Author: mikemoff3

 Four special words from Granddad’s Dictionary  

June 26, 2021

 (This meditation was a gift to Patrick Moffitt, my eldest grandson, on his graduation from high school this May)

What is success? In a perfect world, we each get to decide for ourselves what will make our life a success. We may decide and then change our mind many times, but to fulfill our happiness, we each must be the Captain of our own ship, the master of our own destiny. This is the self evident truth memorialized in our Declaration of Independence, “…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

We can adopt and live by four very powerful values that will inevitably lead us to discover our destiny and navigate our unique success, and happiness.  To understand the importance of these values, we must first realize that each of us accomplishes very few things in life completely alone. We are all chosen and we all choose others, to collaborate or to teach or to learn from, thousands of times and in thousands of ways throughout our lives.  Our first “team” efforts are in the family. Then at play, in classrooms, in sports, on committees, at work, choosing friends or partners… the possibilities are infinite. Teams can last for moments as in a brief discussion, or for the length of a game or project or a season, or for a lifetime. In everything we do we depend on other people to be on our team; to help us succeed. Perhaps the best way to express the importance of our four powerful values is to think of them as skills and behavior we look for when selecting teammates. These four values are Integrity, Curiosity, Goals, and Perseverance.

Think of yourself choosing teammates for any endeavor. First, you need someone you can trust. You also want someone with a zest for learning, someone who will learn and make the team stronger over time. You want someone who will help to develop and then share and pursue goals for the team. You want someone who will stick with the team when times get tough, someone who will not give up, even when things seem completely hopeless. When you find such a person, don’t you want them on your team? If you want to be on the best teams, don’t you need to become that person?  Let’s dig a little deeper into the meaning of these four values.

Integrity

No team of any size or duration can be successful without trust, and trust is not possible without integrity. Integrity is telling the truth, and much, much more. It is telling the whole truth all the time. If you only tell the truth most of the time, who is to know when you are not telling the truth? If you don’t always tell the whole truth, who is to know what important truths you are withholding? Integrity is always being true to your word. It is believing in your teammates as peers. It is living the golden rule. How can you better describe integrity than doing unto others, as you would have them do unto you? Without integrity, any effort or organization is chaos. Integrity allows people to leverage off of one another, to depend on one another, to believe in one another.

Integrity is an ageless value. Henry Ford said, “Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” Integrity drives us to think and act as if the whole world is watching all the time. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus opined, five hundred years before Christ, “Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.”

Character or integrity is not something we are born with.  We are born with a blank slate and are taught or teach ourselves how to build our character and our behavior so that others trust and depend on us. If we do this well, all of civilization is at our disposal. If we fail to cultivate our own integrity we are destined to live alone, or to live in chaos, or both.

Curiosity

We are also born with a clean slate, empty of worldly knowledge. We do inherit some basic instincts for survival. Perhaps the most useful of these is curiosity. The infant begins immediately to explore the information its senses provide… to feel mommy’s breasts, to taste her milk, to touch her face and smell her aroma, to perceive and explore motion. Every perception goes into the infinitely interconnected memory system in the infant’s brain. Every memory can be accessed to associate with new perceptions. The puppy’s fur is short and his bark sharp. The kitten’s fur is silky and its purr soothing. The child, a little later, learns that things have names and wants to know the name of everything. We teach rules and it wants to know why. Then why it rains and how does the umbrella work. Every new bit of information, every image, every thought is stored in the memory bank of the infant or child’s brain.

Without thinking about it, all of our lives, every day, we collect information, images, experiences and thoughts. We cross reference them, sort and file them. Every time we ask a question, we practice filing away the answer and thinking about what else in our memory bank this new information might relate to.  Just like hitting a baseball, the more we do it, the better we get. The more questions we ask, the better we get at building and using this magnificent memory bank.

In the course of our lives we often face questions for which there is no ready answer. This is the fastball we have been practicing for.  The more we have practiced using our memory bank and the more we have stored in it, the more likely we can put together a combination of seemingly unrelated images and find a clue to the creation of a new idea. At the simplest, most ancient level, the wheel probably emerged from the mental image of a rolling log. More recently, the image of a falling apple caused Newton to ask, “Why does the apple fall toward the earth and not toward the moon and the answer became the law of gravity. The Wright brothers won the race to first flight by studying the geometry and aerodynamics of birds’ wings and applying light structure and machinery principles from their bicycle shop. The fundamental nature of innovation is applying two or more observations from different contexts to answer a challenge unmet by conventional wisdom. Curiosity is the force of character to always question how or why, to always file the answers and bring the images back through different channels of neurons to meet new intellectual challenges. This is why curiosity is the second of our four values necessary and sufficient for success. 

