Also read this.
This was all baked into the cake back in March 2020 when governors started deciding if restaurants could be open and how workplaces would operate. It was unavoidable from that moment. It took a while for the effects to become obvious but they were present instantly. It will get more obvious with time. Furthermore, none of this will resolve until the government takes its hands off the wheel and there’s not the slightest hint they’ve got the intelligence or humility to do so.
Get used to it.
Update: The whole point of the video is that immensely complex endeavors “self organize” among free and economically interested people planet wide and that no single person can understand or control it all. President Potato lacks the humility to allow a system to operate on its own. So, he ordered the docks in California to work harder, like any clueless boss would do.
Every employee has at least once watched a boss wade into a complex situation, bitch at the people in the vicinity to work harder, and then run away with the smug condescending air of someone who has no clue how anything gets done but feels like they control it all. Admit it, you’ve seen this in just about every workplace you’ve experienced. Every shitty boss in creation thinks bitching at employees will make the whole system more productive. After all, pouring over spreadsheets and figuring out to invest more in forklift maintenance or whatever would require a lot more effort… so bitching at employees is the default.
Predictably, Biden’s simple obvious solution sounded great and did no good at all. Things have gotten worse. Anyone who has thought about a simple pencil already knew that would be the result.
I read the Leonard Read book many, many years ago, when I was in my teens.
What an eye opener it was, and it led me to Hayek, von Mises and Rothbard, and ultimately away from Rand.
Kurt
Yep. A (semi) free-market society only functions when it’s, well, (semi) free, not restrained and held down and drowned while being beaten senseless.
Sadly. And it was all done to make OrangeManBad look bad, and to install their feudalistic caste system of Elites and Proles.
Random question:
Do you have some sort of shopping-list/recommendations for your basic camping gear? I have too many hobbies already, but I am curious about what I would need to spend a basic few days off in the woods/away from facilities. Never had a chance to do the boy-scout thing as a kid (was spending too much time messing with computer programming and indoor crud instead). It’s a hole in my education.
I will ponder that a bit and put up a post. It may be a week or so before I write it. Given supply chains, stocking up on some basic gear right now is probably a very good idea.
To make it relevant I need to know what kind of camping do you do (or hope to do). Will you camp alone or with other adults. Is the possible other adult a wife or a camping acquaintance? (Trust me, there’s a big difference!) Kids or no kids? Within 20’ of your car or backpacking five miles out? This sounds like I’m prying but it will save a lot of money to think about this before you pick out (or I recommend) gear.
MadrocketSci,
I hope you enjoy the challenges ahead, and look forwards to hearing about your adventures. Prepare well, good luck & keep smiling. A whole new world is about to open before you.
Cheers,
KA
Alone probably. Presumably the whole point of camping is to get somewhere away from the roads/facilities: So maybe backpacking out some ways from the car. But I’m speaking from a position of zero knowledge at this point. (I likely won’t be buying an offroad bike anytime soon – funds are still recovering from my other hobbies.)
Thanks. No rush on answering the question. You’ve just been doing this stuff for quite a while, and I love your blog posts about it.
Random question #2:
I have some vague memories of reading Marcus Aurelius’s meditations. Also some eastern-religion stuff – just random browsing to satisfy my curiosity:
How much stoicism is too much stoicism? One of the things that bugged me about Buddhism was the fatalism. Learn to accept the inevitability of suffering. The world’s not going to change, so the best you can do is learn to ignore the world, really hard. If you do it hard enough, you will have achieved nirvana. I suppose it’s like philosophical painkillers for a screwed up situation (living in bronze age India/the late Roman empire) – painkillers only make sense when shutting down a signal you can’t act on. The reason we have brains in the first place is because our circumstances *aren’t* immutable, and decisions effect outcomes.
