The Golden Shoehorn Award

Back ‘in the day,’ as we old farts like to say, I was a regular listener of the Opie and Anthony radio talk show. Among their many peccadilloes and ‘outrages’ was frequent mocking of other radio shows’ lameness. Anthony, a rather talented singer, especially loved goofing on song parodies that were forced, contrived, and didn’t quite work as intended. One common problem: requiring that a word be mispronounced to get it to fit the original song’s scheme and tempo.

He called it “shoehorning,” and the term was apt.

Today, I offer what may become a regular feature here at The Roots of Liberty, to be presented to someone who contorts, distorts, twists, pretzels and deliberately misinterprets (aka “disinterprets”) an occurrence or phenomenon or emergent fact in order to validate a pet policy.

The inaugural winner is David A. Super, writing at The Hill about how fighting climate change is an essential remedy to the inflation we are enduring today.

He starts out blaming inflation on Internet shopping, supply chains, COVID, and the Ukraine invasion before asserting that global warming is a significant contributor. As in greater aridity, more floods, more wildfires, more and more powerful tornadoes, and other extreme weather events reduce supply of farmed foods and building materials even as they increase demand for such.

Thing is - weather events have not been getting more severe. We are told so, of course, because it sells the narrative, but the reality is that we simply see them more overtly, because information travels so much better, and we have built up more and more in places that weather traditionally damages, thus inflating the costs of such events.

While some argue that such will eventually materialize due to anthropogenic global warming, the evidence that it’s driving the current bout of inflation is simply not there.

What the author ignores is the most obvious and proximate cause of inflation:

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. - Milton Friedman

The government created vast amounts of money in recent years, both in response to the pandemic and to fund staggeringly large social spending programs (yes, the infrastructure bill is a social spending program). That is the elephant-in-the-room, the most blatantly obvious cause of inflation, and one that dwarfs such as supply chain disruptions, the Ukraine war’s impact on oil prices, and consumer behaviors.

Mr. Super made no mention of this profligate spending, and I can only conclude that he omitted it because of his advocacy for even more of the sort of spending that has driven inflation, advocacy that appears at the end of his screed.

So, in order to combat inflation, we must not only pretend that inflation isn’t caused by excessive government money-printing and spending, we must do even more of that, and paper it all over with a “save the planet from global warming” bit of scolding triumphalism.

I hereby award Mr. Super a golden shoehorn, for jamming an inconvenient problem into his narrative.

He’s the first to receive it. He won’t be the last.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.