Don Goes to Town

A revealing guest post

(BWW Readers know Don Williams, infrequent pod cast guest and friend since the Days of More Normal, ex-Smithsonian Heavy and keeper of the infamous Barn on White Run. Also the author of compelling commentary. In advance of his next pod cast appearance, there is this. BW, prop.)

My name is Don, and I’m an old coot.

Last week Mrs. Barn and I took one of our occasional trips to the big city, in part for me to restock some routine building supplies. It had been a very long time since I bought much in the building materials realm as I had really stocked up while constructing the barn almost two decades ago. Slowly over time that inventory had dwindled down and it was time to do a little restocking. Plus, replacing some decking was on the autumn agenda.

The sticker shock almost put me into a wallet-coma. Some CDX plywood, nothing special to say the very least. Enough decking to refurbish an 8’x12′ deck with some left over (even disregarding the need to sort through the pile since about a third of it was useless). Checkout was well on its way to ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS. To say that I was ranting all the way home like a curmudgeonly old coot vastly underemphasizes the pungence of my rhetoric. Not only do they not call material what it is, they tripled the prices since I last bought stuff. $60 for a 3/4″ sheet of CDX plywood? $14 for a 12-foot piece of PT/SYP decking? Insanity.

It would be easy enough to condemn the lumber stores and the lumber markets, but markets just do what markets do. Their moral duty is to maximize legal profits on behalf of their shareholders.

The real crisis is inflation, a crisis I do not believe we as a culture have the knowledge, wisdom, or courage to address.

It would be easy enough to blame the bankers, especially The Fed. But even though they are integral to the crisis, the central bankers are only doing what the legislative, executive, and judicial politicians are instructing them to do.

Even though they are misanthropes integral to the crisis, the spineless weasel elected politicians are only doing what the electorate is instructing them to do; spend money on us, money that we do not have. When legislators and executives spend money they do not have, in order to purchase votes they need as they need food, water, and air, there are only two “solutions.” 1) raise tax revenues to cover the expenditures, or 2) create/borrow phony baloney money to do the deed.

The limits to the first are well established as history has revealed an almost iron-clad truth: governments can only extract about 23% of the economy in taxes regardless of the taxation scheme. Hence the drive towards totalitarian collectivism, a/k/a abolition of an economy.

As for the creation of phony baloney money, also known as fiat currency, the only limit is political. The blame for inflation comes down to us, the electorate. In the aggregate we demand the gubmint give us stuff we cannot afford and cannot be paid for. So they do the “rational” thing, they create money out of ones and zeroes and fractional reserves, reducing the worth of the money in existence. Intrinsic prices are not rising, it’s the value of the money that is falling. That has always been and always will be the proximate cause.

Until we in the electorate tell them to stop spending money on us (yeah that’s gonna happen) the inflation locomotive will be picking up steam as it charges down the tracks, the engineers unaware that the bridge up ahead is collapsed (if it has not yet occurred, servicing the debt will soon be the largest component of the Federal budget). And collapse is the only possible end point. Get ready for it. I do not know the current score in the game nor do I know how much time is left on the clock. But I know the end result.

So Don, are you saying you are smarter than all the smart guys in Washington?

Yup.

But then I live in Cootville and the perspective is not in sync with the outside world. As CS Lewis said, “Reality is a ruthless instructor. It does not care whether you agree with it or not.”

Don Williams