Victorian/Edwardian/American civilization has always been sort of anti-fatalist: People generally think that their circumstances are *entirely* a function of their choices, and that the world is our plaything to understand, take apart, and rearrange to suit us. The attitude sort of hits its manic apotheosis in the “singularity”-crowd (the only reason why we aren’t trillionaire immortal robot gods already is we haven’t been trying hard enough.) It’s easy to mock in it’s extreme: On the other hand, our flag is on the moon, and was planted there in an era where we had not yet learned helplessness in the face of general lunacy and corruption.
What would one expect from a Dolt President, other than stupid non-leadership.
.
Thank You, AC. I’ve got a bike. Your bike. & 3 weeks in, a broken collar bone. My wife: You’re going to hurt yourself. She’s right, and now we’ve got that out of the way!
A simple spill, and that 1 inch perfect to hit the handle bar spot Just Right. I count it in the top five of life: marriage, childrens births, the barn burning down, quitting daily drinking, and This!
My son: “This is Fun”. Yes, that’s why I got it (kids really only know 4 wheelers these days. Never got the chance of 3 wheelers.) and now “You be careful you don’t do what Dad did”. While I didn’t get xrayed then, I now know I broke the same bone 30 years ago on a 3 wheeler.
I’ve always said a doctor can only really help if you’re bleeding from an orifice or have bone sticking out. Imagine my surprise when the ortho doc looked at me and said “It’s not sticking out, so just wear a sling for 6 weeks.” That lasted for 2 days. I was going to hurt myself worse trying to work around the sling.
My random question is: Why do we see it as a conservative thing that gas be Cheap? I mean, it is the obvious Wrong to displace the super efficiency of a pipeline with rail, trucks or Mabel trying to carry a bucket of electricity, but why does the energy sector have to be the whipping boy of Everybody?
I just don’t get it.
Holy crap! A broken collar bone! Now I’m thinking about those fancy armor chest pads that “real dirt riders” wear. I think I’m going to “up my game” with motorcycle protection. That said there’s nothing better than “be careful you don’t wreck the bike like Dad did”. Enjoy the war story; and the sound of a fun family.
I think we associate conservative with cheaper gas because it’s where one sees efficiency first. We might experience efficiency / low prices in other places but it’s not obvious enough to make the association in most people’s eyes. Suppose a president (of either party) backs off and stops tinkering with the economy like a kid poking a stick at a hornet’s nest. (I can dream can’t I?) We might get cheap Tickle Me Elmo dolls, inexpensive peanut butter, TVs that don’t spy on us, or new innovations in snow tire performance that make them better and last longer; everyone would think that’s “luck” and start looking for a stick to poke the nearest hornet’s nest. The price of gas, on the other hand, is hard to deny.
Good luck with the collar bone. I hope it heals quick and well so you can ride next spring with no worries. If you decide to buy a shoulder/chest protector, drop me a line about what you get. They all look the same to me so I’m all ears.
I always despised Socialism (we have only achieved ever-expanding levels of Cronyism at this point, but Demon-Rats have their Eyes laser-focused on the Prize)… Even a simpleton ‘should’ be able to figure out that some central (read ONLY) party apparatchik making decisions about something as complex as a multi-million person economy only EVER leads to Epic Fail Avenue – Full Stop; there simply is no other way for such an economy to end up given human nature (if our psychology mimicked that of the ants or bees, then I might sing a different tune).
Any of a number of works by authors such as Friedman, von Mises, Hayek and a plethora of others have demonstrated this by mathematically verifiable proofs based on heuristic analyses of human outcomes under the various systems attempted throughout history.
Although worth one’s time, you don’t need to get into works as complex as Human Action or Locke’s Second Treatise of Government…. Oleg Atbashian from The People’s Cube wrote a wonderful little travel reader called Shakedown Socialism (it is only a little over 100 pages.. with pictures). It perfectly illustrates why someone else being in charge of economic decisions for YOUR best interests are, in aggregate, always Always, ALWASY going to lead to poor societal outcomes.