Mid-Day Dream

It was a struggle, attempting to balance the wants of the three grandkids, the demanding schedule of a Doctor son, the absence of a wife who was with the daughter-in-law and our forth grandchild, and an everchanging balance of rental cars and return flight schedules.

Our son needed to be at a job interview early the next day so he had taken off the evening before, just after I had made arrangements to fly home from a nearby airport after dropping off the rental car.  The grandkids and I had just checked into a new hotel after deciding it was too far to drive to Greenville, North Carolina that afternoon and I would drop them off the next morning after their mother had arrived home.

As I asked them if they wanted to head down to the pool for a quick swim before we sorted out what to do for dinner, or if we should push on to Greenville that night and I would leave extra early the next day the door to our room suddenly burst open as John showed up with a shoulder covered in suits and his hands filled with suitcases.

“What are you doing here?” I asked as I struggled to get into my swimsuit while the kids were in the other room.  In that effort, I fell backward onto one of the three beds in the room.  “The interview isn’t until later in the day and I figured we could drive over there together in the morning.  This way I could help with the kids.” 

As I wrestled with the thoughts of how I could adjust all the changing schedules.  Where would I turn in the rental car, how would I change the flight schedule, would I ever see my wife again, and who was feeding the cats?  The phone rang and I woke up.

Oh well, just another day of social distancing.

Fiscal Reality

Whether we choose to accept it or not, there is one indisputable truth.  The United States’ role as the dominant world power will come to an end.  We will not hold this position forever, for in the recorded history of mankind no empire has survived forever.  The only question is what will cause us to become a second-tier nation?

After the Second World War we, along with the other victorious allies, created the United Nations.  The stated intent was simple, to give a forum for nations to talk, resolve differences and avoid war.  Anyone who has paid attention to the last 75 years should know how miserably it has failed on that last item.  In fact, only four years after its creation the UN mobilized a force to fight the communist takeover of the Korean peninsula.  Today the UN serves as a forum for large blocks of countries allied with various other powers to condemn the western world.  It also serves as a potential replacement for individual governments if the world were ever to come to agree on a one-world government, the problem in this aspect is how to manage the wealth of the world on a global basis, when so many have their own opinions on how they should be rich, but everyone else should share whatever is leftover.

As we crank up the printing presses for the second time this century to restart the economy and save the American way of life the first question I have is where does the actual substance of this wealth transfer come from?  Our currency is not based on real or tangible assets, rather it is based on the good faith the Government will stand good for the debt.  In the second World War, when we mobilized the nation to fight the threat of the Axis powers we borrowed from the American people.  Those who were around (I was not) may remember the bond drives, the offer to have towns or businesses buy a plane, a tank, or a ship.  We collected scrap metal, we (the government) limited the products we could buy, and we diverted all those resources to fight the war.  The government spent the next 50 years paying off that debt while accumulating more modern debt.  Kind of like the guy who gets a new credit card to pay off the old credit card and whose debt limit increases because banks see him as a good risk.  Until one day he can’t and the house of cards he built comes tumbling down.

I smile when I see my Democratic friends post about how unprepared we as a nation were for this pandemic, or how if we had universal health care we would be so much better off.  It is a sad smile, for their statements fly in the face of all available evidence. 

Let’s think about preparedness for a moment.  Each and every year this nation faces some kind of major catastrophe and it doesn’t matter who is President, in the eyes of the opposition we will always be unprepared.  It may be a major hurricane, a state ablaze with wildfires, the Great Plains states devastated by tornados, or earthquakes caused by the movement of the tetanic plates along the Pacific rim or in the Caribbean.  We as a nation, and especially our politicians, respond to the crisis before them.  The need is obvious, we must address the crisis at hand with the resource available and worry about the purchase of stuff for the next crisis when we have the time and resources.   

Unfortunately, for most of those in the Executive Branch the fact Congress can’t do its real job of passing a budget each year before the year starts it means there is never enough cash to do the nice to do things, and barely enough to do what the government must do.  Congress also has an endearing quality of telling the States what they must do, often without providing the states the funds to do it.  This puts the state governments in the potentially embarrassing position of not having all the resources available the Federal Government has mandated.

Now we come to the ideal of Universal Health Care.  Of all the countries currently affected by the COVID-19 virus, the U.S. is the one major world power without such a system.  For those countries with systems can we really say they were either better prepared or better able to handle the epidemic?  Only a scant four weeks ago people were pointing out how many more beds Italy had available when compared to the U.S.

