Is it Time to Write Three Letters?

There is an old joke about the time Nikita Khrushchev took over the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin’s death.   Khrushchev was just settling into the big office in the Kremlin and beginning to make himself at home.  He was rummaging through Stalin’s massive desk when he came across a small drawer.  The drawer held only four items.  There were three sealed envelopes and a simple note on top.

The note read, “Comrade if you are reading this note it means I am dead and you have risen to the top of the Party and now control the entire union of socialist peoples.  Welcome to this position.  I’ve left you three simple letters to be opened only if there is a crisis that could topple you from power.  Take my advice and use it wisely.  Don’t open the letters until you actually need them.  Stalin.

Well, the first year came and went as Khrushchev consolidated power within the party and across the USSR.  But eventually, there came a crisis when the summer wheat harvest failed due to a severe drought.  Khrushchev struggled with how to assure the people they would make it through this crisis when he remembered the notes from Stalin that remained in his desk.  With trembling hands, he opened the first note.

It read simply, “Create a 5-year plan.”  Of course, he thought, organize the people to work through this crisis and prepare so it won’t happen again.  So, he went to The Politburo to explain how they would turn the people out to harvest while they changed the industry to modernize the collective farming system.  In five-years, the Soviet Union would lead the world in wheat production.

At the end of the five years, the Soviet Union was no better off than it was at the beginning.  Despite all the government plans, all the new equipment, and all the work on consolidating the collective efforts wheat production still lagged behind the needs of the nation.  His foes in The Politburo had begun to mumble that perhaps it was time for Nikita to visit one of the Gulags.  Again, Khrushchev turned to his old mentor Joseph Stalin as he opened the second letter.

It read, “Blame your predecessor for the failures, I am dead and no harm can come to me.”  That evening, as Nikita addressed The Executive Committee he detailed all the graft and corruption he could remember under Stalin’s regime, he talked about how the purges had weakened the Motherland and led to the great Patriotic war that cost the nation so many of its young men and woman and the fear that was so persuasive then was still limiting the nation’s ability to recover.  He promised to erase those evil memories and open the Soviet Union to become the truly Communist ideal Vladimir Lenin had promised.  The Politburo raised as one to stand behind their leader as they purged the memory of Joseph Stalin from their psyche.

Unfortunately, as history will attest, there was another crisis.  Again, Khrushchev returned to the small drawer to open the third, and final letter from Stalin.  With confident hands that Stalin would once more recommend a way to maintain his power, he opened the envelop to find the words of his mentor.

It said, “Write three letters.”

What we’ve seen in the Presidents of this century is how this joke plays out in real life.  Each of the three men who’ve been President have used this advice in their communication with the nation.  Each has come up with some long-term plan to shape the nation in their vision (or the vision of the people who got them elected), and each has when the need arose. blamed their predecessor for the failures discovered during their administration.  The only question that remains is it time for Trump to write his three letters?

Since his surprise upset of the anointed one of the Democratic Party; there has been a non-stop drumbeat for Trump’s removal.  For those with so much vested in this mantra, there can be no turning back.  In the immortal words of Rosanne Rosannadanna “If it ain’t one thing, it’s another.”  It is as if any idea of working with a self-promoting outsider is so far from their political model as to be inconceivable.  An old marketing cliché comes to mind with its approach.  “Let’s run it up the flag pole and see who salutes?”  Unfortunately for the opposition -- President Trump has far out-marketed them and they seem incapable of actually coming up with any new ideas on how to “out-America” this Make America Great Again President.  In fact, it is too often their approach to condemn the value of the nation.

It seems the left has spent so much time and effort to get everyone in their party aligned with their groupthink, and have vilified the opposition for so long they can’t figure out how to deal with someone who loves himself so much that he must vilify those who vilify him.  They are used to traditional politicians who’ve not responded in kind to the accusations against them.  Unfortunately for the political elite, they don’t relate to the common blue-collar worker in the same way Trump does.  The blue-collar workers understand his approach, and because of that they are vilified by the elite, for that is what elites do.  They look down their noses at the middle class.

