What Have You Done For me Lately?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

When I was in Europe, whether visiting in Portugal or in brief airport sojourns in Madrid and Amsterdam I kept running into weird things coming off the TV. No, seriously.

“The government must provide more affordable housing.” “We demand the government create more pre-school slots.” “Government must provide more transportation.” “Government needs to create more child care.”

Look, it was so pervasive that I heard it twice at least per airport, though I only stayed there a couple of hours.

And it hit me wrong.

I’m not going to say that we don’t have our idiots claiming that “Government must provide” fill in the blank. I’m sure we’d find tons of them in deep blue areas, and they practically jump in front of the mic at Democrat conventions.

But the truth is that it’s not universal here. And in general, it’s understood that government doesn’t “create” things or “give” you things. At some level, in our back brains, we know it’s a matter of the government “allowing” i.e. getting the heck out of the way and letting things happen.

Most of the things we really desperately want government to “provide” are things that they should and we’re entitled to from them: border security. National defense. Answers.

But in Europe the phrasing wasn’t even questioned. And I’ve seen the same from Australian posters on Twittex.

It makes me wonder, it does. Do they think government is going to be out there with trowel and bricks building houses? If not, where do they think it comes from?

It’s like Commie La Whorish wanting to give every black man a 20k non-payable-back loan. Where does she think money comes from? Oh, yeah, sure, print it. But when you print it, since it’s a symbol of value, not value itself, it just devalues the other symbols out there. So in the end, it comes from all our pockets, including those of black men. And it will buy less and less the more you print.

Every time I heard “Government must provide” and what followed was not “Evidence they’re not a criminal conspiracy against their own people” my hackles rose, and I started talking back to the TV in a couple of languages. For some reason this performance amused my dad, though I’m not sure he understood what the objection was.

You see, they have become convinced that the government giveth, the government taketh away, blessed be the name of the government. And at this point what they expect the government to do is the equivalent of expecting vampires to produce living children.

I’m not saying we don’t have trouble right here. And if we manage to thread this needle and get ourselves out of this pinch, it will be proof certain that G-d looks after fools, drunkards and the united states of America.

But I hate to say this, in the fight against globalist technocracy, Europe’s feet are in a cement bucket. It is impossible to fight against intrusive, all controlling government when you think government is the engine of the economy.

In this global fight, our allies are more than a little brain damaged. Yep. I’m very afraid it is up to us again to once more get the chestnuts out of the fire.

Build under, build over, build around. Show the world there is another way. Because when the increasingly incompetent kakistocracy collapases, the world will be in dire trouble.

And we’re the only ones not waiting on directions from above.

158 thoughts on “What Have You Done For me Lately?”

  2. And at this point what they expect the government to do is the equivalent of expecting vampires to produce living children.

    It happened in Twilight, so……

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    2. Sure they can. As a breeding program, for more tasty blood bags. “Blah blah! I do not care if you dislike that person, you WILL breed children with them or I will cull your worthless self right the heck now.” Bingo, bango, nine months later, children!

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    3. But in Twilight, they weren’t *both* vampires.

      *Nerd glasses on* The transition to vampirism freezes the body in a biological stasis, you see so women’s cycles no longer occur and they can’t get pregnant; however, sperm production is a biological constant for males, so they CAN create vampire babies with humans (which will murder their mothers in the womb through sheer strength, which is why Bella had to be c-sectioned and vampirized, to save her and the baby).

      (How does this relate to the notion of the EU as a vampire? Not sure.) Anyway, it’s an unpopular admission in many circles, but I greatly enjoyed the Twilight books. :)

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      1. I read them. There were exactly two moments in the first book that I thought were clever, and I don’t remember what one of them was. The other one was that the conceit is that this book is Bella’s journal, and so when Edward breaks up with her at one point (spoilers: it doesn’t last), the next chapter heading is “September” and the page is entirely blank. Then under “October” the narrative starts up again.

        I never had that “Oh, I like that, that’s clever” experience in any of the rest of the series.

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        1. Once upon a time a chortling 10-year-old read aloud to me a passage from one of the Twilight books, in which a precognitive and a telepath played a game of chess. They faced each other, motionless, minutes passing, tension mounting, neither one making a move… then one of them sighed, reached out, and tipped over his king.

          We agreed: that was a pretty cool scene.

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        2. I read the first book and spent the whole book wanting to slap Bella. I agree with Larry Correia, I can respect Meyer as a capitalist who made a boat load of money but “vampire shouldn’t sparkle unless they’re on fire.”

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      1. And K-dumb wants us to go to a different rally. (Hears “Highway to hell”, amid memories of reading about the Press On Regardless rally.)

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  4. Milton Friedman gave several interesting talks about what government should do. He reduces it to defense, police, setting up and enforcing the rules of the game, and what he calls “neighborhood effects”. He also believed the state should provide the means of exchange (money), which is where I part company with him since the state is the very last institution that should be involved, especially as controlling the money is the pathway into controlling everything else and that the state has always and everywhere — if you know, you know — been really bad at managing the currency.

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    1. Well, question then. Congress is specifically charged with coinage: A1,S8,C5, to whit: “ To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;[..]”.

      Who provides instead of Congress? Who decides for Maine and who for Oregon? International trade? Interstate trade?

