Month: April 2020

Most, not all, of this whole thing is a hoax. It kills some, but many millions of Americans have already had this thing and not even known it. As long as there are enough hospital beds, then the risk will never get any LOWER. The risk is not zero, and may even be high, but it will never get LOWER. There will be no vaccine in the next twelve months, and if we stay locked down it will be Mad Max. Count on it.

Thinking about all this, at the same time the earnings of many Americans have plummeted to zero, or something close to it, the earnings of all our GOVERNMENTS have also plummeted to something like half of what was coming in.  Some people are still paying payroll taxes, but not more than two thirds of the country, and probably a bit less than that.

At the same time, our governments are spending money like crazy to prevent hunger and riots from the situation they have created in response to this non-disaster.  THEY are the disaster, and it will get worse.

We are at the moment more or less inflating our way out of this.  Trump has mobilized the Fed to–perhaps for one of the first times in human history–use manufactured money to help ordinary people. Usually it is used only for power elites to help them keep power.  The power elite gets the benefit–first shot at spending the money–and the plebes get the result, the loss of value of everything they own, and everything they earn.

As Keynes noted just slightly over a 100 years ago, not one person in a thousand (or was it a million?  It may be even less than that) understands what is happening to them.

But to keep the boat afloat massive government expenditures are needed, at precisely the same time government REVENUES are tanking.  And we can expect a substantial recession in the wake of this clusterfuck, which will last proportionately longer the longer we drag this out.  Every week makes it exponentially worse, I suspect.  One failure leads to another failure.  House of cards.  Dominoes.

So maybe this is the time for my proposal or something like it (I will note I longer believe all the ideas in that piece are good ideas, but the gist of it I continue to believe in strongly.  Everything I wrote would benefit from the touch of an HONEST economist, if one can be found).  Follow the logic of the situation: we are already engaged in mass money creation, which over some period of time will lead to mass price inflation, which will dilute the already meager earnings of most of us.

Why not go all the way?  Use the Fed to pay off all debts, public and private, including US Treasury debt, including all State debt, and balance all the books everywhere.  No debt anywhere.  All cars, houses, boats and corporate debts gone.

Then dissolve the Fed and reset the currency.  Revalue the dollar and NEVER CHANGE IT AGAIN.  Not the gold standard.  Gold can be created.  And historically governments always cheat.  They lie about reserves.  Banks, if they can, lie about reserves.  And we have the physical problem of getting and housing the gold.

Now, precisely how we do this is a technical problem I’m not qualified to solve.  But that it can be solved, I have no doubt.

I won’t say this is the only way out of this.  We can muddle our way through miserably and slowly, watching business failures and eventually bank failures.  Life could be a complete shitshow for most Americans for a long time.

But this proposal has a moral element too: the banking system has been stealing from all of us for a very long time.  Total money in existence has QUADRUPLED since 1980, when the Fed got the last constraints off its back (in my view, after engineering the inflation of the 1970’s to create the rationale for that law).  That means ordinary Americans should be roughly four times wealthier than they are.  The excess went to yachts and mansions, and country clubs, and the best whiskey, wine and women money can buy.  Or children.  This does seem to be part of it, nauseatingly.

My proposal would simply RETURN the wealth to ordinary Americans.

Certainly, this qualifies as a dangerous and potentially calamitous situation.  This idea warrants serious consideration.

I don’t do
Revelation much but

I do it all the time.

Most of us are
like that.

We need to add this to our lexicon of phrases.

New York went from 6,300 COVID-19 deaths to 10,000 by adding 3,700 “presumed”, but untested, cases.  No doubt someone thought 10,000 was a more impressive number for the tabloids.  And they are all tabloids, now, aren’t they?

Nationally, we went from 30,000–which presumably included the higher New York number–to 40,000, through the same magic of assumptions.

Neil Ferguson, in his latest–as of what, three weeks ago now?–said that 10,000 of the 20,000 Brits he expected to die were going to die of something anyway in the next year.  Should those numbers really be added?  No, I would argue they should not.  We should not be counting straws, but hay bales.