Perhaps it’s because their globalist view aligns with companies like 3M where there is no moral imperative to do the right thing for the nation?  For them, the idea of a nation-state is antiquated and should be replaced by a single world government for which they would be key beneficiaries.  For them, at least it seems to me, their worldview of America more closely aligns with Iran’s view than with the average middle of the road American.  America is not filled with people trying to make the best of their lives and live in peace and harmony with their neighbors.  It is filled with racists, homophobes, and xenophobes who are all on the verge of joining some white supremacist group. 

This was pointed out to me by a devout progressive about 10-years ago when, after Barrack Obama swept into office by a significant majority, there was a small political movement called the “Tea-Party” that argued for a balanced budget and limited government spending.  This young liberal pointed out the only reason this group existed was that the recently elected President was Black, and he had personally seen the racist signs they stood behind.  Through the Obama administration’s reign, we see time and again where the President and his supporters would use the claim of racism to counter any opposition to his policies.  Unfortunately for us, this was not the unifying approach many of us who honestly try and view others as individuals hoped for.  In fact, it has become a central part of the progressive playbook.

Even with the economy in shambles, unless the Democrats are willing to find a candidate who can go toe to toe with President Trump and persuade the middle class he/she has their best interests at heart I don’t think we will see much change in November.  In fact, I’d guess there is a better than even chance the Democrats lose the House, which won’t necessarily be a good thing unless those septuagenarians who’ve held office for half their lives are retired at the same time.

So, as much as those who’ve made it their life’s work to point out every narcissistic mistake the President makes I’m not convinced he needs to write his advice to 46 just yet.

Through a Modern Looking Glass

“The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it 'nonsense' if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

As Alice found as she stepped through the Looking Glass, we are living in a world turned topsy-turvy where the normal rules seem not to apply.  But still, some would have us believe that they, and only they, know what is true and what is not, and thanks to the explosion of media venues, social and otherwise, we are inundated with those opinions of reality.

“The President waited too long to inform the nation.”

“The President overreacted to the threat, and is racist.”

“If you’re not eating at Chinese restaurants you are a racist.”

“The virus is not serious, live your lives as you would normally.”

“The Chinese did a great job to curtail the virus. We need to learn from them.”

“The President sent all our supplies to China!”

“The President won’t send us enough ventilators.”

“I’m not hoarding ventilators, I’m stockpiling them for when they are needed.”

“Why doesn’t the President tell us what is going on?”

“Why does he have to have all these daily briefings?”

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“We won’t air his comments.”

“His support has been excellent.”

“Why does the President mock the media?"

"Why does the media mock the President?"

“Why doesn’t he listen to his advisors.”

“How could his advisors give him such bad advice?”

On and on the talking heads talk.  Their political views intact, their opinions unchanged, their self-righteousness never in doubt.  How do we create such characters?  It would be beneficial if we could simply be honest about the agenda of each talking head, but then we think they are.

“Alice laughed, ‘There’s no use trying.’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen.  ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

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. 

In a Modern World.

In looking at the great governmental debates going on in the United States I believe they really boil down to two simple (opposing) positions.  Do you believe the government is the answer to most problems or do you believe the government is a source of most problems?  This is a binary question and there are rarely binary problems or solutions, but if you look at the modern political debates everything is painted in absolutes and polarized positions. One side is good, the other evil.

There are clear things we must have a government for and people have organized since before recorded time to address those unavoidable needs.  I’m talking about things like defense, social order, the economy of effort, and other basic needs required for communal wellbeing.