      I don’t wish to be a PITA, but I haen’t thought of getting the feds out of money-making, and so I’m now intrigued, and I want more nuts-n-bolts of who, where, and how, &c.

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      1. The government is charged with creating coinage to prevent denatured coins from being struck. It is not charged with printing bills. That was the province of the banks. The government could not inflate the money supply as each coin contained its value in metal and the banks could not do so as that would be fraud and prosecuted.

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        1. Yep, the government got into the paper money business with the National Bank Act of 1863 and then with Wilson’s folly in 1913, the FRB really screwed the pooch. As Jackson said about one of their predecessors “a nest of vipers. It’s a huge topic and all the textbooks are wrong, or better obsolete. It doesn’t work that way anymore. Now, it’s just a racket.

          Most “money” is created by banks independent of whatever the government or central bank might say. There are no reserves, fractional or otherwise, just balance sheet capacity and good quality collateral. That tends to be short term US (mostly) or Euro (much less) debt or the Japanese carry trade. It’s actually very like the system worked out in the renaissance by the Medici and the Fuggers. The government keeps this going through too big to fail which means no large bank will ever be allowed to fail, no banker will ever go to jail, and no bonus will ever get clawed back. Without the TBTF thing the system would actually be close to free banking since banks could fail, etc., and there’d be some limit.

          I know that’s all confusing and contradictory, but what we have is the worst of all the worlds. Banking has private gains and public losses. It’s a scandal.

          More recently, when the Federal Reserve “printer went brrrr” nothing actually happened, when the Biden admin spent a couple of trillion dollars by creating money out of nowhere, well a couple of trillion dollars appeared and that’s the money that’s driving the inflation. All the fed’s money is still sitting on bank balance sheets earning 5% from we the taxpayer while credit card rates are 30% and deposit rates hover near zero. It’s called financial repression and it’s how the oligarchs stay that way.

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        2. The government could not inflate the money supply as each coin contained its value in metal

          lolwut?

          Inflating metal coinage is easy: you get more coin-metal, and you make more coins from it. Not *as* easy as running a printing press, but saying it can’t be done is just ridiculous.

          Or do you not remember when the Spanish empire crashed their economy and a good chunk of the european economy with new world gold?

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          1. As others have pointed out, it was New World silver.

            And the second oldest scam in existence is debasing your currency by “stretching” your supply of coin metal.

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          2. People seem to tend toward All-or-None thinking, both in expressing rhetoric and in interpreting it. Yeah, inflating metal-backed–or anything-else-backed–currency isn’t a “can’t be done” thing; it’s just a “harder to do” thing.

            I like Heinlein’s idea, in Beyond This Horizon, of (some handwavy omniscient bookkeeping method of) “backing” currency by adjusting its supply to the total real wealth. (I *DON’T* want the gummint trying to actually do that.)

            I *DO* want there to be some kind of ride-the-brake friction on printing up the Benjamins. I know, it’s a radical position, but I’m sticking to it.

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      2. Money is what we agree it is. “we” can be small or it can be large. Bitcoin is a good example of a private currency with a reasonably large “we” behind it.

        Commodities (particularly gold and silver) have been “money” for a long time. There is not much difference between a private gold mine plus smelter and a government mint.

        One can use just about any commodity as a currency, these days. Sell the commodity futures to convert the commodity to currency. Buy them back to convert the currency back into the commodity. The list of possibilities is nearly endless. The biggest bottleneck is transaction fees and the capital to fund that initial sell (and, yes, you can sell futures of commodities that you do not have – you just need to be sure to buy them back before you need to delivery said commodity).

        It’s almost impossible to opt out of the dollar, but one can certainly minimize exposure to its fluctuations. One problem is that everything fluctuates. Commodities (including gold) are not the panacea that people want them to be.

        The bigger problem is that there is not enough of anything to replace the vast numbers of dollars, other than (maybe) plain old dirt, which people do not value. More dollars change hands every day than there exists (already mined) grams of gold.

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    2. I keep trying to wrap my mind around how getting the Government out of money would work. Or not turn into a horrible nightmare that before it got worked out the Gov would be back in as a “Neutral ” 3rd party that just there to keep everyone honest, really trust us.

      I’m just not grasping how. Great another squirrel rave that I’m getting itchy on following down.

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      1. You have to start by requiring real money, for example gold coin (which incidentally is what the Constitution demands, as was already pointed out). Once you do that, there is no need for the government to issue coin; all that is required is the usual police power of stopping fraud (i.e., ensuring that an alleged ounce of gold indeed is just that). Banks can do this just fine; they can also issue “gold certificates” that are more portable. You’ll find this in Neil Smith’s novels, where he mentions gold ounces coined by the “Industrian Bank of Laporte”.

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        1. The problem the Brits faced when they were tied to a gold standard, actual physical coin in gold or silver at a fixed swap ratio, when their Industrial Revolution took off while they were simultaneously trying to defeat Boney, would just happen again. They ended up basically inventing printed money as banknotes, issued first by any and all banks pretty much as a bank check, redeemable to coin on demand, but eventually the Bank of England notes displaced them all. The issue was real wealth was being created in the new mills and foundries and coal mines, but it was chasing a small and fixed quantity of Gold and Silver coin.

          Gold, or platinum or iridium or whatever non-spoilable non-decaying physical trade token, is not a magic solution to monetary policy.

