Letters to my fellow Homo sapiens featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer "
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine." -H.L. Mencken "
Always remember that, "The journey to enlightenment is better w/french fries."-Bilquis
Okay, where was I... Oh yeah, Crankysplaining (vastly oversimplifying) Adam Smith's three economic fundamentals that will enable any nation, and its citizens, to prosper: the pursuit of self-interest, the division of labor, and freedom of trade.
The pursuit of self-interest simply means that every Tom, Thomasina, and T. has the right to figure out how they're gonna pay the cable bill without a dicktater, or a master of any sort, assigning them a role to play in the economy or determining how and how much they'll be rewarded for their labors.
A free man/woman/person should be compensated based on what service/product/talent they provide their fellow H. sapiens. A reasonably free market will easily determine the financial value of a good doctor, a good housekeeper, and everyone else.
Pursuing your self-interest in a free market wherein everyone else is doing the same thing tends to result in a self-regulated market that allocates resources in a way that central planning simply can't match when everyone is competing with everyone else.
When regulation is kept to a necessary minimum and the playing field is level, consumers will rule and consumers will win.
As to the division of labor, this can be summed up in two words, modern civilization. Do/make something you're good at and trade it for things you aren't as good at doing/making and simplify things dramatically via a reliable system of reward certificates (money). The result? The most prosperous era in the history of H. sapiens. Consumers rule, consumers win.
Freedom to trade. If you’ve lost a good job because your job is now being done by someone in a foreign country, like Elbonia for example (H.T. Scott Adams) — crappy weather, chock full of primitive religious sects prone to killing each other, a corrupt government and/or any number of other possible combinations of factors that would keep you from vacationing there even if you had any damn money — odds are you might be a little cranky.
One of the reasons I’m a little cranky is that I lost a fairly decent job, a job that I thought would be my last, due to the effects of (insertominous musical fanfare) The Great Recession. When this happened I was almost a thousand years old (in American years) and had all the wrong skills.
I was forced to take a crappy job, actually, several part-time crappy jobs that required me to work eight days a week just to get by. Unfortunately, it wasn't because I was a greedy workaholic who couldn't ever be rich/secure/powerful enough, it was because they didn't pay very well.
I had to work a lot of hours to get by; I literally limped my way, with what turned out to be a busted hip, to a forced early retirement because I needed the diminished dough to get by before the rest of my deteriorating joints (osteoarthritis, the adventure continues) got any worse.
But the reason I lost my job had nothing to do with free trade. It might have happened because the company I worked for managing a crew of 15 souls that kept a hooge Kmart warehouse clean, wasn’t competitive enough — or Kmart wasn’t competitive enough (hold your calls, I think we have a winner) and Wally World ate their lunch... and breakfast... and dinner.
I and a lot of other people lost our jobs but there's no shortage of stores still around selling merchandise at all price points. Consumers rule, consumers win.
{Wait-wait-wait. What about inflation?}
I lost my job because a variable, or a combination of variables, known or unknown, led to life jumping out from behind a tree and kicking me in the crotch. This is how life and the economy, despite our best efforts to generate a desired outcome, often works.
{And what about the popping, no exploding of the real estate bubble in 2008?}
Central planning, aka The Fedrl Gummit, that never met a program to encourage people to buy homes it didn't like (or was unwilling to subsidize) watched as the bubble expanded. After the explosion, it had to step in and spend (print) trillions to prevent another Great Depression.
And nobody went to jail. Not the big boys persons that ran/run the major financial institutions or the hustlers on the front lines handing out liar loans.
"When the tide goes out you discover who's been swimming naked." -Warren Buffett
After shutting down the country and the schools when the pandemic hit (a reverse quarantine) they printed roughly $5,000,000,000,000, so much dough they still haven't spent it all despite an obsession with creating a green economy out of thin air and caused the "transitory" inflation we're still dealing with.
Spending money that creates a problem and then spending more money to fix it ain't how a free market is supposed to work.
If you've been waiting with bated breath for Chapter Six of my condensed history of the world, I apologize.
{You know, I've always wondered...}
It's a transitive verb from Middle English that means to reduce the force or intensity of (Merriam-Webster) and has nothing to do with fishing.
If you're new here, this will give you a chance to catch up. If you're a regular reader this will build anticipation... All right, I admit it, I just decided to take a break for no special reason.
- If Bill Gates is so smart, why is my Hotmail account always choked with spam and my Gmail account virtually spam-free? Why can't Willy take Sundar to lunch at one of those fancy places rich people eat, like Olive Garden, and ask for help?