Our founding fathers, as they wrestled with the failures of the government put into place following our divorce from England, argued about what the right kind of government was and how to implement it.  The failures of the Articles of Confederation were obvious in the way it limited the economic well-being and the defense of the colonies.  ThoughtCo provides a good synopsis on the weakness of the original government and the issues the founders hoped to address with their second effort.  In essence, the Confederation failed to provide sufficient centralized power to regulate the commerce between the states and raise a military to defend the colonies from either external threat, or internal rebellion when the need arose.  But in those debates, the fear of an all-powerful centralized government remained fresh in the minds of the political leadership who knew firsthand the potential abuses of the state.

As John Adams wrote,  “It is by balancing each of these powers against the other two, that the efforts in human nature toward tyranny can alone be checked and restrained, and any degree of freedom preserved in the constitution”[1]

I believe, since the Second World War, the government has grown far beyond what the founders could have ever imagined.  For example, Congress was not envisioned as a full-time job.  The capital, built on reclaimed swampland, was uninhabitable in the summer months, so the Representatives would meet for a little while, address the necessary actions and then return to their communities to resume a normal life.  Now they are full-time federal employees responsible more to the people who will offer them wealth than to the people they represent.  Senators were to be responsible to the state governments they represented, now they too are full-time employees seeking the wealth that comes from their positions.  The bureaucracy of the executive branch has never shrunk from what we expanded to in the war, only the roles and responsibilities have changed.  With the social legislation put into place during the Roosevelt years and greatly expanded during Johnson’s administration, we have created layer upon layer of workers and managers whose tenure is untouchable, overseen by the political appointees who will come and go with each new administration.

Ask yourself three questions:

Has this larger more encompassing government made our society better or has it simply reacted to the changing culture by fostering more dependence? 

Do the top-of-the-pyramid politicians shape the course of society or do they simply respond to it, as they vie for political dominance? 

Is the social order actually set by those who are beyond public scrutiny? 

What I find rather humorous, in my own cynical way, is that those who favor an all-powerful government are now emotionally outraged to the point of derangement over the fact their government is led by someone they despise, and he is doing things they don’t like.  It’s almost like they don’t understand Newton’s third law of politics (actually motion but I think you get my point).  To determine if an all-powerful government is really something even worthwhile let’s put that aside and talk about how wisely we, the nation, have chosen to spend our money to make America a kinder, more tolerant, and loving society.

Let’s put defense spending aside for a few minutes, for although that is frequently a topic of how much money the government wastes it is an increasingly smaller share of the total government spending.  Rather, let’s talk about the great social experiment we began with the creation of social security under the Great Depression-era President – Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The idea behind social security was to create a safety net for those who had been unable to save for their retirement years.  It was planned as a self-paying program where those in the active workforce would pay into the account at rates equal to or higher than people would draw out.

It appears to be a natural condition in humans to believe if the government was going to pay them in retirement they could use the money they should be saving to meet their more immediate desires.  This is the path those in my generation “the baby boomers” chose.  As my generation matured and as the economy flourished the social security account prospered and grew.  Unfortunately for the social planners, the labor force in society has not continued to expand in size at the rates necessary to ensure contributions would always exceed the rates of withdrawal from the account. 

In the 1960s we saw the government add healthcare as an expense that should be borne/shared by the government, as well as the expansion of the social safety nets with increases in the welfare programs.  At the same time, the states began to look into providing their own supplemental programs in healthcare and welfare, and private industry (both healthcare, social welfare, and private insurance) expanded to profit from those new healthcare dollars.  All of these programs became “mandated” or “entitlement” programs and are in fact “must pay” bills the government is obligated to fund before it funds the discretionary things (like defense or infrastructure) that most politicians get rewarded for spending on. 

As the baby boomer generation retires it leaves a much smaller workforce behind to pay into the system that will now payout to the boomers who will live for another 30-40 years.  As a result, the mandatory spending on Social Security and Medicare become an ever-increasing portion of the nation’s gross domestic product.  Growing from roughly 4% in 1970 to 10% in 2016, with projections to grow to 15% shortly and with no relief in sight.  Expenditures are, according to several sources, growing at rates far greater than the general economy.