          Besides, the first asteroid refinery yield would crash a gold-based hard currency economy like nobody’s business.

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          1. Now imagine the situation in a society that has nanotech. Fiat currency is unworkable; no matter what security features the government tries to incorporate, anybody can duplicate them with trivial ease. Nanotech requires only a pattern, the correct elements and energy to produce a perfect copy indistinguishable from the original. They’d have to use gold and silver, or something equivalent.

            Remember James Blish’s ‘Cities In Flight’ stories? Early on, refined elements such as germanium were used as currency. Later, they switched to ‘immortality’ drugs. Rich people with stockpiles of germanium became instant paupers.

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            1. Thinks a bit. Those novels came out before silicon transistors were common, and the leading technology used (drumroll) germanium.

              OTOH, considering the technology in that universe, a true* stockpile would have been valuable as an industrial feedstock. Said supply holder would have been less rich, but not a pauper. I don’t recall transmutation as part of Blish’s treknology.

              ((*)) discounting Germanium-notes

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              1. It did, but as Blish noted it became something you bought, not something you bought things with. The double whammy was that the Cities needed the drugs as drugs if they were to live long enough to continue their lifestyle; even with the spindizzy travel between jobs (i.e., between stars) was slow. Unless you were fortunate enough to have a planet converted to FTL…😉

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                1. Which is the flaw in the set-up. EVERYONE would want to use the drugs, not trade them for something else. If there were so many drugs they could be used as a currency, they would be effectively worthless as such.

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                  1. Yep, both valid points. But Blish was an entertainer, not an economist, and his stories were pretty good. No SF that involves violations of current physics can stand detailed scrutiny; the good ones are worth reading anyway.

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                3. Clearly they need to nip across universes and get a proper space drive like a Berhgenholm. Please note that all sales final are no guarantees that a Bergenholm will work in your space time continuum. For verification of the Bergenholm design in a specific continua please check with an Arisian as they seem to know everything…

                  Man it’s been several dogs ages since I read Cities in Flight.

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                  1. 😁😁😁

                    I’d go for the “transmitter drive” from Leinster’s “The Last Space Ship”; 100,000 ly in 0.0001 second is hard to beat. 😉

                    IMT

                    Made the sky

                    Fall!

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                    2. Wonder how it compares to the hyperspatial tube? Send Sir Austen Cardynge — they’ll give it to him just so he’ll go away. 😁

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            3. The last of George O. Smith’s ‘Venus Equilateral’ stories had the V-E boffins come up with cheap matter replicators. Stuff anything from gold bricks to antique art in, and get an atomically-identical duplicate out.

              The economy of the entire solar system then collapsed…

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              1. Now that’s just magic. Nanotech can’t transmute elements. To get gold bricks out, you’d have to put an equal amount of gold in.

                Gemstones, on the other hand, are composed of common elements arranged in uncommon crystal configurations. Diamonds are just carbon. Sapphires and rubies are aluminum oxide. The various colors are the result of impurities. Yep, ‘Transparent Aluminum’ is a real product! It’s just far too expensive to make large sapphire panels with our current technology. Emeralds are silicon-aluminum-beryllium oxide with a trace of chromium or vanadium. And so on.

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                2. And diamonds are not nearly as rare and intrinsically valuable as the cartel that controls the diamond market has caused them to be in the global marketplace.

                  That even sets aside the easy creation of synthetic diamonds given current technology.

                  Diamonds are valuable effectively because of market control by the diamond intermediaries.

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                  1. Don’t forget that there are two diamond (and most other “gems”): gemstone and industrial. LOTS of diamonds used to make various cutting instruments.

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                    1. Which is why the main characters in my story choose to make industrial diamonds instead of jewels. The market is bigger and not controlled by cartels. 600 kilograms of industrial diamonds will hardly make a ripple.

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                    2. Black and brown diamonds USED to be industrial. Then a few years back I noticed ads popping up for black-diamond and brown-diamond jewelry, calling the brown ones “cocoa diamonds”. Clever, but I’m not buying any.

                      (I much prefer colored gemstones and of all the many gems out there I think my favorite is black opal.)

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                    3. Industrial use of “really hard crystalized carbon” for abrasives is the use synthetic diamond production mostly feeds, for application where crystal uniformity is paramount. As I understand it the diamond cartels response has been to lower the prices of their waste “industrial” diamond materials on that commodity market to attempt to undercut the production costs of synthetics, even with the additional processing required to get more uniform crystals using the natural diamond feedstock.

                      I note with interest that, even with the cartels acting like cartels, fixing prices and coordinating across the industry, I do not know of any regulation campaign targeting the diamond industry (Hollywood movies do not count).

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                    4. Whoever came up with “chocolate” diamonds, marketing industrial stones as high fashion, was brilliant. I didn’t buy any, and won’t, but he/she/whatever was a genius at sales.

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                    5. Or perhaps three types. Diamond is now also used in semiconductors, since it is both an excellent insulator and by far the best conductor of heat.

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                    6. Making synthetic diamonds with our current bulk material technology is NOT easy. Diamonds form at very high temperatures and insanely high pressures. Carbon is also an extremely gregarious element that likes to invite all sorts of other atoms to the party. Making the carbon keep to itself and properly crystallize requires a complex structure incorporating aluminum buffers and other materials more attractive to those elements than carbon.