And the biggest hay bale, right now, is the one being loaded by our sundry governments onto the backs of the already poor, the already miserable, the already marginal.

If this thing does produce a spike in divorces–as I think many expect–that will create yet more economic trouble, and yet more troubled and unhappy children who in turn will create a yet more troubled and unhappy society.  Water flows downhill, and troubles tend to multiply.

Whatever else it is, a marriage is a useful economic arrangement, a division of both physical and emotional labor.  The latter falls disproportionately in most cases on women, but it does not diminish if and when they find themselves single mothers.  On the contrary, everything is compounded.

I judge people continually.  That should be obvious.  But I also don’t judge them.  As a general rule, I understand why people do what they do, and consider it an immutable rule that nobody does anything, ever, which is not emotionally logical to them at that time, which does not seem to make sense.

Life is complicated, and freedom can often seem a curse.  But freedom is the space within which problems can be corrected, over some time domain, after much trying and much failing. It all has value.

To live in a box is to be condemned never to get much larger.  Much of humanity, for much of history, has lived in boxes.  We need to protect the prairies and mountains of human potential.

This phrase popped in my head.  I think it well describes the attitude of the Left towards whatever demographic they happen to be kissing up to at that moment to keep the path open to the riches and power they crave and live for.

I really think a lot of State and local governments, and the police forces through which they exert direct control of the masses, are losing a lot of goodwill right now.  It is a quantity they have assumed and counted on for some time, but if this thing goes on much longer, guns will be met with guns.

This is not my recommendation or hope.  We are in my view far from needing to shoot anyone over anything.

I am just saying that never before in American history have people been prevented from working, prevented from earning a living, and at that over such a trivial nuisance.  When the Spanish Flu hit, everyone KNEW it.  It got into nearly every life in America.  And even then nothing like this was attempted.  Bars were closed after 6pm, but left open during the day.  Businesses had restrictions, but not closure orders.  People have to eat, and they have to get paid to do that, and they have to work to do that.  This is not rocket science. 

This thing, by my count, has increased the April mortality rate in my State by 4%.  It was invisible in March, and will likely be invisible again by May.  For that, we are ruining tens of millions of lives.  Anger is inevitable, and need to be factored into all calculations.

And I will comment again, that the use of force eventually always produces an equal, opposite, and possibly superior reaction.  The use of force by extremist citizens will provoke violence by the government.  And vice versa.  Do we really want to live in a world where all the cops need to be looking over their shoulders all the time, even at people they once trusted, and who once trusted them?  Where people who once supported them now want to murder them?

That’s where we are heading, if things do not diverge rapidly from this disastrous course.

I am by nature mostly pro-cop, while recognizing that a percentage of them are no damn good, and that this is well known by all the people they work with.  But cops in general have not acquitted themselves all that well in this thing, most notably in California.  I read some Michigan cops are refusing to enforce some bans.  That’s good.  I would like to see more of that.

As I noted, I personally watched a young cop tell a young couple they couldn’t play tennis.  Stupidity flows downhill.  What makes societies work is local intelligence, local restraint, and the exercise at the ground level of common sense.

Anybody who is “just following orders” is doing no more or less than the Germans did under the Nazis, with much less justification.

Trump wants to take a reasonable, balanced approach, based on what I think most of us think is the bad advice of Anthony Fauci.  He’s understood Fauci would be fine locking most Americans in their basements at gunpoint for his own convenience, since Fauci seems to view the virus as his main interest, with people and their lives merely existing as distractions.

But Trump, like the rest of us, didn’t know what he didn’t know three weeks ago.  So he recommended people err on the side of caution.  Had he not, and had this thing blown up, he would have perhaps deserved some portion of the blame which is directed at him no matter what he does or says, or does not do, or does not say. Orange man bad daily, details to be announced as they are determined.

Here is the thing: Democrats are not just trying to take the opposite approach specifically, but in tone also.  Where Trump is trying to balance and moderate, they want to unbalance, and unmoderate.  They want a long term, draconian shut down enforced with the nastiest police they can find.

There are really three strands to balance: the disease itself, the proportionality and Constitutionality of the policy response, and the needs of ordinary people to be able to feed, clothe and house themselves with honest work.