Word on the street is that the Goog is running behind Microsoft in the race to unleash artificial intelligence on those of us who think lunch at Chick-fil-A constitutes a memorable day. Perhaps they could trade info and fix Hotmail for the little people?
After all, Willy fancies himself a philanthropist.
{I'll bite, what's a Sundar?}
Dana, you are, um... What's the opposite of cosmopolitan?
{Parochial? Narrow-minded? Rustic?}
Exactly, and likely racist, and probably some sort of ____phobe as well. He's the chief Googler.
{Huh. I'm surprised you don't call him Sunday, or Sundae. What are you whining about anyway? Hotmail is free, and so is the software you're using, even as we speak, to write what you call a column and what normal people call a blog.}
Free? I think that if more people realized just how minutely and carefully everything they do online is being tracked, recorded, and sold they would realize that there is still no such thing as a free lunch.
{Oh please, everybody knows there's no such thing as privacy anymore. What can you do?}
- Although I hate to admit it, I find that my attention span has slowly but steadily diminished since the worldwide web of all knowledge has become ubiquitous, and I'm not even a social media maniac.
I've entertained thoughts of self-harm while enduring the interminable wait for my toast to pop up.
{Speaking of which, it's the World Wide Web, not the worldwide web and as far as I know, you're the only one that tosses in "of all knowledge."}
Well, as I've long suspected, worldwide web it turns out (I recently got around to finally looking this up) is grammatically correct, world wide web ain't, but that's not my point.
It's just a dash of attention-seeking behavior on my part that also subtly implies that it's a web of contradictory, missing, manipulated, and frequently incorrect knowledge.
Not that knowing this keeps me from indulging in extended periods of web surfing from which I suddenly regain consciousness and ask myself, where have I been?
Look, a squirrel!
- For the record, The Wall Street Journal officially and enthusiastically embraced the ongoing decline of journalistic standards on 01/06/24. Granted, this is a somewhat arbitrary date given that my personal paper of record (for now) has been declining in quality slowly (but steadily) for a while now.
However, Emma Tucker, named editor-in-chief in December of '22 by King Rupert (who has since abdicated the throne to his son, at least officially) published a sleazy, speculation-filled front-page hit piece — A Tony Stark (Elon Musk) takedown.
{Wait-wait-wait. Mr. Musk has no shortage of critics loose in the world.}
Absabalutely, and I'm sure it's a coinkydink that WSJ reporter Tim Higgins, who's been writing almost exclusively about Musk for quite some time, has recently written several articles that read more like editorials than hard news stories.
When Rupert Murdoch folded the WSJ into his media empire he assured the world he wouldn't lower the paper's famously high standards. In fact, he expanded the Op-Ed section, which was/is separated from the news division by a Chinese wall.
{Wait-wait-wait. Isn't Chinese wall a racist term?}
Nah, it's just culturally insensitive, according to Wikipedia anyway. The Wikipedia entry mentions an unintentionally hil-LAR-ious suggested replacement, cone of silence, a technical term that also happens to be the name of a device used in a formerly famous TV show.
This column was sitting in a drawer, as you can tell by the date of the referenced hit piece (1/6), but the Journal has since published another hit piece about Mr. Musk. It's basically the same as the first one: mostly unidentified sources say Elon does, or at least did, a lot of drugs.
I find it interesting that both major articles' comment sections overwhelmingly supported Musk. I'd love to know what the strategery is, perhaps controversy for its own sake?
I refuse to post any links to this blatant purple journalism but in the Journal's defense, they recently published an in-depth piece about the fact Taylor Swift's dad played college football for a year.
In the year 1776, after a coupla hundred thousand years of just scraping by and occasionally killing each other while simultaneously trying to avoid being killed by a somewhat bloodthirsty Mother Nature, some H. sapiens launched the American experiment and a Mr. Smith published a book.
Adam Smith was, and is, a well-regarded absent-minded professor with a first-rate mind. He gave up his day job as a popular professor at Glasgow University in 1764, to tutor and travel with a young Scottish nobleman (road trip!).
They spent a couple of years touring continental Europe and met several leading thinkers of the day (e.g. Benjamin Franklin) and Mr. Smith was given a life pension by the grateful nobleman that enabled him to spend the next ten years or so working on his magnum opus, “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”
In other words, he set out to discover the best policies a given nation should pursue so that everyone could make a buck.