                      Which then has to be fitted into a 6-piece tungsten carbide anvil assembly and crushed in a 5,000 ton hydraulic press at around 1,500° C for several days.

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                3. My favorite bead store back in AZ had a lovely strand of faceted black diamonds in their precious gemstones case for several weeks. They were actually quite pretty, but at several hundred $ for the strand, a bit pricey for my gemstone budget.  ;-)  Although there was some discussion among the regulars of pooling their funds and splitting the strand among themselves. One day I came in and they had been sold.

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              2. Remember Damon Knight’s A for Anything? A random guy gets an unexpected package in the mail; he finds within not just one Duplicator gizmo, but two, with a request to send 10 such packages to 10 more people…

                A few pages later, some ambitious sleazebag realizes that an economy comprises Goods and Services. If suddenly there’s a literally infinite supply of literally free Goods, there’s only one kind of Wealth left for a social-climbing sleazebag to flaunt. And there’s only one way to get it.

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          2. The gold asteroid thing is a risk, sure. A remote one, so to speak.

            The other point is not an issue. A growing economy where the money supply is fixed is an economy where prices gradually decline, in inverse proportion to rising productivity. Ludwig von Mises mentions this specific point as the normal and expected outcome of the use of real money in a real economy.

            There are those who think that dropping prices are bad, which is true if it is caused by government mangling of the economy, and Britain has encountered that in the past. But it isn’t a problem when it’s the organic consequence of economic growth. For a simple proof, consider that dropping prices (and in fact, unusually rapidly dropping prices) have been with us for the entire life of computer technology, and there is no sign that this is changing anytime soon. It’s been true for other things too, like cars (perhaps not 100% of the time as it was with computers, but often enough). No problem.

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            1. We already have a historical parallel to the gold asteroid – the tons of silver Spain brought back from New Spain. (gold was for jewelry, silver was money)

              Vast quantities of New World silver devalued Old World silver, and Spain went into a fairly massive depression which then spread to adjacent European nations.

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            2. A gold asteroid is not a risk: it is a massive jump in wealth.

              No, not money. Gold isn’t money.

              We could stop using inferior substitutes for gold in all of the materials science problems where gold would be the best option.

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          3. An interesting variant on currency was part of the backstory of Tim Powers’ “Dinner at Deviant’s Palace.” The government of a post-apocalyptic California had made distilled liquor the basis for its currency, and all distilleries were under government control.

            It was an interesting idea. There were natural limits as to how much alcohol could be distilled, and some portion of it would be removed from the currency supply by drinking it. Unlike paper money, it had a useful inherent value.

            I’m sure there are holes in the idea big enough to drive a truck through, but it was still an interesting thought experiment.

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    3. Controlling the money supply is just defining another unit of measurement, in those case a unit of value. It’s a bit more complicated than defining an inch because the amount of value keeps changing, but it’s just as important for the same reason. Trade would be much harder if we had to figure out if we were dealing with New York inches or Pennsylvania inches, and it would be even harder if we had to determine if we’re talking Wells Fargo dollars or Chase dollars.

      The problem isn’t the federal government controlling the money supply, it’s that we’re allowing the federal government to be stupid in controlling the money supply. Give the Fed an inflation band and tell them to adjust the money supply to stay in it and let the rest of the economy handle itself.

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      1. And how, exactly, are they supposed to do that? What do they actually control?

        Like I always say: “Governments can only print money; they can’t make it worth anything. They can make it worth nothing.”

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        1. The government can make money worth something by requiring it to pay taxes.

          The mechanism for controlling the money supply would remain the same, just the criteria the Fed uses to make its decisions would changem

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          1. The Fed says it controls money, but the Fed says a lot of things most of them untrue. How exactly does the Fed control European or Japanese banks? Never mind China.

            It’s a red pill thing I’m afraid. None of it’s what’s in the textbooks.

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            1. The Fed doesn’t have to control Europe or China, by controlling the dollars in the US they control the dollar. China et al. would have even less influence on the dollar if we stopped Congress from spending like trophy wives.

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        2. ^^^^ very much this I’m afraid. ^^^^.

          controlling the money supply cannot be done. I’m a great admirer of Friedman, but he got this entirely wrong. Further, even were governments to fiat a gold standard, the banks would create/destroy money using balance sheet entries. All they need is a unit of account — pistoles would do — and off they go. Medieval and renaissance commerce used it and we still do today.

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        3. Well, currency is not money. That’s where the Brits got in trouble – they initially were thinking it was, and since there was insufficient physical gold and silver on hand with all the overseas suppliers demanding to be paid in silver, they were having trouble doing things like investing in those fellows Newcomen and Watt and the rest working on their steam engines while simultaneously paying the Royal Navy and building and equipping and victualing their ships to keep Boney on the other side of the channel. They were basically forced to start to figure out the difference.

          Here’s an alt-history I have not seen: What would have happened if Adam Smith had written The Wealth of Nations during the Roman imperial period.

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    4. It seems to me that the proper function of a government is not to do more and more Good Things for the people, but to keep as short a list as possible of Bad Things from being done. Essentially, to be the Lead Pipe that enforces the Golden Rule.

