Thanks as always to The Other McCain and Pirate’s Cove for the Rule Five links!
This piece on 5 Major Paradigm Shifts The Wuhan Flu Crisis Has Revealed Americans Need came out late last week, but I didn’t have time to digest it until the weekend. Here are the two things I found most interesting, with my comments:
When the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic arose and began spreading, for weeks the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to cover it up, with deadly consequences for the world. When communist China was blamed, it not only refused to take responsibility, but slandered America for pointing the finger, to the point of calling the United States culpable as part of a disinformation campaign.
The CCP even threatened, via a state-backed publication, to cut off essential medical supplies should Americans continue speaking openly and honestly about the CCP’s role in creating the crisis. Then the CCP cynically tried to act as a savior for the crisis it created.
Every day this pandemic persists, and long after it is neutralized, we must remember the CCP bears by far the greatest responsibility of any party for this pandemic. If the CCP is not made to pay in a meaningful sense for the global catastrophe it caused, it will continue to act with impunity in its quest for hegemony, guaranteed.
This pandemic should represent the most tangible sign yet for all of America that we must decouple from communist China in every strategically significant sector. We cannot put our survival in the hands of a hostile adversary.
President Trump’s 2016 campaign was focused in large part on bringing our manufacturing sector back home. While I’m not a fan of government at any level mandating how businesses run, I do see plenty of talk now about how big companies are re-thinking their supply chains in light of what is happening right now. And, frankly, that’s the smart thing to do. Keeping the supply chains closer would lessen the impact of the recurrence of this kind of event.
Then there’s this:
While a society-wide shutdown certainly represents the most extreme kind of financial shock, nevertheless, the devastating impact of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic accentuates the problem of our largely debt-based economy in both the public and private spheres.
At the governmental level, the fact that we are likely to completely blow out budgets that were already so bloated as to ensure interest payments on the national debt would soon swamp all spending besides entitlements shows the extent of our profligacy and misplaced confidence we can debt-finance the U.S. government forever. There appears to be zero national will to deal with runaway spending and the runaway deficits and debt it creates.
But the reality is that in the next major crisis, we will be in an even worse financial position. What will happen if multitrillion-dollar relief bills are simply not tenable at that point?
What the hell? What do you mean at that point? It’s not tenable now!
The national debt is already past the point of no return. The Kung Flu pandemic has lots of folks out of work and many more worried about money, and I can understand the pressure pols feel to do something. But what they are doing is throwing money at the problem, and the only thing that is staving off inflation is the Fed keeping interest rates at near zero, which discourages saving and drives people into equity markets, which looks good on paper but is likewise inflated beyond any actual worth…
A big part of our national economy is a house of cards. We still have companies that make things, and we still have a fairly decent business environment; but if that house of cards collapses, it’s going to bring plenty of otherwise-sound enterprises with it.
If that happens, forget viral pandemics. We’ll have bigger problems.
