When Mao decided the future of China was to be found in surpassing the United States’ steel production, he shifted the entire country towards that singular purpose. This mass mobilization saw the vast countryside of farmers and laborers setup micro-foundries in their backyards – in search of sheer weighted output, and without regard to any other considerations – with which they melted their own finished products – cookware, farm implements and so on – down to globs of metal. The result was a famine that claimed as many as forty million Chinese.
When Kim Il Sung decided that his country’s birds were a major impediment to increasing food production, he ordered locals to destroy them. After many failed efforts at hunting birds to death en masse they finally found success in sending hordes of children into the forests to make loud noises by banging pans all night long, night after night, until the birds simply fell dead from the trees from stress. This effort resulted in the extinction of species, and the decimation of the nations bird populations had ripple effects throughout the ecosystems. The resultant Biblical-level plagues of insects destroying crops might have been predicable, and like China’s singular focus on steel this psychological avian warfare ultimately introduced mass famine to the nation of North Korea.
The point of the above stories is, in this case, not to paint a picture of the similarities in singular-focused governance, nor authoritarianism that is now burgeoning among us, but simply, and pragmatically noting that political decisions have real consequences for people everywhere, including here in America. While our nation is in many ways something special, we ourselves are not immunized against bad times. Despite our decadence, and comfort to which we have become accustomed, we are each subject to every last law of nature in existence. We must eat to survive; we need shelter from the elements. It is with this in mind that we must examine the choices being made on our behalf.
Economics
There are simple laws to economics that can be understood readily without delving deeply into the complicated system that we have organized. Prices are a way of transmitting information about a product: they tell us first and foremost how many other people want that product, and how bad, and further how many people want products made by the constituent parts of the product (alternate uses). When the product is scarcer the price increases, and when demand is more scarce prices decrease.
Let us consider a scenario in which we have ten people using clamshells as money all wanting to purchase the same hat. Let us say that each person has ten clamshells for a total of one hundred clamshells among them. Simply because there are ten people trying to buy one hat there is a very good chance that the price gets bid up quite a lot, and in this case the ceiling is ten clams (the most anyone has). It is therefore reasonably likely that somebody will pay ten clams for the hat. This is an example of supply and demand working to drive price up. However, another major influence on prices is the value of money itself. What if somebody came along and gave half of our ten people forty more clams each? Well, in that case somebody is probably going to pay fifty clams for the hat, as that is now the most anyone has. But did the value of the hat go up? Was it objectively worth more to anyone? Well, no, not really. What really happened was the value of a clam went down.
By the time all budget reconciliation bills are passed this year it is conceivable that nearly half of all dollars ever issued by the Federal Reserve will have been issued since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. This massive infusion of cash has consequences. The Federal Reserve, executives from JP Morgan, Bank of America, and international observers noted months ago that the United States had entered a period in which the dollar would rapidly lose value – what is known as hyperinflation. Initially these experts all suggested that this was to be expected, was planned for, and would be a short lived “transitory” experience. Now the estimates vary on how long this hyperinflation will last – the Fed is saying many months while some industry experts say years – but nobody is using the word “transitory” anymore.
Now, I do not hold myself out as an expert predicting what will happen, only as a student of history pointing out what has happened elsewhere. We are not the first nation to experience hyperinflation. There was a bit of advice given in Weimar Germany that simply suggested that when you sit down and order coffee that if you intend to drink two cups you should order both at the same time – by the time your cup needed refilling the price would have gone up substantially.
Translating prices into something we can understand it was around this time in Weimar history that vendors were seeking as much as $300,000.00 for a single egg. When winter came around many fed their woodstoves with wheelbarrows full of cash, as it would burn longer than the wood it could purchase. For a more modern example look no further than Venezuela where I hear the most common profession among women today is prostitution – many women are crossing international boundaries to ply this trade for foreign currency. The average Venezuelan lost over ten percent of their body mass in the first year of hyperinflation, and they did not exactly have an obesity problem to begin with. Again, this is not to say that this will happen here, but I am not particularly confident it cannot happen here.
Cultural Revolution
After his catastrophic Great Leap Forward five-year plan Mao Tse-Tung staged a comeback by indoctrinating the youth and riding their zealous fervor to greater power through the political persecution of more than one hundred million Chinese in “struggle sessions,” and the violent murder of several million more over a decade-and-a-half. The youth were turned against the old culture, old ideas, old habits, and old customs in their fundamentalist reorientation towards Communism.
Today we are indoctrinating our youth through the educational models of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Friere, Brazilian Marxist, 1970), Critical Theory (Max Horkheimer, German Communist, Critical and Traditional Theory, 1937), and Repressive Tolerance (Herbert Marcuse, German Communist, 1965). Taken together these efforts serve to define all persons along the oppressor-oppressed dialectic, induce mental instability through critical consciousness (wokeness), and legitimize violence against ideological opposition.
Already the American struggle sessions have begun outside their academic incubator as a generation of revolutionaries have taken to the streets. A quick, and extremely conservative tally puts casualties of this youth revolt already at three digits – and this excludes those fatalities not directly caused by obvious mob action. Those already struggled against are at least an order of magnitude higher. There is no particularly good reason to think this is going to get better, and there is quite a lot of reason to expect it will get worse.
Scarcity
When “15 Days to Slow the Spread” became a mad scramble to secure sanitary rolls for rears we saw the effects emergencies have on thinking as translated to store stocks, and the difficulties in meeting unusual demands by supply chains. The process of making a product as seemingly simple as toilet paper and getting it to the shelf of the store where it is needed at any given time is more complicated that you really want to consider. But you would now do well to have some consideration, as the calamity of worldwide lockdowns has wreaked havoc on supply chain stability all over the globe, and these instabilities are being exploited in asymmetric warfare by hostile nations that worsens our predicament by the day.
We are now entering a period one supply-chain expert going by the name Huntsman (Twitter @man_integrated) identifies as “catastrophic failure cascade” of supply chains wherein many shelves are seen becoming bare in short order and predicting a ruinous squeeze on cities in particular. This will mean everyday items, energy, and food items will become scarce in many places, and in a varied manner in the coming months.
Government
Despite the ideological roots being French it was the Italian Benito Mussolini that first attempted to breath life into the nationalist conceptualization of socialism known as Fascism. It was thought that the proper level of application for the concept of equity was the nation state, and those within to be made equal by force. Under this conceptualization corporations would be managed in a quasi-private manner but take orders directly from the government. Like all other forms of Statist (Hegelian) socialism Fascism is totalizing; its mantra, as aptly put by Mussolini, was “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Hitler would adopt a terribly similar conceptualization of national socialism, but from the racialist perspective he believed that the “state” was actually the “German race,” wherever they may be.
It is with great concern that I now suggest that it is this Fascist formulation of government that most closely resembles that being molded by the top-down revolution of the current American regime. I legitimately cannot tell where the oligarchical corporations end, and the government of the United States begins. They are the fleshy, hypertensive organs of the same animal, and they wield the claws as one. The Executive orders critics silenced, and the fingers of the technocratic arm move to comply. The regime merely suggests that some persona is non grata, and he is now considered such by airlines, financial institutions, the intelligence community, military, police, and very many employers. There appears to be no limiting principle whatsoever now that the regime has identified current times as a war effort, their enemy worse than Confederates, and an imminent, existential threat to the party.
Now, do not confuse the purpose of this essay. It is not mean to be the blackest of black pills. It is meant to be a digital clock for those having difficulty seeing what time it is. Take heed.
Great article, congrats!
So how do we stop repeating this cycle? or is it just to be....