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  5. Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

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      1. It’s ridiculous, but the reason there are dozens if not hundreds of pages detailing each tiny little specification of products like brownies is that they got scammed at some point. Military specifications come from hard experience.

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        2. And some non-military government publications are written for such a lowest-common-denominator reading level that you wonder why they even bothered with words instead of pictures. I guess there is a regulation somewhere that says “Fourth Grade Reading Level” is not adequate for some manuals and regulations.

          As compared with “so complex even we don’t know what we meant anymore. You figure it out and we’ll tell you if it is right.”

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              1. The concept at the time was centered around a Cold-War-Turns-Hot drafted military, where the entire generational cohort would be pulled in and sent to save Europe yet again, so the lowers common denominator had to be able to figure out how to run the gizmo. The sorting hat was intended to be the ASVAB aptitude test, which would send the higher-scoring draftees to run the radars, and the lower scoring to drive the trucks or load the artillery.

                The military contracts had hard caps on word-choice for almost everything the Army bought at I think 6th grade level. An employee of mine in semiconductor cubeland had previously worked at FMC on the Bradley program, and used to tell me stories about the documentation people pulling their hair out trying to write complicated maintenance in sixth grade words.

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            3. The volunteer fire outfit I was on had a working M35 Deuce-and-a-half, plus two others in “reserve” (Not working. One was persauded to run and was sold off, the other was towed back to the state’s yard.) Medium useful, and decidedly primitive. Minor details like sound insulation weren’t part of the specs. Not sure about cabin heating. Was generally too busy to care when it was in use.

              The manuals were simple but clear, which made sense, considering that the likely mechanic was going to be a 19 year old with little advanced mechanicing experience.

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              1. M35: never had to work on one, but drove one a few times in the Air Guard. I don’t think it had a cabin heater, but then I was never ‘checked out’ on the details, and discovered I had no idea how to turn on the windshield wipers in heavy fog at night – what fun that was.

                See also https://truck-encyclopedia.com/coldwar/us/M35-truck.php. Kia has the license to make them these days.

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                1. I had to run the wipers a couple of times. As memory serves, it used the manifold vacuum for the wiper motor (not unlike autos in the 1950s). I don’t recall the incantation to get it started, though it might have been a valve-knob by the motor. (I left the not-quite department in 2008, and it wasn’t that interesting. (Unlike the shift pattern. Oddest one I ran across. Contemplates utility tractor. OK, it’s a tie.)

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                  1. it might have been a valve-knob by the motor.

                    Yes, daylight revealed a valve to unscrew the cap of, on the dashboard; degree of opening controlled wiper speed. Might have been left of the steering wheel, but I can’t find a clear picture of the dash to be sure.

                    This was before I had an EDC flashlight. My co-driver/passenger did not have a light, either.

                    I had forgotten the shift pattern! 4 and 5 are opposite of where I would now expect them:

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                    1. At least you didn’t have to push down on the stick to get into reverse…👀😜

                      (I wonder if the WWII Kubelwagen shared that “feature” with the VW Beetle…?) 🤔😆😆

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                    2. Here’s the pattern for my Deere (Yanmar built) tractor:
                      2, N, and 3 are supposed to be in the same column. YMMV.

                      ===4==2==1
                      ======N===
                      ======3==R

                      Transfer case is logical. High is up.

                      I almost never use 4. In 4-high at full throttle, it can go 11 mph. And with no suspension, farm-grade brakes, and a high center of gravity, the one time I did so, various orifices were puckered pretty bad. (Had to take a trailer load of stuff to the transfer station a third of a mile away. About half of that was on a county highway. Future dump trips, the trailer was behind a truck. Future excursions via the highway were in 2nd and on the shoulder.)

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            4. I borrowed a manual for a big Army 6×6 dump truck from a NG friend (this was for a possible proposal at work to DOD). It was hilarious and full of practical advice. “Suppose you are stuck, immobilized. There are many steps you can take. Begin by placing your right foot in front of your left foot.

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            5. The famous example of that was the “comic book” for the M-16 rifle.

              I have a copy. Yes, it’s in comic format. And I hate comics. But it was accurate, informative, very memorable, and in no way condescending. You can find copies all over the internet.

              Back about the same time the M-16 manual came out (1969) there was a book called “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive – A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot”, also 1969. They’re both very similar; chatty information vs. boring instruction.

              A lot of

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        3. 600 dollar hammers instead of just buying a couple spares…

          The COO of Boeing in 1986 came and spoke to the Computer Information Systems students at my university. he talked about that very thing, specifically about chocolate cakes in WW2. When the Germans captured some of our troops they discovered the troops had “fresh” cakes make in America and it took some of the wind out of their sails. A young LT tried to screw it all up by adding in inspection requirements, storage rules, recipes and all that. Eisenhower got it back on track.

          Sadly, the pointless bureaucrats slipped back in and we forgot how to deal with them. I have hope Musk will know.

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          1. Conveniently left out of the $600 hammer story is that this was not the same kind of hammer which you can get at the hardware store. Among other traits which I can’t remember, it was non-sparking. Plus the QA and supply chain assurance to make sure it actually had those traits instead of someone substituting in a cheap hardware store hammer.

            Which, if you don’t think that is necessary……. I invite you to use the normal hammer in a place where the non-sparking one was required.

            I’ll watch, with popcorn, from a safe distance.

