, and permanently low, interest rates.
- Rampant money printing.
- A never-ending supply of “stimulus” packages and tax cuts to goose the economy.
- An experiment in Universal Basic Income by paying out of work people more than they were paid working to not work.
- Blatant political cronyism far in excess of the usual – your elected representatives are even trying to bail out Jeff Bezos’ so he can compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX®. This is actually happening (LINK).
One hundred miles per hour sounded like it was really fast to me when I was driving a pickup truck that wouldn’t go that fast downhill on a mountain pass (topped out at 95). But the economy is so goosed now that we see $100 plywood sheets tumbling in the breeze as we cruise down the highway. The stresses from the velocity as we shamble and skitter between the lines are evident.
What’s next, a $50 ribeye?
Speaking of printing, some people are now 3-D printing guns. That’s nothing. I’ve had a Canon® printer for years.
Maybe we can bring it back under control. I don’t know. But I do know what Alice said:
And I laughed to myself at the men and the ladies
Who never conceived of us billion dollar babies
La da da da da, indeed.
It should go without saying that putting all of our faith when it comes to economics in the hands of people who have no experience in actual economics has been a disaster. Look at people like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich. They have never worked a real job, ever, never had to make a profit or pay employees. Even free market economists like Milton Friedman never really worked in the real economy, everything has always been academic to them. To people like Krugman and Reich, the solution is always more tinkering with the economy because obviously they haven’t tinkered enough yet.
Our economy is run by knuckleheads who are the equivalent of people directing brain surgery who have never even done a tonsillectomy. Who could have foreseen that going badly?
The problem with economics is that they try to turn it into a pure science like physics. The issue with this is that economics is at least as much psychological as mathematical. A great micro example is how economists try to apply the Coase theorem to everything without regard for the caveats (“low transaction cost”) or the fact that Coase himself said it should only be applied in purely economic considerations like environmental regulation, not violent crime.
A great macro example is communism: it looks good in theory, until you realize it relies on people acting against their personal best interest to benefit the many. And not just some time, but 100% of the time, for generations. I’m not talking about the peasantry either, I’m talking about those in charge: they have to make the decision to use power for the benefit of the whole rather than their personal benefit.
That is true for most economic theory. The main problem with libertarianism is that it utterly fails to dwell in the real world and take into account human nature. In that sense libertarianism is actually very similar to socialism.
Robert Reich is a disaster of a human being – a parasite. He’s done nothing of value, ever.
And you’re right. They’re at the helm.
La da da da da.
What’s next, a $50 ribeye? $50 chicken.
Seriousness aside, I was in the grocery store Monday. In the chicken section there were probably 10 large trays of drumsticks, plus dozens of trays of chicken thighs and boneless, skinless chicken breasts (the most useless meat in the world) but not one tray of chicken wings. Due to my advanced knowledge of science, I happen to know that chickens have exactly the same number of wings as drumsticks. So why is it that there were around 100 drumsticks on display and not one pair of wings? There’s an entirely different demand for wings than the rest of the chicken.
“Due to my advanced knowledge of science, I happen to know that chickens have exactly the same number of wings as drumsticks.”
How certain are you in your advanced knowledge that there aren’t GMO chickens with 4+ wings? I’m joking… or am I? I’m not sure now that I think about it.
I hadn’t thought of it, but I bet if you could develop a four winged chicken, you’d make millions. The demand seems completely different than the run of the mill, “let’s have chicken for dinner” demand.
I bet there’s virtually zero overlap in the Venn diagram of people who think GMO food is terrible and the people who go to a sports bar, have a beer or two with a plate of wings while they watch TV.
Actually it should be a chicken with everything on the right side. The kinky, crazy Chinese are buying only wings and legs that come from the right side. The wings and legs you can buy are only only from the left side.
My local bbq place only sells halves of chickens, the left side!
I was (sort of) joking, but today I was in a blizzard of activity and stopped at a local fast food place, and saw a $6.99 double cheeseburger.
It was a cheeseburger. For $6.99.
$10.49 Big Mac, here we come.
I had a tape player just like that one. Must have bee about 1970 or so. Mine had two external speakers that weren’t half bad for the time.
I’ve thought for a long time that a sudden stop to everything would in the end be the least destructive, and a long drawn out slide into the abyss would be the worst. The longer time frame means more time to try stupid ideas and more time for the ‘paths to squeeze out whatever they could from the rest of us.
Mine was totally mono.
