"Problem-Reaction-Solution:
Coming Soon To A Country Near You"
by John Wilder
"Problem-Reaction-Solution has been the playbook of the Left for a long time. What’s that? First, there’s a problem. It may be a real problem, or it may be entirely invented, like my résumé.
Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel, was famous for saying “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” In his own words, Rahm explained, “What I said was, never allow a good crisis to go to waste when it’s an opportunity to do things that you had never considered, or that you didn’t think were possible.” Yes. He said that. It is probably not true that he stood next to a South American quadruped and a doorbell for his senior picture, because that would leave us with Rahm, a llama, ding-dong.
Rahm’s crisis is really just a way to restate the Problem-Reaction-Solution paradigm. It’s a way to make people do things that were otherwise unthinkable. Why? Because some leaders want their people to accept what would otherwise be unthinkable. This has long been the playbook of the Left.
It has been used by the Left since, well, forever. The problem-reaction-solution is often called a Hegelian Dialectic, but that has too many syllables for 1:43AM. And Hegel died in 1831, so I’ll just leave it that this sort of crisis-seeking isn’t a new thing.
The Left turns out to be pretty good at this stuff. Examples? Well, in Australia, all it took was one mass shooting and the politicians convinced the Aussies to turn in their guns. The problem was that single shooting. The reaction? A well-formed media manufactured panic. The solution was to turn in all the guns. The Australian Leftists certainly didn’t let that problem go to waste.
The end result? Australia had some of the most oppressive COVID-19 restrictions on the planet including concentration camps. Which is just what government wanted – to turn citizens into subjects. Taking guns away is a good way to do just that. The joke is that everything in Australia can kill you easily. Now that includes the police.
The same attempts were made in the 1990s with the assault weapons ban in the United States. It went into effect. Without the Internet, I imagine it would still be in place. But, luckily, there was a way to bypass the media, and people got together to push back. I’m not sure that George W. Bush was in favor of rolling it back, but every Republican that had a job and wanted to keep it knew that making it go away in the next election was in their best interest.
So the problem wasn’t big enough, and (at least so far) hasn’t been big enough because events like Uvalde proved one thing: waiting for the police to come and save you isn’t a good strategy. In a way, using the Australia example just isn’t going to work in America.
But what about other things, like money? It has worked before. One of the first things that Franklin Roosevelt did after becoming president was to confiscate almost all the gold of American citizens and then make the dollar worth less. It was the same formula. The problem was the economy had cratered. The reaction was that people were panicking. The solution? Almost anything Roosevelt wanted to try, he could try, up to and including taking the country (eventually) into a World War.
Whereas Americans seem to have a strong distrust of government taking their guns, the distrust with politicians destroying our money doesn’t seem nearly so strong. Which brings us right back to today.
The economy has been a mess, for quite a long time. I could delve back into history even more than I’ve done so far, but I don’t want to write a 20,000 word post. But where we are today is precarious. It is certainly the problem unfolding. In 2008, when inflation was “tolerably” low, the Federal Reserve® could print money at will. This allowed bankers to keep the profits that they had made, while the financial system used the Bounty™ Currency Quicker Printer Upper® to socialize the losses.
This wasn’t without creating ripple issues, but it kicked the can down the road for more than a decade. Then, COVID. Same playbook: print all the cash!!! This time, however, the cash didn’t just go to cover paper losses at banks. People got the cash, and did what people do: they spent it. Another part of the idea was to inject as much money as is possible into infrastructure projects.
Now, I like roads and bridges as much as the next guy, but when all that money chases concrete, it pushes the price of concrete up – that’s supply and demand. And whatever the government was buying went up in price. Now, decent cigars haven’t gone up much in price, but eggs, bacon, and gasoline certainly have. So the Fed© can’t print itself out of this one. Heck, every time the Fed® tries to stop, the economy lurches like a Pelosi getting out of a Porsche™.
So, the problem is here. The reaction is going to be significant as the economy continues to wobble and waver, and I believe is headed for even darker days. Forget Netflix™ and avocado toast: people get grumpy when they can’t afford to eat or buy gas. The normal solution (printing cash and making it rain) can’t be used. That leaves us with a crisis that would make Rahm Emanuel drool. The idea from the government will be to create a solution that, right now, we’d consider unthinkable.
Just like our pushback on the unthinkable banning of guns, it’s our job to push back on whatever nonsense is coming, because I can assure you that it will leave most of us poorer and with less freedom. Why most of us? Remember, there’s a reason why people like Rahm Emanuel look forward to things like this. And it’s not because they lose power or money."
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