Sticks and Stones

Sticks and Stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

This is a piece that I started during the Boston Marathon last month. Fundamentally, this is about rhetoric, speech, especially speech that is intended to persuade.

There are two sides to that old adage; although it is usually used to show scorn for those who use foul language and insults, but it is also a suggestion to remain non-violent. I suppose that the bombs that were set off at the finish of the Boston Marathon last month were a good idea, if the ones who planted them wanted to inspire loathing for themselves, but if they wanted to garner support for their views, then they hurt their case. I still don’t know what they may have been trying to push, but I am opposed to it forever.

There are many ways to forward one’s views. The best ways are to make what you want to look good and to make what opposes you to look bad. There are many ways carry out those strategies; all of which involve spreading knowledge and using logic and connecting what you like to things that are generally pleasant. Those methods always work, unless those who oppose you are right and you are wrong. That happens even to the best of us, but those of us who have intelligence and sanity it is no great problem to admit having been wrong. Since Asperger’s Syndrome was defined we have had to add a fourth reason why people retain opinions that have been proven wrong to the traditional reasons: religion, stupidity, and insanity.

Another way to further your views is to kill off those who disagree. When you kill all of your opponents, then you will not have to be concerned with opposition or even with whether your opinion is rational. This method works only if one does a complete job, and it is best to do it quickly and completely, because a partial or slow campaign of extermination will annoy the remnants, and they may take action against you in, analogous with poking a stick into a hornet nest.

If those people who planted those bombs in Boston had wanted to be effective, then they should have caused massive death. Causing a few deaths and a number of serious permanent injuries simply garnered ill-feelings and gained some implacable enemies for them. And the shutdown of the city while the pursuit was going on added to the annoyance. Now, I and a few billion other people are firmly opposed to whatever you favor. Whether your reasons were religious, political, or something else, we don’t care; we are opposed. 

Then there is the matter of your lack of free will. Perhaps this action by you provides us with an excuse for improving the gene pool. The human race doesn’t need people who think that their opinions are absolutely true. No, we need people are capable of telling the difference between truth and falsehood and changing their minds. Alas, our lives and thoughts and everything are predetermined, so there is only one way to eliminate people who insist on making war against non-combatants. But we really blame you for doing something that you had no choice about?

If someone else is inclined to attempt such a stunt, then here is a little advice; although if you are stupid enough to do something like that you probably won't pay attention. If you want anyone else to support your positions, then do not, emphatically do not, attack that person. What you want to do is to make your potential ally sympathetic with you and your position. Instead of an attack try being pleasant and complimentary. Make the potential ally feel comfortable with you. Then, after the potential ally regards you in a positive light, bring up your agenda. Even if there is something unpleasant involved the potential ally may regard it positively, and remember the old adage: You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. So honey your words. Make the potential ally happy to see or hear your words. It has been claimed that one can catch more flies with bullshit than you can with honey, so you might try that. The different baits would result in different persons being attracted, so one might be preferable to the other; you can experiment.

To reiterate: if you want to garner allies for your campaign, then you should not attack potential allies. You should use honeyed words to attract potential allies, and you should not annoy them by blowing up bombs around them. Is that clear?

Restoring The Middle

Over the decades I have noticed a lot of loose talk about the “Middle Class”. Most recently I read something by a computer geek who claims that computers eliminated the Middle Class. My immediate comment was that the MC was doomed to decline from its first moment. After further consideration, I realized that the problem is with definition. What has been called the MC since WW II may be near the middle of the socio economic spectrum, but is what was more accurately called the Working Class, and that tem should still be used, if we define the Middle Class based on what people do?  If we decide to define Middle Class as that class of people who are between the higher and the lower classes, then sure the middle class is there and it is a third of the people. If we decided to make the definition based on the status of what people, then the situation becomes shaky, because the middle class is, or was, the bourgeoisie, above the peasants and manual workers and below the aristocracy. Regardless of how one defines it, the Middle Class has lost economic strength over the last few decades.

