"From Riches to Rags"
by Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Any run-of-the-mill politician can ruin an economy. It’s practically written into their job description... Divide the public over trivial issues... (check!) Distract them from what’s really going on... (check!) Lure them into a state of fear and/or helplessness... (check!) Pretend to offer the only solution to problems you actually created... (check!) Accrue power and wealth to your own elite, self-serving cabal... (double, quadruple, sextuple check!)
And let’s give credit where credit is due; most politicians and career bureaucrats are pretty adept at cruising through the above checklist. Take a look around... As Bill reminded us this week, the rich have racked up $30 trillion in stock market gains since 2009, due in no small part to the funny money flowing directly from their pals over at the Fed. That money goes first to Wall Street (and the insiders who trade from their positions on Federal boards).
Meanwhile, the average working stiff - thanks to the best efforts of his elected leaders - has gone precisely nowhere. His wages are flat as a millpond, even as inflation eats steadily away at his modest savings. (The Consumer Price Index soared another 0.5% in December, putting yearly inflation at 7%, the highest in nearly four decades. It also marked the seventh straight month that the Biden Administration’s “transitory” inflation has crested 5%... a phenomenon that sent us back to our trusty Funk & Wagnalls to see if we remembered correctly the definition of the word.)
Distracted by anti-racist baby books, body positivity billboards and case numbers of the highly mild Omicron variant, our lumpenproletariat has enough to worry about just making ends meet. He has a job to hold down, errands to run and a wife to disappoint. If his politicians didn’t rob him blind while his attention was elsewhere occupied, they simply wouldn’t be doing their job.
That being said, it takes a special kind of collectivist idiocy to ruin an economy as rich as, say, Australia’s. Two weeks and ~650 days into “two weeks to stop the spread,” and Australia is in the midst of a self-induced mass psychosis. While nations the rest of the world over were dealing with the first “waves” of COVID in their own curious and bumbling ways, the Land Down Under spent the first 20 months gleefully surrendering every civil liberty it could find worthy of the description.
Businesses were shuttered (the city of Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest, at one time held the unenviable record for “most locked down city on the planet”), families were separated (your antipodean editor hasn’t seen his own kin since before the dreaded plague) and borders where slammed closed (Australians cannot travel freely between their own state borders, even today).
All in all, untold billions were squandered chasing so-called “double donut days” (Australia pursued a bizarre “Zero COVID” strategy for months, going so far as to jail people for breaking self-quarantine orders. Once a penal colony...) Night after night, breathless health bureaucrats would appear on television, reporting on single-digit cases in states the size of Texas, scaring citizens witless.
Needless to say, the petrified and browbeaten populace was hardly ready for what came next.
How to go from Donuts to 150,000 in under a month...
Click image for larger size.
“Just two weeks to stop the spread, mate!” (Source: Worldometers)
The picture above represents the fastest case rate increase anywhere in the developed world... and in the most recently jabbed, double-jabbed and freshly boosted nation on the planet. And yet, precious workers who remain “stubbornly vaccine hesitant” are forbidden from going to work... and school... and parks... and concerts... and public spaces... and hospitals... and - gulp! - even the pub! (See Western Australian Premier’s unlettered ramble here for some idea of the paternal state of affairs in that hermit state.)
Meanwhile, the nation’s extreme and Orwellian contact tracing system, coupled with mandatory quarantine for anyone testing COVID positive (and, until recently, anyone who was even in the same “exposure site” as someone who tested positive), means huge swaths of the nation’s workforce have been benched... just as cases hit record numbers in all states.
Without truck drivers to freight goods... without store and warehouse workers to stack them... without cashiers, clerks, attendants... supply chains begin breaking down very quickly. Even in a country with more head of cattle (28 million) and more head of sheep (68 million) than people (26 million), things can go from bad to worse rapidly.
A dear friend sent this photo from her local grocery store in Brisbane, Queensland. (Fortunately for her, she’s a vegetarian...)
(Photo: So much for the great Australian Barbecue!)
As regular readers of these pages will know, we’ve been monitoring Australia as a kind of “Canary in the COVID Coal Mine” since all this began, warning of what can go wrong when complex economies (even rich ones) cede power to the Central Planner Class.
Amplifying natural disasters with man-made catastrophes is nothing new, of course. Nor is such a phenomenon restricted to “lucky countries.” As Bill and Dan have noted this past week, complex energy markets are breaking down all around the world. From Germany to Kazakhstan to America’s northeast, flatfooted governments and helpless citizens are witnessing the beginning of what we’ve quietly been calling the Winter Catastrophe of 2022."
No comments:
Post a Comment