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            1. Brass hammers don’t cost $600; and they are used in almost every petroleum production, and aviation refueling equipment repair, facility for the very fact that they don’t spark.

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            3. Fred Reed explained the indignant media coverage of (iirc) the Navy paying $17 apiece for hex nuts. He said it was some oddly-sized nut* with tight tolerances and demanding specs, and that they only needed about half a dozen.

              So they could solicit bids for a million of them, wait for that whole process to pass through a Human Centipede of bureaucrats, use the ones they needed, and dump the other 999,994 over the side. Or they could pay a machinist a hundred bucks and have them the next day.

              * I may be conflating a couple of internet factoids, but I seem to recall that the nut in question was the one that held the top rotor onto a helicopter, and that the pilots and mechanics called it “the Jesus nut”. I so want that to be true, I don’t even wanna google it.

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              1. There was also the “overpriced” toolbox for the (IIRC) Trident subs. The screaming media always seemed to leave out that it was a custom design, specified to a gnat’s eyelash and required to fit tightly in a certain place in the sub, and that the total requirement was for less than 50 of them (maybe way less; one for each sub plus a few spares). Custom designs ain’t cheap when you can’t amortize the cost over a few million (or even a few thousand) units. I suspect it was cheaper than redesigning that part of the sub to fit a standard commercial toolbox…

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                1. no amount of copium can ignore the fact that the ships, planes, and other vehicles are built specifically to prevent the use of standard off the shelf parts.

                  not enough money in that.

                  bureaucracy is a parasite that eventually kills its host.

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                    1. Apparently I didn’t use the right size metric hammer to reach you.

                      Hope you’ll forgive me for thinking you were an actual taxpayer.

                      Do you still work for the government or a defense contractor (but now I am being redundant)?

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                    2. Nope, I just happen to dislike overgeneralizations, and I know that off-the-shelf parts, up to and including entire subassemblies, are used for new development, but only if they meet service requirements; I used them often enough (Chinesium crap hardware and other such junk need not apply). You do know that the only electronics that come close to Mil requirements are the ones used in automotive underhood applications, right? And that every generation of military aircraft is required to have capabilities which don’t exist in prior generations? The same applies to armored vehicles and electronics.

                      And I stopped paying income taxes about a decade ago, when my taxable retirement income slipped below the minimum taxable level. And I still haven’t recouped everything paid into my account since 1963 in the SS “Trust Fund” (what a joke :roll: ).

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                    3. “I still haven’t recouped everything paid into my account since 1963 in the SS “Trust Fund” (what a joke).”

                      🙄

                      No, neither have either of us. But between my grandparents (all post 1959 surviving) three of them, and my mom, surpassed what they paid in, and put a severe dent in what us kids and our spouses have paid in. But now our kids are paying in. So we’ll never get our pound out of the SS “Trust Fund”.

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                  2. Hmm. A book I have on the U2 says that the fuselage was from the F-104. Not exactly off the shelf, but a good re-purposing of an existing design.

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                    1. I’d bet all dimensions and tolerances are specified in common fractions of decicubits, centishekels, and nanojubilees. :)

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      2. My brother was in the USAF. He got sent to a leadership course. When he came back he gave me one of the textbooks he used.

        It was called “Lincoln on Leadership.” It was assembled from writings and speeches made by Abraham Lincoln, who was obviously a Great Leader, therefore his words had to be Great Leadership.

        Reading that book explained a lot of things about a subject Sarah doesn’t want us to talk about here.

        The big zinger was probably “don’t tell your subordinates what you want; they should figure it out.” Uh, yeah. The rest of it ranged from “Pointy-Haired Boss” to sabotaging your own organization. I called my brother to make sure the book wasn’t intended to be an example of *bad* leadership. Nope, it was a role model for all USAF NCOs to follow.

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        1. Odd.

          I never saw that in NCO Leadership School, nor the NCO Academy. And that wasn’t in any of the readings in the Senior NCO Academy correspondence course.

          The biggest take away I got from all of those was, “tell your subordinates what you want, give them the materials to do it, and then get the heck out of the way.” The only caveat was that you had to have well-trained, motivated, mission-oriented subordinates.

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    2. As the Appalachian states are learning now. Oh the people on the ground, the locals and the volunteers are using FEMA, and the deployed services are helping them use FEMA. It sure isn’t the other way around. Things are getting done despite FEMA. Note, early on it was “getting around FEMA”. National Guard is working with the volunteers (once they were allowed to deploy).

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  6. The shockwave when this all decides to stop is going to be very interesting, in a historical/”interesting times” sort of way.

    I suspect that we would be doing a lot better, in a lot of places, if the mission creep of government was reduced or eliminated.

    We’ll never have the pure libertarian state (which would be just as much a nightmare as many of the other utopias), but there’s things that our elected officials have their noses in that they very much shouldn’t.

    Liked by 3 people

      1. The biggest issue is going to be untangling them from the things they shouldn’t be doing and keeping them doing the things they should be doing and must be doing.

        Lot of industries depend on a lot of things the Government shouldn’t be doing, trying to make as much of an honest dollar as you could in this world.

        Still needs to be trimmed. A lot of trimming.

        Liked by 1 person

      1. That might be too much, especially considering how much we need in a lot of ways. Just not all of it-and not in the ways that the current people think it should be.