The worst part of the problem was the expansion and contraction of the upper part of the Working Class, especially industrial workers. There aren’t many of them left. With the loss of factory jobs in the U.S. workers don’t have nearly as many options left, and the options don’t pay much. Most of those jobs have left the country, and pay has dropped on the ones that remain. Just fifty years, people in the U.S. didn’t have to ever buy imported goods, unless they wanted to. All types of clothing, tools, household goods, etc. were produced in the U.S., and the goods were of good quality and reasonably priced. Today few things are produced I the U.S.; it’s easy for someone to have no clothing not made the U.S. Federal tax policies are the main reason why manufactures have let the U.S. It has become cheaper to ship things ten thousand miles than to make them in Lowell, Pittsburg, or Montgomery. As a result, many people have trouble buying such goods. Manufacturing clothing and general merchandise was never a tremendously profitable or well-paying part of the economy, but people could make a living.

Since 1950 the good paying manufacturing jobs migrated first from the North to the South, then they migrated to other countries, but that migration excluded the very best manufacturing jobs, aerospace, defense, and parts of the computer industry. We were left with an economy that produced little of its day-to-day things, which were shipped in from far away, and many workers were permanently put out of work. That situation has continued and gotten worse. As a result of the dotcom bust of 2000 many, many web artists and coders lost jobs and have not been able to get comparable work since.

I started this as a counter argument to the idea that the internet destroyed the Middle Class, and the more I think about that assertion the less rationale I can see for it. The internet is one of the few parts of the economy where there are jobs available that are suitable for the Middle Class, and those are truly Middle Class, rather than Working Class.  Rather than arguing about what has gotten rid of the Middle and Working Class, it might be a good idea to think about how we could restore the U.S. economy, including the Middle Class and/or Working Class. I think that it would be easy. Both Federal and State laws would have to eliminate most of the barriers to starting a new business, and taxes would have to be made fairer.  If there were a simple income tax in which everyone paid the same percent over a fairly high basic exemption, then it would be easier to tell how a business would do, and the workers would make more in after tax income. We would have to get rid of benefits that were not applied equally to everyone, so it would be worthwhile for people to work, and we would have to provide an effective “safety net” for those who had conditions that didn’t allow them to work. Today most of the people who are permanently unemployed could work, if there were jobs, and most of them would be happy to work. 

So make me emperor, ad everything will be wonderful.

U. S. Politics After the End

The shape of government will change everywhere after the Great Pandemic will decrease population by 80%, and the politics involved with the governments will also change. Teasing apart the results of the changes is difficult, and it is likely that new elements will arise, but the general political culture of most countries would be unchanged, and that means that there will be cut-throat politics in the U.S. Just as one can read the political satires of Jonathan Swift from the early 18th centuries and see parallels with today's politics in the UK, there will be a huge amount of similarity between today's politics in the U.S. and what we will see after the Great Pandemic. But it is likely that some things will change. The issues probably will be different, but it will be a matter of who gets to profit from the government. The parties probably will have new names, or they might switch sides again. The Democrats derived from the Anti-Federalists, who were firmly opposed to a strong government, but they had become the party of the establishment by the time that the Republican Party arose, as a populist party that opposed the status quo, especially slavery.

In addition to the major parties we now have a large collection of minor parties, and one, or more, of those might present the right program to become important after the pandemic. While a highly regulated economy will be undesirable then, there may be a desire for a protectionist import policy, or there may an imperialist trend. There are good reasons for thinking that imperialism will be seen as desirable in some parts of the world. So the U.S. my have a big government – small government split that would be defined by positions in regard to Manifest Destiny. There are good reasons for the U.S.A. to take over Canada and Latin America, and those reasons will be more valid after the pandemic, and the population of Canada will between six and seven million (34 million now), so it would not be difficult to reverse that bit of bad luck of December 31, 1775. I am not necessarily advocating the conquest of Canada; I am mentioning it as a distinct possibility.

 Any expansion to the south would be difficult, and there would be no real value it for the U.S.’ although it might be desirable for other reasons. The conquest of Mexico would be somewhat more difficult than conquering Canada. Mexico probably will have a population of between twenty and twenty-five million (probably toward the low end of that range). It would be more useful to eliminate any criminal gangs that might remain and to set up a government that would work reasonably well. Establishing U.S. control in South America would be much less likely, because Brazil would also be working at that. The economic value of combining the Americas would be considerable, but the cultural complications might be insuperable. Federation might be a practical answer, and it might be a step toward eventual world government. (Oh horror! Suggesting one world government!). Adding the Canadian provinces to the U.S. would be fairly easy, and the legal systems are not all that terribly different. Expanding beyond that would require making the Mexican economy stronger and less corrupted by crime. That would require a complete change in drug policy in the U.S. And in many other countries, and the cost of starting a new business would have to drop. These two steps would greatly improve the Mexican economy now, but they will become essential after the Pandemic.