Democrats have developed a monomaniacal focus on the first, and discarded the other two.  The forest may contain lions, tigers and bears, but they only count the lions.

How many times do Americans really need to see the contempt Democrats have for ordinary people, working ordinary jobs, making ordinary money, and living ordinary lives?  They have no USE for such people, especially if they are white, but it’s really not any better if they are black, latino, or Other.  There is no principle left.  There is no honest compassion left.

I will recall to your mind the hatred intellectuals everywhere have felt for the middle classes in all their countries.  What they wanted was warfare.  Warfare between a “working class” that didn’t even necessarily exist (Russia, Cambodia), and a power elite.  The bourgeoisie got in the way, because they were actually pretty comfortable.  This means they didn’t want to tear down the fabric of the society.  Since the intellectuals DID want to tear everything down, on the assumption that good things would happen in the aftermath of mass destruction, they hated, and still hate, the middle class.

Right now, they are calling people who just want to go back to work “right wing extremists”.  Ponder that.  Ponder that these are the same people who preach compassion, and who once claimed to care about the poor.  The poor are hurting the MOST right now.  But they don’t want them working.  They want them suffering.  If they can get good numbers of dead from black Americans, well that is Progress, right?

I am starting to wonder if the Left is not taking active joy in watching much of America suffer.  They hate most of us: that much has been clear for a long time.  And they hated America as a whole much more when we elected Donald Trump.

It really seems like many of them are feeling active Schadenfreude at people suffering from being shut in their homes, locked out of their jobs, cut off from any source of income, and being unable to pay their bills.  They very much want this whole shitshow to continue, as long as possible.

I really don’t think it’s just about the upcoming election, but payback for the last election.

None of these people should ever be let near the halls of power ever again.

It occurs to me to comment that the “Cultural War”–which I would argue is really a battle between Culture itself, and nihilistic barbarism and atavistic and pointless violence–is a war of attrition.

Yes, there have been major battles, like the Mapplethorpe thing.  But by and large, the planned and coordinated rivers of doubt wash away some small part more of our shared inheritance each and every day.  Every week.  Every month.  Every year.

The people fighting the battle consist on the one side people who simply want to preserve some form of the status quo, as they conceive it.  Possibly, they want to return to some other time they envision as more clear and more simple (which was usually also more abusive and less free).

Such people really want nothing more than to preserve some form of common sense, in the form of ideas like “if we want to help people born here it is not helpful to import millions more people who also need help.”  That’s not radical.  It’s not even controversial, if one is trying to think clearly.  It’s obvious.  It’s common sense.

On the other side, unfortunately, they have learned how to turn people into abusive, repetitive machines, who rat-a-tat the days propaganda relentlessly against any and all targets they see.  Marriage, family, the notion of biological gender, the sanctity of national boundaries, the value of the Constitution, the value of the concept of universal human rights, the heritage of free philosophical inquiry: all are on the chopping block.

It is really quite impossible to retain any normal sense of human dignity and restraint in the face of machine like abuse.  People get rigid, tribal. They contract.  They get angry, and act out, although so far in very, very few cases.  It’s the other side, trying to prod us with hot rods continually, which is heaping the abuse, and we who are taking it.

But absent some major development, it’s hard to see how common sense wins this battle.  The machines on the one side demand of us that we, too, become hard, rigid, unseeing, violent, brittle.  It’s a really horrible situation.

I don’t have an answer, at least for all of us.  I personally will likely be contracting soon somewhat from the public sphere, and focusing on my own indivisible and private reality.

Something large is going to give at some point.  In large measure,  it already has.  We are a decayed, decadent, stupid people, and I speak of most of the developed world, at least, not just the United States.  Most of us have been trained like obedient dogs to hearken to the words of “experts” and brook no disagreement from their orations and pronouncements from anyone.

This line of thought and feeling is a bit grim, but that’s how I feel at the moment.  Perhaps I will lighter in an hour or a day.  Or when Hillary Clinton is arrested and charged with as many felonies as she is CLEARLY guilty of.