        I’m holding out for about 75% minimum and go from there.

        Liked by 1 person

  7. I had a talk with Little Britches this weekend about why we’re better off in America than the UK after she saw some videos coming out of formerly Great Britain and thought it looked so great. She was absolutely shocked that they were arresting people for silently praying on the street.

    Liked by 3 people

      2. kinda sorta.

        there is a forbidden radius. Sort of like the problem gun owners or smokers can have if they live next door to a school.

        it’s stupid, and vile, but it is a weird interaction, not the main thrust.

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        1. ”Oh, hello there, Scottish Thought Police Officer, I was just kneeling here in my living room silently reciting sayings of Karl Marx. Why do you ask?”

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        2. The detail is that if the praying is visible/noticible to the public (within the Abortion Exclusion Zone), that’s when the rozzers are supposed to get active. (I love that word. Have to figure out where it came from. And nobody seems to know.)

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          1. “rozzers”

            A take from “revenuers”? What the whisky runners called them govn’ment agents coming to break up stills?

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            1. It’s British slang, possibly (maybe, nobody who knows is alive) derived from Robert (Peel, legendary head of the Britcops, and otherwise immortalized for his “Bobbies”.) Apparently the Rozzer word showed up in the 1880s.

              It’s shown up on a couple of Midsomer episodes, and possibly a Vera.

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          2. Since “standing in silence” is deemed “visible/noticeable”, you would have to hide in your closet to be sure.

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              2. Yeah, geez. Or in the hallway staring at a blank wall trying to remember the car keys location this time. Or anywhere trying to remember again why I walked into this room.

                If standing in silence is a crime, well, it’s a fair cop.

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  9. People who believe that the Government will always provide are idiots or want to be on the government’s tits. [Angry]

    Liked by 2 people

  10. My intro to economics class has been watching “The Commanding Heights” series. After watching two episodes of that, I am left to wonder; did they not learn from what happened in South America, Poland and India?

    I don’t pretend to understand economics, but I can say that a few things I thought I knew were wrong and I am looking around the world with different eyes.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I mean, you’d think they’d have looked at the hundreds of millions of graves filled by communism and it’s relatives in the twentieth century and learned from it, but instead we get “Oh, but it just hasn’t been done properly yet!!!”

      Liked by 2 people

      1. “There is no right way to do a wrong thing.”

        Time and time again they tried to ‘do communism properly’; time and time again they descended into totalitarianism, squalor and mass murder. Because when you take everything from the people who produce, and give it to those that do not (and the Party elites keep ‘just a little’ for themselves) why would they continue to produce? Turns out it’s immoral to reward people for working, but perfectly moral to punish them for not working. Hence the Gulag.

        107 years. 100 million corpses in mass graves. How many more do they want?

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The reason why socialism and its bastard children of communism and fascism prosper on college campuses is because outside of a rare few disciplines, you don’t have to prove that they work. Just that you can convince your peers that it might work, somehow, somewhere, under very specific circumstances…

          And be able to teach people who are not good at understanding the idea of specific circumstances, are of average intelligence and low human empathy at best, and they try to apply these beautiful-sounding theories to the real world.

          Meanwhile, ignoring the train crash as it happens….

          Liked by 1 person

          1. How can even an endumbened college kid think that a system explicitly promising to pay people to have Needs and to charge people for having Ability is a good idea?

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Entitled attitudes, would be my guess. They DESERVE to be on top–they’re the smartest and cleverest. Meanwhile, the people manipulating them see useful idiots, and another means to control people’s lives.

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              1. They might consider an incidental bit in Kornbluth’s Not This August: An avuncular shopkeeper and his wife had devoted themselves to carefully suggesting, to any high school kid who would listen, that Socialism/Communism was the Coming Thing, the Arrow of History, etc… and that the Fat-Cat Pigs of Running-Dog Capitalism were greedily standing in the way, what with the greedy greed of their greediness and all…

                When the Rooskies invaded, the couple showed up at the new District Commissar’s office, expecting to be rewarded for loyally advancing The Cause.

                It turned out that, once the Old Boss had been undermined, the New Boss had no more need of–and even less desire for–people who were practiced in the Art of Boss-Undermining. He gave them agricultural work instead, fertilizing a cornfield.

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          2. “Saboteurs and Wreckers”

            “This time, the smart people who understand it will be in charge and make it work.”

            ….

            Well Comrade Professor, I was correct that your DDR and USSR would soon fall, and Reagan would likely whizz on their graves.

            (grin)

            Liked by 2 people

        2. I like Mad Mike’s reply to that (paraphrased): “Okay, so let’s call it ALMOST-communism or ALMOST-socialism. Those “ALMOST” versions ended up with millions dead. How much worse would the REAL thing be? And this, now, in the U.S., isn’t REAL capitalism either. It’s ALMOST-capitalism, and look how prosperous.”

          Liked by 1 person

  11. I’m afraid that the main use of Europe, like that of Detroit, or of California, may be as a bad example.

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      1. Well, since the Israelis understand that our Cucumber in Chief is not their commander in chief, that’s pretty easy. I don’t think Joey No-Mind understands that anymore, if he ever did.

        Liked by 1 person

  13. I have seen this attitude permeate everything in a completely unquestioned way among many (in my experience, most) Russians, Ukrainians, and Israelis.