Warning: do not try to read The Wealth of Nations unless you enjoy the writing style of 18th-century academics (I’m thinking this is a relatively small group of people) and you’re much smarter and more patient than I am (I’m thinking this is a relatively large group of people).
The commas and semicolons seemingly reproduce themselves as you try and decipher the text. Find a commentator that you trust to render Mr. Smith’s ideas into modern English.
In Mr. Smith’s defense, it ain’t easy to be one of the founders of a field of study (modern economics). Also, I must warn any kneejerk anti-capitalists that beating up on Mr. Smith because you think he was just another greed-head will make you look goofy as he’s well known for his belief that accumulating wealth and material goods won’t make you happy.
Besides inventing modern economics, he also explored morality and ethics. He wrote a book titled The Theory of Moral Sentiments that is still highly regarded. Incidentally, both it and The Wealth of Nations were best sellers in their day and literally changed the world.
Adam Smith wanted to figure out what the optimal system was for a free people to attain whatever level of economic security they thought was necessary and appropriate to keep the wolf from the door. He also warned the world about crony capitalism and rent-seeking, two of the monsters currently attempting to strangle America to death.
Although he was financially quite successful, he quietly and discreetly gave away most of his money and lived simply. I highly recommend P.J. O’Rourke’s, "On The Wealth of Nations”. Mr. O’Rourke was not an economist, which is not necessarily a bad thing. He was, however, very smart, very funny, and lived in the real world. I highly recommend any of his books, essays, and articles.
“Economic progress depends upon a trinity of individual prerogatives: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade,” says O’Rourke, stating the fundamentals of Smith’s thought.
{That’s it? That’s all it takes for a country to be prosperous? Everdamnbody? I find that hard to believe.}
Well, more or less, Dana The rule of law is also an essential component if you think that it’s important that everdamnbody should have to play by the same rules and that cheats and bullies should be spanked.
Disclaimer: I’m a former, unapologetic, unrepentant wild-eyed free marketeer and libertarian who seems to be getting more and more conservative and nationalistic with each passing year in an effort to figure out how to mitigate the negative impacts of the global economy on my fellow Deplorables.
However, capitalism has provided us with a level of prosperity that almost everyone who lived prior to about 1850 or so could only dream of. So I strongly disagree with the tendency of well-meaning (or otherwise) progressives, socialists, and communists to frequently use the word capitalist as an epithet.
I describe myself as a sorta/kinda or bleeding heart libertarian (BHL), primarily because I’m all for the rationally designed safety net I mentioned earlier. Many libertarians think that’s wrong-headed or impossible.
Also, there are political philosophers loose in the world who promote something they call BHL but some use terms like social justice and anti-racism, words, and concepts, that as currently defined by many, I have significant problems with.
{What's that got to do with the history of the world?}
I guess it's a highly opinionated history of the word given the next three paragraphs.
Communism, in spite of its adherent's claim that it would work if ever done properly, is an obvious dead end, often literally, as the 80 to 100 million bodies piled up in the last century in its name would seem to indicate.
Socialism is a great idea, all we have to do is change human nature first and lock up all the screwballs like me that are obsessed with personal freedom. Progressivism and/or democratic socialism, or how to have your cake and eat it tooism, is the current flavor of the month for the Utopianists of the world.
Many people want the benefits of a free market combined with a big, juicy welfare state with millions of rules and unionized bureaucrats, but someone else, preferably the evil rich, should pay the bill. Unfortunately, there just aren't nearly enough of them.
Back to Adam Smith. Smith’s work contradicted a widely held belief of his time, mercantilism. This is the belief that a nation’s wealth is determined by how much gold, silver, cash, ginormous TVs, etc. it can accumulate, after all, there’s only so much wealth to go around, right?
Therefore, you should export for the cash and block, or at least penalize, imports. This view of the world, which currently is enjoying a comeback, leads otherwise clear-thinking people to believe in the Boarding House Pie Fallacy.
Say you're living in a boarding house (look it up, kids). It’s dinner time and Mrs. McGillicuddy is serving up her famous caramel-apple pie for dessert. Since there’s only so much pie to go around, and fat Freddie's at the table, it behooves everyone to employ a strategery that will ensure an equitable portion of pie.
Mr. Smith (no relation to the Mrs. Smith of Mrs. Smith's Pies) contends that boarding house wisdom has limited applicability.
There’s an easier and much more effective way to get what you want — that has the added benefit of not having to impose high tariffs (which begat high prices) and over-regulate anyone — the pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade. Skilfully employed, these three ensure that everyone can have their own pie.
