Awful truth #26: At some point a tragedy must be tragic.
“Oh, how many mothers brandish their fists against the heavens and weep for the drowned sons they hold on their knees, howling curses at the wrath of the gods.”
—Leonardo da Vinci
It is an inherently childish expectation that there can be tragedy without any, well, tragedy. A nation in debt tens of trillions of dollars—and getting further in debt with each passing day—cannot willy-nilly pay for natural disasters, economic calamities, and endless wars, while at the same time cutting taxes and increasing spending on sundry government programs.
We believe otherwise, fully imbibed with fiscal delusion akin to that which afflicted Robert Mugabe, though he lacked the benefit of the Zimbabwean dollar being an international reserve currency. The biblical miracles of loaves and fishes or water from wine are quaint parlor tricks compared to the pernicious magic of quantitative easing (aka the printing press), the petrodollar, and electing childish adults who are bereft of both fiscal realism and necessarily harsh restraint. Hell, raising Lazurus from the dead seems quite pedestrian when compared to the “miracle” of saving AIG’s ass during the Great Recession.
Thus, there is an expectation that the victims of a natural or economic disaster must be made whole again. Everything destroyed replaced just as it was, and with no inconvenience to those of us not directly impacted by the untoward event. Whenever there is an economic or natural disaster, the government (selectively) floods the victims with money we don’t have. If we prudently possessed a pot of money saved for a “rainy day,” that would be one thing. But we don’t. We borrow it, print it, further devalue our currency, and inflation and greater moral hazard is the result.
Moral hazard guarantees these disasters are increasingly devastating and far more costly. Why learn our lesson when there is no requirement to do so? In fact, there is financial incentive to learn nothing from folly, whether caused by Mother Nature, the Quants, or illicit gain-of-function “research.” Only a fool, it seems, would behave responsibly.
We must disabuse ourselves of the notion that everyone must be made whole if they suffer tragedy and the rest of us can come to their aid with no collective and contemporaneous sacrifice on our part. Perhaps, if people suffered real and permanent consequences, we wouldn’t build in areas where we shouldn’t be building—or we’d build with the appropriate robustness in earthquake fault zones, flood plains, areas subject to hurricanes and wildfires. We’d also see fewer of the shenanigans committed by the financial sector, which they do knowing full well that if the mess they create is big enough, the government is going to step in to bail them out. They’d be forced to see adjustable-rate mortgages, special investment vehicles, leveraged arbitrage, and credit default swaps as the reckless casino games they are. They’d have to face the harsh reality that stock and real estate prices wildly divorced from underlying reality are deafening ticks from a not-so-hidden timebomb.
And what of war in an age in which war bonds aren’t sold, the Boy Scouts don’t conduct scrap metal and paper drives, and the dead are seemingly someone else’s children and husbands? No worries there, as well. The Military-Industrial Complex shall receive its cash, as it always has, and seemingly always will.
We fancy ourselves not an empire, yet we have troops strewn so far and wide that the sun never sets on the American flag. We believe endless wars are doable without ultimate financial costs to those who clamor for it and those who allow it by their indifference. In fact, we can have war and tax cuts if we put our minds to it! Our nation has somehow discovered the magic formula which eluded every empire prior to ours: seemingly costless wars.
And not just our own wars. We can fund another’s war with our billions, as we currently do for Ukraine and Israel.
The somnolent voters must stir from their stupor and assume an adult responsibility they’ve long since abandoned. The elected geniuses who vote for these wars, disaster relief, and economic bailouts must be asked where the money is coming from, and I mean exactly from where. If we are to have responsible government, this question must be asked for each proposal for new spending, each increase to existing spending, and for every dime proposed in any budget. Is it borrowed, printed, or from actual revenue?
Include in these fiscally responsible queries a demand for their specific plan—and I mean specific—for paying off our existing debt and funding our massively underfunded liabilities. Should they answer with the inane rejoinder that economic “growth” shall, at some nebulous future date, eventually solve these concerns of deficit and debt, I suggest you laugh in their faces with all the derision you can muster—and don’t vote for them. If our economy could somehow grow as rapidly as the most malignant of cancers, this would not remotely be rapid enough to overtake and absolve us of our aggregate fiscal foolishness.
At no point are the American people asked to sacrifice for disaster recovery, economic relief, or war. This has resulted in a society of adult children playing at adulthood. This faux adulthood is a game we play with Monopoly money rather than our actual dollars, and the wars we wage are nothing but grand video games.
There is no sacrifice too small that we won’t ignore it. It’s all make-believe, the monster under the bed or in the closet not real. The snipe hunt merely a humorous prank. The tens of billions funneled off to the steppes of Eastern Europe a lark, a pretend war it seems, except for those doing the actual dying—and those who someday must pay the bill.
How do we make these tragedies and wars real, force upon us adult consideration, adult decision making, and adult consequences?
Better that we not print and borrow or defer our statesmanship to the future, but for each disaster, each economic calamity, each war, we seize enough of our individual assets to pay for these now. A special tax assessment to cover these costs would demonstrate if our walk-the-walk matches up with our talk-the-talk. Then we can be sure the sacrifice is real and not childishly deferred to someone else who, years from now, will be brave and prudent and finally make the sacrifice we were too cowardly to make today. And we can make certain the sacrifice is one we actually want to make and then actually do so in the here-and-now.
This is harsh. But experiencing the consequences of today’s folly today would reduce the number of people who in the future would face tragedies, which must in the end be tragic. Collective sacrifice in the present is the right thing to do.
Are we going to do it? Grow-up and get real about any of this?
Nope.
Therefore, the tragedies yet to come are going to be doozies of our own making.
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