When you add in the fact that any money laying around on a balance sheet gives the Congress ideas on how to spend it on things like new programs you quickly see a problem where mandated spending will exceed mandated income.  There are always more problems than there are dollars to pay for them, and Congress (whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans) has shown little appetite to limit themselves to the money they will receive in taxes. The solution they always choose is to borrow money based on good faith in the country.  They will borrow until the lenders decide not to lend any more.  For my purposes, I assume the end of the lending train occurs about the same time the dollar stops being the currency of international trade.

The costs aside, what have been the social impacts of an expanding government with an ever-increasing demand for social engineering and social welfare programs?  Are we a better nation for the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on healthcare, social security, and social welfare? 

From my perspective, it sure doesn’t seem like we are.

Remember when the government said everyone should have the right to buy a house, and the government expanded its home-buying guarantees so even people who didn’t have the financial resources necessary to sustain the loans could get them?  We had Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac as pseudo-governmental guarantors of the loans.  Well, those programs certainly worked well, at least until 2008 when all the smoke and mirrors of the programs came crashing down and so many people found themselves in homes they couldn’t afford.  How many lives were impacted by those failures?

How about the basic building block of modern society?  I’m talking about the family unit.  Is the family unit as strong as it once was?  How about in the minority groups like African-Americans, the Hispanics, or the Native Americans?  Have the social support programs we’ve invested in made those groups more independent and stronger, or have they turned them into groups with an increasing dependence on the state?

We talk a lot about the “American Dream” where an individual with the drive and ambition can succeed in life and rise above the station he or she was born into.  Recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this idea was absurd and no one could raise themselves up without the government doing it for them.  Some found this laughable coming from someone who just a couple of years earlier had been a bartender with a BS in Economics and was now making a six-figure salary as a Congresswoman.  But in one sense she was right.  It took her finding a government job that didn’t require any real skills (other than campaigning) to rise above the challenges she faced with the death of her Father.  Her biography is vague on what her parents did or how she was able to attend Boston University, so maybe she hasn’t pulled herself up at all and her statements are based on her real-life experiences. 

It seems, at least to me, the whole of the Democratic campaign centers on three main points.  First, we have the vehement anti-Trump rhetoric making claims that he is either a tool of the Russians, a bumbling idiot, or a criminal.  Next comes the campaign against wealth with the claims no one needs to be a billionaire and the idea the wealth of the rich takes away from the wealth of the poor (who are poor through no fault of their own), and finally a bigger government (run by the right party) would actually strengthen the middle class.

I’m sorry but after watching a bigger government unfold for the last 50-years, and regardless of the claims by the left’s adored leader, I’m not buying any of their claims.  The record is pretty clear, whenever government becomes the center of all society the middle class is actually weakened, if not destroyed.  It doesn’t matter if there is a Monarch, a Shaw, an Ayatollah, a dictator, a President for Life, a Prime Minister, a Chief, der Führer, or a General Secretary if the average person is totally dependent on the decisions of the Government for their welfare the middle class will be turned into the lower class within a decade.

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[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/checks-and-balances

The Pendulum of Communism

1920-1945 – Communism is okay, look at how they are unifying the Soviet Union and helping fight the Nazis.  So, what if they have killed a few people to maintain power.  The workers are united, the progressive media love them, we should be more like them.

1945-1989 – Communism is bad, look at how many millions of people they’ve killed, they are trying to take over the world, they are spying on us and stealing our secrets, we have to stop communism and end the evils of the Soviet Union and China.  We must round up and blacklist everyone who liked communism.

1990-2016 – Whew we dodged a bullet, but it looks like communism is contained.  Look, even China is moving towards capitalism, so what if they are stealing a few secrets. 

2016-Present – Communism is okay, it will destroy those billionaires who are hoarding all the money and make life great for the workers.  It will solve all the problems with pollution and fix the climate problems.  Workers unite.  The thing is communism gets a bad rap so let’s call it democratic socialism, at least until we are in charge.   

BTW, see how well communism is working in China?