Two weeks ago, people were saying we were totally unprepared with test kits to determine who had the virus and who didn’t.  Of course, China stepped in to offer its technical support and provide hundreds of thousands of kits around the world.  Unfortunately for the world, the accuracy of their test is in the 30-50% range and as a result, several nations like Spain and Germany are now abandoning them.

But I digress.

The issue I started with was how will we pay for the $2-trillion we’ve just authorized the government to spend.  It is a question I can ask, without a clue how to answer, but somewhere in the not too distant future some Congress and President will be forced to.  The question is what becomes of the United States when that day of reckoning comes?

p.s.  I may be alone in this opinion but I agree with Representative Thomas Massie, (R-KY) this historic assumption of debt should not have passed the House of Representatives with a simple voice vote where no individual is directly accountable for the decision.

OPERATION COVID-19

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Amid this medical crisis, I am struck by the similarities to a military campaign.  In war, if you could do everything, everywhere, at once to win the war you would, but that is never the case.  There is never enough equipment, never enough people, and never enough time to plan for that one big thing.  For this reason, wars are fought as a series of campaigns where the Nation’s limited assets can be brought to bear on the enemy with the greatest chance of success.  If successful, it will lead to another campaign, and another, until in the end the General (the Army, or the Nation) is successful.

For those who study history, especially military history, this idea is obvious.  Look at how the rag-tag Continental Army struggled from campaign to campaign until they were finally able to box in General Cornwallis and the British Army at Yorktown, Virginia.  Or the Civil war where first Lee and Army of Virginia and then Grant and the Union Army fought a series of battles, each part of a campaign strategy.  A strategy that ultimately failed for the South because at the end of the day they could not meet the industrial capability of the North.

Now we are confronted with a disease that until 6-months ago did not exist.  We can speculate ad nauseum as to how it developed, or who was responsible, but those debates do little to marshal the finite assets of the nation (or the world) to confront and overcome the enemy.

Since we are agreed this virus comes from China, let’s spend a few moments thinking about the war we are in with insights from a Chinese general who put these thoughts down some 2,500 years ago.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

Right now, let’s assume we know ourselves (but that will become the real question we must answer).  Clearly, we don’t yet fully understand the enemy.  It is for that reason we are in a delaying campaign as we gather our resources for what will become the next offensive campaign.  Think of the time after December 7, 1941, when the Japanese had decimated the Pacific Fleet, invaded the Philippines, taken over Singapore, and threatened Australia.  We could do little but begin the process of rebuilding, reequipping and training the new forces.  For a morale boost, we sent a small force of B-25 bombers to bomb the island of Honshu but the real efforts were behind the scenes. 

Isn’t that true for us today?  We are marshaling our resources, we have implemented policies intended to delay (not stop) the inevitable spread of the virus until we are better prepared to confront it head-on.  Of course, there are real consequences to this strategy.  First, we have a political opposition and press who have invested the last three years vilifying the chief executive and are now unable to put aside their distaste for the man for the good of the nation.  They question every decision the executive branch makes and questions why everything isn’t achieved yesterday.  It appears for the opposition the destruction of America is an acceptable consequence if they can destroy the man.  Of course, if this had been the opposition's position after December 7^th would we have been able to recover from the losses of Pearl Harbor?  I wonder.

“If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

As we deal with this pandemic there will be defeats as we learn more and more about the enemy.  The question for us as a nation is how will we deal with those defeats?  The recent experiences strongly indicate the political opposition will rejoice in each and every instance as they work to achieve their selfish political end.  We see this in the social media where each mistake along the way is highlighted and assigned as an individual fault of the President.  For example, when two people in Arizona decided to self-medicate with a fish tank cleaner with the anti-malaria chemicals the President had mentioned on his daily update.  On-line outlets like Axios were more than happy to condemn the President as if it was directly his fault.  They didn’t have the time, or desire, to make sure the facts of the story actually supported their political agenda.  If we can’t come together in this time of crisis the question is will we ever be capable of unity?

“If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Finally, we come to Sun Tzu’s bottom line.  The fact we refuse to know ourselves as a unified people with a vision for the future suggests this campaign has only a limited chance of success and the economic future of the country for a quick and sustained recovery is questionable.