Reality And Corruption

Bear with me while I take you on a quick trip through physical reality.

Yes, yes, I know we all know people who seem idyllically detached from it, who believe that "their truth" is whatever they decide, and that the world can be molded and shaped, like a ball of clay, into whatever form they feel is best. For us as well as for them, even if we don't concur. Let’s ignore them for the moment.

Bear with me while I dip a toe into the engineering world.

In matters of fluids (as in gases and liquids), there are three basic variables. They are pressure, temperature, and volume, and the way it works is that two determine the third. Put some air in a cylinder, shove a piston down the bore, and you've decreased the volume. As you do so, the pressure and the temperature will increase, and if you measure either, you can use a simple equation (the Ideal Gas Law) cobbled together by Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron just under 200 years ago to determine the other.

Bear with me while I dip a toe into the world of electricity.

Again, we have three basic variables: voltage, current, and resistance. Again, thanks to an equation cobbled together by Georg Ohm about 200 years ago, we can determine the value of the third variable when we know the other two.

Bear with me while I dip a toe into the realm of plumbing.

Reflective of the beauty of the natural world, water flowing through a pipe is analogous to electricity flowing through a wire. Pressure is a physical analogue for voltage, flow rate is a physical analogue for current, and resistance is, well, resistance. You can only control two out of three.

I will repeat that: You can only control two out of three.

This "two out of three" is a vital but often overlooked lesson when it comes to matters economic, fiscal, governmental, and so forth. It is a reality that our idealists either don't know or refuse to accept. It isn't always 2 out of 3, but it is always the case that you cannot set every variable in a complete model. Some are always consequences of the others.

We can find an example in health care. People all over the place lament that the US does not have "free" or socialized medicine, or a "right" to health care. Setting aside the misuse of "free" - someone is paying for it - and "right" - you cannot have a right to someone else's goods or labor - health care is as subject to the two-out-of-three as anything else.

Those three are quality, cost, and availability. Two always affect the third.

Put in economic terms, since healthcare is a scarce resource (i.e anything that does not exist in infinite quantity) there will always be a rationing mechanism.

That many people don't care about the cost variable unless it dips into their pockets directly doesn't obviate any of this.

But, I offer health care only as a "bridge" example, since it's 2 of 3 analogous to the physical examples. Today's punch line is about inflation.

The Harris campaign is promising to tackle inflation by imposing price controls. Artfully labeled as going after "price gougers," this idea ignores the underlying cause of inflation, and therefore the reality that "some variables are always consequences of others."

As Milton Friedman taught us, inflation is always a "monetary" phenomenon,

as in too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. In the current iteration, we have the government borrowing/printing money in excessive quantities, making inflation a consequential variable.

Friedman offered an analogy of a pot of water boiling on a stove. You don't solve the problem of boil-over by putting a brick on the lid, which is what Harris’s price controls would be. All that does is delay the boil-over a bit, while making it more intense when it does boil over.

Regular readers know I already eviscerated the price control promise not that long ago, but it is such a colossally bad idea and evidence of such colossal misunderstanding of reality that a second pass is warranted.

Harris's proposal to go after "price gougers" as a remedy for the inflation that the administration in which she has been second-in-command imposed on Americans is a demonstration of either ignorance or dishonesty. The former is inexcusable, the latter is contemptible. And, if it's both (it probably is), it's irredeemable arrogance. There is nothing worse than someone who knows she's wrong but doesn't care if she can sell it for personal gain.

Either way, this proposal by itself informs us of ignorance, malevolence, or both in the Democrats' candidate for the Presidency. There are many other policies that reveal the same (I’ll take some of those apart in future posts). That "ignorance, malevolence, or both" extends throughout the leadership and into both the mainstream media and the Best-and-Brightest in academia.

RFK Jr. dropped out of the Presidential race and endorsed Trump, if for no other reason than what he calls a corrupt Democratic Party and a corrupt press corps. I find no flaw in his argument.