The longer the binge, the bigger the hangover. I’m worried it will be a doozy.
So what happens when a ‘goosed’ economy honks? Let’s just say that you don’t want your newly washed Prius parked underneath it.
If you paid $10 for an Alice Cooper cassette back in the Stone Age, I’m afraid there is no pity for you, JW. Hell, I used to get 8 cassettes for a penny (and only had to buy 12 more over the next 2 years at the regular club prices!)
BTW, adult son assures me that, just like vinyl, cassettes are coming back in vogue. Goes to show that you can’t keep a bad idea down.
Ha! Ma Wilder would NOT ALLOW me to join a record club (though she encouraged the Science Fiction Book Club and the Revell Model Club). Too much commitment.
I still have a box of cassettes. A big box.
Rock on.
Why would Pa Wilder put a Dodge engine in a Chev Impala?
My memory was faulty! Thank you! It must have been 400 CI.
Re: that picture of the accused cassette player
Where did you plug it in while in the back seat behind that 400 CI Dodge Engine???
Details, details, details. 😉
You must be a young’un. AC/DC is not just a band or a lifestyle. 4 C batteries IIRC would last maybe 4 hours before the motor would slow down and the music would get trippy.
Which was exactly the distance between home-mall-home.
4 C-cell batteries! I used the cord when at home, but used the batteries when I was getting firewood from the pile, or reading comics in the back seat.
You totally got me. (My memory) was totally set on the 440 number on the engine. It was 400.
Now corrected.
Not the same country as in 1981 and certainly not like 1932. Two Americas essentially not on speaking terms. The Fed is really wedged and they know it.
Can’t raise rates to 20% to stop inflation like the 1980s. Most likely outcome is martial law and civil war.
Can’t stop printing money else debt deflation like 1932 and a few weeks after September, 2008. Most likely outcome is martial law and civil war.
Only one real choice. Keep goosing the economy which means asset prices go to Mars and pray for “mild” inflation in consumer goods like food, health care, lumber, etc. Not working out so well in 2021, we’ll see how “transitory” this is.
Well said in every respect.
What is it we make today, besides debt? Food, energy, and . . . ?
I won’t even try to comment on the monetary disaster going on now. I vacillate from amusement to rage to horror. I need to settle on amusement.
However, your opening took me back to the 1950s. We lived on a family farm in the middle of nowhere Illinois. Corn, pigs and chickens. At age 10 I used my cutting corn out of beans money and bought 100 baby chicks. Dad agreed to provide feed, in return he got to butcher half of them for family food when they were ready. I got to keep the eggs and sell them in town and to neighbors. Just as they started laying a storm was brewing for overnight and Dad told me to go out and make sure the door was propped open so the flock could get back in the chicken house when the rain came. I didn’t. In the morning half of them were suffocated, piled up against the wind closed door. We dressed chickens all day. A few days later I got my first basket of eggs and Dad took me to town and I sold them. Paid for my 1st professional haircut, 50 cents I think. When I got across the street to the store to buy baseball cards/gum, no money. I had lost it out the worn out pocket of my jeans. Second batch of eggs bought a cheap imitation wallet. I dropped that down the outhouse at my Aunt and Uncles a few weeks later.
Thanks for your cassette tape story., it made me think of those days in my youth. It’s really funny now. Not then. The lessons I learned as a farm kid were invaluable. Hard and sometimes sad, but invaluable. What is really sad is that most kids today never learn those things that tough times and good parenting taught me by the age of 10.
Thanks for your story. Responsibility is important,
“Keep your kids long on hugs and short on pocket change.” – RAH
You and Bill Johnson could spin these into stories. Maybe have a bit in the back with “how to” that ties in.
Be good to have someone beside Gary Paulsen writing those books.
That sounds like fun, really.
Wow – I hadn’t heard of him. What a prolific author!!!!
I too owned that exact tape deck. I used it as a cassette data storage device on my TRS-80. Those were the days, when real men had the guts to run assembly language programs on a real microprocessor with plenty of registers, the majestic Z-80, instead of that girlie 6502 in Steve Job’s Apple II.
Of course, we all now know the relative worth of Radio Shack and Apple today in the 21st Century. Woz’s implementation of NTSC quadrature colorburst was one of the greatest and most clever engineering hacks of all time, and gave Steve the ability to push and sell COLOR GRAPHICS. The rest is history.