Another issue in U.S. politics would be local versus central government. How that would play with regard to issues probably would vary with the region, and that support, or not, should be an economic issue, but there would be complications. For practical reasons it would be difficult for the Feds to intrude as much into local issues, because there wouldn’t be enough people to enforce the federal intrusions.

Issues regarding rebuilding the country’s credit rating and whether equality before the law would be enforced would be important internally and externally, but it would take considerable time for things to settle down...

Economics After the End

Eliminating 80% of the demand will hurt the economy, to put it mildly. The drop in demand will result in an immediate drop in prices of everything that is bought and sold. Prices of food and other perishable goods will drop greatly, but the prices will rebound, because supplies will need to be replenished regularly, but durable goods do not need frequent replacement. Production machinery will eventually need to be replaced, but that won’t be for years, which may lead to other problems. The biggest effect will be in Real Estate, which has an even longer useful life than machinery, and residential real estate outlasts people.

Manufacturing and distribution After the End There would be major problems for the economy and society, but it would create huge opportunities for the people who would remain. The biggest problems would relate to mismatches between needs and people and things available, but there would be surpluses of many kinds of goods for a considerable time.

We can expect that the distribution of goods would stop for some time, and it probably would take some time before the transportation sector settled into the new reality. There might be piles of goods in some places that were needed in other parts of the world. The matter of transporting energy products would be a mess for a short time, but in a few months the extra wells would be shut down, and shipments would be rerouted to get crude oil and LNG to places where it might be useful.

The drop in real estate prices will be the big thing that will kill the banks. Banks will be hurt by the drop in clientele, but when trillions of dollars in collateral will become mere millions of dollars’ worth of collateral, and the loans will default, so the banks will have to simply give up and walk away, instead of the borrowers walking away. To make things even worse, there will not be enough new borrowers to make up for the losses. But don’t mourn too much. The banks have been gambling for thousands of years, and they nearly always win, and there will be new banks that will take up where the old banks ended.

One interesting and related development will be that currencies and sovereign debt will also fail rather dramatically. The U.S. will default on its sovereign debt for the first time, and there will be no way to avoid the default. With the loss of 80% of the U.S. population the drop in tax revenue will be proportionate. The demands for Federal money will also drop, but just doing the basics will be all that the Feds will be able to manage; debt service will be out of the question. The international complaints about this and other sovereign debt defaults will be barely noticeable, because all countries will default. At present most currencies are backed by sovereign debt rather than hard assets, but that might change.

There isn’t enough precious metal in the world to back all of the money, but the demand for money will drop after the pandemic, and there might be enough precious metal to cover the demand that pertain to that era. That doesn’t make a huge difference, but it will be one of the oddities.

The collapse of the banks, currencies, and so on would make international trade impossible for a time. It is impossible to determine how long that paralysis would continue, but it probably would not be long, because there are always to make a deal. Put this paralysis together with lower demand, and we probably will see a long-term reduction in international trade. It simply won’t make sense to have so many things produced in other countries when the economy of scale will have disappeared. The cost of transportation probably will change relative to the cost of production, but it is impossible to tell by how much. Then there is the question of how large the labor pool will be in countries that are presently doing production; will there be enough people to provide for local needs and to produce large amounts for export? In the case of China it is likely that there won’t be enough people available, but there might be in other countries. In India, for example, the biggest difference might be that there just won’t be as many people, but the economy is well diversified, and the labor force is reasonably flexible. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa would also see little change except in population. Western Europe and the U.S.A. would see major changes to the society and government structures. I can’t imagine what would happen to the Russian economy.

Putting all this together, we should all plan to take up substance farming at tree the end. It will be a good idea for people to take up raising some of their own food; although most things will be available through commercial channels. Within a few years there probably will be a good market for specialty foods and for fine wine and other luxury items.