Natural Law
There’s been an emergence in Trump’s most recent rhetoric of belief in a natural law which states something like the following:
The rich deserve to get more because they have more.
The poor deserve to get less because they have less.
The rich stay rich; the poor stay poor.
This is the way things are supposed to be.
So simple.
But is it true?
Originally written: 7/14/2011
There is much I don’t understand about the world’s economic crisis but what I do get is that everyone owes everyone else and no one has the money to pay it back. That is of course an overstatement, but when you look at it, it does seem that a lot of people are broke — the governments of the world are broke, large swaths of their citizens are broke, non-profits are struggling, and many businesses are hanging by a thread.
Universally, it seems, we are simply out of money. We owe more than we make and we can’t pay our bills. Or at least, not all of them.
The solution to this problem, if the United States Government is any example, is to borrow more money. That’s easy for them to say — they’re the United States Government. Oddly enough, their bond-rating is better if they raise the debt limit and borrow more than if they don’t. I guess being in debt up to your ears to the Chinese is a good thing.
I realize that everything the world over is connected and that if a check bounces in Cinncinnati, it can take out a whole franchise in Taiwan. Or maybe it isn’t that delicate or complicated. Consider this: debt default or no debt default, there will still be 300 million living people in this country, who will still want to get up, breath, eat, work, laugh, and sleep through the night, whether the U.S. raises the debt limit or not.
Which brings me to the solution: universal debt amnesty. Read More
Back in my childhood, paper towels were regarded as an expensive commodity, to be used rarely, if at all, and only on the most spectacular of spills. For a spill to be worthy of a paper towel, a Paper Towel Emergency had to be declared unanimously by all assembled. Otherwise, we were supposed to use the kitchen sponge or a dish cloth to wipe up the offending area.
Over the years, it’s been my opinion that our household has gotten way too lax in our use of both these items. Channeling my dad, I see the paper towels come and I see them go, and I think, how could we use so many paper towels? But we do. Same with kitchen sponges. I was raised in a two sponge household — one for disgusting messes and one for dishes. I am sorry to report that that this rule is not strictly followed in our house. Consequently, we go through more kitchen sponges than I consider appropriate, especially at the new going rate of a buck a sponge.
Well, times have changed. The coronavirus grocery shortages have put an end to the casual use of just about everything. We now have half a roll of paper towels and one, groty kitchen sponge to hold us until we find some more.
This makes things complicated. Just this morning, I was forced to decide whether the little pile of cat vomit that greeted me on waking justified a paper towel. After a brief debate, I decided it was too early for that nonsense, and used a single half sheet of paper towel along with a spatula to scrape up the remains.
Sometimes it’s the little things that bring it home to you — those moments when you realize, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Meanwhile, here at the homestead, not only are we starting to be out of things, we’re afraid to even go to the store to look for them!
For most of my life I’ve been a fan of end-of-the-world movies, but now that the end times are surely upon us, the genre feels particularly apropos. Not that I especially want to watch them right now — these days, I’m preferring old musicals with cheery melodies and lots of tap dancing. But I’m glad I did watch the end of the world flicks when they came out. They’ve given me good preparation for global disasters of all kinds including asteroids, Planet X, aliens, nuclear wars, fascist pod people, smart computers, zombie epidemics, and generic apocalypses from A to Z.
Admittedly, coronavirus would probably make a pretty static end-of-the-world movie given that most of the participants are just locking themselves in their homes trying not to catch coronavirus. Nevertheless, if someone wanted to make a disaster film out of it, they could.
There’s something very unifying about a global crisis — a great inescapable event that affects us all at the same time. Such crises seem rare but in modern times, they happen often. We have world economic crises, a global climate crisis, and a crisis of faith in our leaders that’s led to widespread social uprisings around the world. These sorts of crises affect everyone to some extent, but the effects are hard to gauge. Some people are affected disproportionately, others not at all.
But in the case of coronavirus, it’s different. Coronavirus is affecting everyone — rich and poor, young and old, all races and creeds — at the same time. And while some of us say to ourselves, “It’s just the flu” or “I’m young, it won’t kill me,” our lives are still being majorly impacted by it. For starters, there are social restrictions and they’re getting tighter by the hour. Moreover, the world economy is shutting down, which means that along with toilet paper, money is going to be in short supply..
On Monday afternoon, on the eve of Super Tuesday, I voted for a Democrat for what will likely be the last time. I was never a very strong Democrat, always to the left of party policy. But in the past, I still believed that the Dems were at least marginally on the side of regular people. I no longer believe that. Today’s Democrats seem to be more interested in appealing to a better off clientele — people who really love their health insurance plans! and resent those who need help getting to sufficiency.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they had just sold out their values and left it at that. They didn’t. Instead, they went after their own frontrunner, Bernie Sanders, like he was Public Enemy #1.