    They judge the success of their government by how much it pays out of what it had promised. The notion that it had no business making those promises in the first place doesn’t even cross people’s minds.

    Modern Russians/Ukrainians even have a term for the sectors of economy that unquestionably demand taxpayers money: бюджетники (I would translate it as “budgeteers). Except nobody there sees it as taxpayers money. They think it is government’s.

    We here see a glimpse of that in teachers unions attitudes and tactics. Outside the U.S. it is pretty much universal.

    It just boils down to their conviction that it is your government’s role to provide for you from cradle to grave, and that is a good thing, and that is the way it should be, and that is what governments are for.

    It has been bred into them for centuries, so most are trapped into that paradigm.

    American attitudes are completely foreign to them. Most of the time they can’t even understand them.

    Liked by 2 people

  14. The ultimate result of allowing the government/king/queen/ chief inquisitor…whatever, is to provide everything is servitude. With the power to provide is the power to control. Since any form of government doesn’t produce anything, controlling those that do is paramount, and will do so with any form necessary.

    Europe, and many other countries, is steeped in the tradition of accepting a fate determined by those in power. The United States was founded to eliminate that fate. Some people in other countries, and too many in the United States, can’t understand, or ignore, the responsibilities required for liberty. They are best described as sheep.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. I call it the Progressive Fallacy: The idea that if you support something then you must support the government providing it and thus the only reason to oppose the government providing something is because you oppose the thing itself.

    See the “argument” against Pro-lifers that they’re obviously hypocrites because they don’t support cradle-to-grave welfare.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. In syllogism:

      We must do something!

      This is something.

      Therefore, we must do this.

      This level of logic seems to be the only thing I can cite for why, when Republicans propose changes to an unsustainable program, an otherwise reasonable liberal opines ‘The cruelty is the point.’

      Liked by 1 person

  16. This is why they (leftoids) infiltrate everything, especially education. keep ’em stupid, and they’re easier to rule. If everything burns down from the stupidity, feh, who cares, as long as they get to run things.

    Liked by 1 person

  17. I’m sorry, when you said asking vampires to produce living children, my immediate response was ‘like, from a pantry?’

    Which is sort of how the government works, too.

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    1. It is, now that you put it that way. “Sure, we can provide X. Just don’t ask where the funds for it came from, or why it seems a little off and behaves oddly.”

      Liked by 1 person

  18. “Do they think government is going to be out there with trowel and bricks building houses? If not, where do they think it comes from?”

    According to Lulu and her friends, new houses only come from illegal immigrant construction workers.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. When I saw the title of today’s post my first thought was of the variation, oddly apropos now to politics, but originally applicable to liberal arts degree holders:

        “What Fries Have You Done For Me Lately?”

        And Kammy’s answer is, of course, “None. None fries, lately or ever, metaphorically or literally”.

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    2. Because it worked to get rid of Joe.

      The fact that it was obviously true with Joe, and is obviously not with DJT, is immaterial. That attack has been proven to work so we’ll get it again and again from now on.

      Remember how much of the left is Hollywood. This is just a sequel.

      Liked by 3 people

  20. Meanwhile, the media is still having, “Well, I never!” fits over Trump’s brief employment at McDonald’s. As one commenter put it, they seem to be upset the the man’s actually having fun.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. In addition, Trump has apparently gone on Mark “The Undertaker” Calloway’s “Six Feet Under” podcast. Obviously Trump had a history with the WWE, and Taker had a 30+ year career there, so it makes sense. I haven’t watched it all yet but apparently for much of the interview President Trump is basically fangirling out and asking Taker all sorts of questions like a pro wrestling fan would ask him. People in the comments are losing it that he’d DARE have Trump on his podcast, but one self-proclaimed liberal was complimentary about the free speech. Heck, if Harris wanted to go on there, he’d probably let her. It would be the most awkward thing ever because I doubt she’s ever watched one second of pro wrestling, but if you could survive the cringe it would probably be pretty funny.

        Liked by 1 person

  21. Maybe not “waiting on directions from above,” but for seniors here, keenly aware of the impact of entitlement withdrawal (Social Security, Medicare, etc.)

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    1. As a senior — discounts say so! — I knew back in the eighties I was entitled to nothing and the system would be bankrupt before I could collect one cent of the money stolen from me throughout my working life.
      I just plan to die with my hands on the keyboard.

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      1. “I knew back in the eighties I was entitled to nothing and the system
        would be bankrupt before I could collect one cent of the money stolen
        from me throughout my working life.        “

        Us too. We had the benefit of saying each month … “You are welcome, Grandma, Grandpa, and Grandma, plus a few great-aunts and uncles.” Then later adding “Dad” (medical retirement at age 50). Surprised the heck out of us that we are actually getting anything. Granted discounted from age 68 (ish) for me instead of 65, taking it at age 62. But, we are getting it. I’ll take every penny too. (Mom’s collected hers until dad passed, now is getting his. Trust me, at this point she and dad combined have long passed the amount dad and what little mom paid in. I guaranty my listed grandparents above collected more than they every paid in. Paternal grandmother was 80 and the other two were mid-90s before they stopped collecting. FWIW, I expect to do the same. They count on people dying early. Not happening. 😉}

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