The money angle? I am in slack jawed disbelief on how screwed up our economy is, basically a beach ball batted around by billionaires. Start researching the Venezuelan economic collapse to see a pretty good picture of how it’s gonna go down for us from here.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/09/venezuela-was-once-twelve-times-richer-than-china-what-happened
Indeed, OPEC was founded by a Venezuelan lawyer named Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso around 1959*. Ya wouldn’t think it. Something about what comes around goes around springs to mind.
*From “Paper Money” by Adam Smith (pseudonym of George Goodman)
The final fate of my cassette deck? As soon as it stopped working, I gutted it to see how it worked, and then glued a *lot* of tank parts to it to make it a really (lame) cool space cruiser.
Good times.
Tesla has the very best driving AI in the world. The US economy is running something like a $9 Trillion deficit and racing along at 110mph. So all that needs to happen is the Fed buys a Tesla (we’re now running a $9 Tillion + 1 Tesla deficit), shove the economy in the back seat, and watch with amusement as it automagically navigates the highways and byways of America. It might get a little dicey in Winter, but I’m sure the AI will keep the Tesla in Arizona for those few months.
The important thing is that the Tesla, not the Fed, catches the blame should any minor explosions occur along the way.
We should just use the Federal budget to buy only Teslas, and then they could just drive around by themselves.
No, good point. One guy dies, Tesla gets blamed.
An economy goes up in flames? Fed Governors keep their jobs.
re: Yup, that’s Groucho on the album cover. How he got there, we’ll never know
Groucho, Milton Berle, Jack Benny and Mae West were ALL fans of Alice – attended several shows and saw the whole thing as vaudeville…they GOT it
I have been to several of his concerts. Amazing stagecraft.
The REAL reason for the degeneracy of current generations:
their childrens programming-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py2f38iPBeI
Ours-
Ahhh, Alice. That may have been why I bought that tape . . . . 🙂 (Yes, I know that song isn’t on the Greatest Hits)
Elmo. Must. Be. Destroyed.
Oh, you sweet summer child. This is what is at your local.library and school and what is flagged as “child friendly” and recommended to kidneys on the inter-tubes.
https://youtu.be/MYShHd7S87c
*that would be “kidlets”
There won’t be any nice guy action in the United States of Somalia but at least the bad orange tweets are gone.
Let the muh Jonestown democracy comrades enjoy their abomination.
Man made gods always fail and leave a mountain of skulls but at least the ginger carny barker is gone.
Just wait until the PLA marches down the street and responds to cries of oppression with a salvo of hot lead. Your freedom has been a lie and we are here to help. (BOOM!)
Conomy? That is a contstruct of the white male capitalist pig patriarchy, comrade.
We don’t need to produce anything when we have a printing press and money backed by lovable ol’ Scranton Joe the mint condition lunchbox toting blue collar champion who has worked in government for fifty years.
Forward! To the New Man utopia. Yes we can.
My first was a 65 GMC V6 w/ powerglide. 95 sounds about right.
’65 Chevy fleetside with 283 ci and 2 speed powerglide transmission. It would do around 100. Fun fact; even though it was an automatic transmission, you could “jump start” it if you had a hill steep enough to coast up to speed, about 25 mph, then pull the shifter from neutral into drive.
My first cassettes were Elton John Brown Dirt Cowboy and The Carpenters Greatest Hits. I also had the same cassette player.
Wow! I had the Carpenters “Now and Then” as one of my first three.
Yes we can!
We are already swapping states. The PLA is pretty far from Mayberry.
Skulls? I can’t see a way out without a mountain of them.
A friend of mine is a banker. His clients are people and businesses who are worth millions. He told me many of his client’s borrow money every month to cover their employee’s payroll, then pay the loans back when they eventually get paid by their clients.
As a small business owner, this horrified me. I was under the apparently naive impression that having enough money in the bank to cover debts for several months – at least – was just smart business.
My friend didn’t think anything of it, obviously.
Clearly the rules change for some when they get big enough. And as they change, the rules eventually bear no relation to nor are based in any way in reality. And the people involved no longer see anything wrong with what they are doing.
At some point it all becomes a vapor-banking and nobody seems to realize that in the end, Every Debt Will Be Paid, one way or another.
Also, Alice Cooper never caught my ear. He seemed kinda weird to me. He’s pretty tame by current standards.
I thought it was a Mondegreen, but nope: That Colgate thingy is real:
https://youtu.be/0TmcS4C0ZF0
Mondegreen – cool word. Thanks!