These first two values, integrity and curiosity, are closely related. Albert Einstein observed, “Most people say it is intellect which makes a great scientist.  They are wrong; it is the character!”  His point was that a great scientist must never be afraid to be wrong. Science is only “settled” according to what we now know and can measure. Proving something beyond or something different from what we think we know is the way we advance science. Great scientists, indeed all truly successful people, are curious enough to question their deepest and the most widely held convictions. They have the integrity to accept that new answers, including new science can prove any of us very right or very wrong at the most unexpected or inconvenient moments.

Goals

The inventor of the wheel in pre-history had a goal to move something.  Newton had a goal to understand the forces between the planets. The Wright brothers had a goal to build a heavier than air flying machine. Every journey of any length or difficulty either begins with a goal or has an accidental result. Goals are essential if a person or a team is to clarify their purpose, to visualize success, and channel energy.  Goals can be about this moment, such as to finish this task or to win this game. Goals can also be lifetime drivers such as to win Olympic Gold or a Nobel Prize. Important achievements rarely occur by accident. Any success short term or long term, simple or world changing must be driven by goals. Without goals, we are aimless, our efforts are random, and outcomes are accidental.  Without goals we cannot recognize success when we see it. More fundamentally, without purpose in our lives, we have no reason for being.

President Lincoln said, “The best way to predict your future is to create it!”  In America for Lincoln, and for each of us today, anything is possible.  But to convert possibilities to realities we each must create a vision of our destiny, and then goals for each step along the way.

Perseverance

Goals alone, however, are not enough. Goals give us self-directed guidance and focus. We draw the energy to accomplish these goals from within ourselves. That energy must be continuously renewed as we face accidents and obstacles along the way… and there are always accidents and obstacles. Perseverance is the act of persistence. It is the act of being steadfast. It is moving ahead without expecting others to catch us when we fall. It is keeping our confidence when others lose hope. It is translating confidence into action. The importance of perseverance has been described too many times to count. Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close to success they were when they gave up.” Teddy Roosevelt said, “Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is called whining.” C. S. Lewis said, “God allows us to experience the low points in life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.”

Success, Happiness, Family and Freedom

To fully appreciate the power of these four values, Integrity, Curiosity, Goals and Perseverance, we need to think about how we learn them, why they can work for everyone, and why they work especially well in a free society.

We learn these values beginning at birth. We learn them from our mothers and fathers, our grandparents, from our priests and ministers, from a few of our teachers and coaches. A great education system is helpful, but the uncurious and unmotivated student gets little benefit from it. A student with a zest for learning and focused on goals will flourish even in the lowest rated schools. It is individuals, not school systems that drive individual behavior. We learn the foundations of our values and behaviors at home. We begin to practice these values long before going to school. We continue to hone them throughout our lives. Often we learn them from failures. They have been learned in the cradle, at school, at work, on the battlefield, in many competitive sports and even in prisons. All it takes is loving teachers and open minds to build our character and train us to live these four values and find success and happiness throughout our lives.

It does not matter that we each are endowed with different talents and blessed with different starting points in life. No matter who you are or where you start, you can always visualize your destiny in any way you can imagine. You can always follow the path of Integrity, Curiosity, Goals and Perseverance to achieve that destiny. If this were not true, we would not so often hear, “I was the first in my family to finish college or the first to travel to Asia!” If this were not true neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama could have traveled from humble and broken families to become Presidents of the United States. If these values did not matter we would not see many with “privileged” birth falter and achieve far below the level of their parents and below their expectations

It does matter that we can best exercise these four values in a free society. We each freely embrace, or not, each of these values. But our exercise of them can be limited by the rules of society. In a place without free speech, whomever controls speech, controls what information is available to satisfy your curiosity. In a place governed by a dictator or a controlling party, rule by law inevitably evolves to rule by men, and those in charge inevitably limit the destiny of most of the population to favor themselves. In a society with frozen classes such as kings, queens, lords and ladies, Brahmins and Untouchables, or members of “The Party,” those classes define destinies. Take a moment to appreciate the importance of mobility and fluidity in America to our free exercise of these four very magic values.

We of course are not completely free of rigidity or friction, but think about this: In 2019 there were 18.6 million millionaires in the United States. Nearly one quarter of these are people of color or of Hispanic or Asian decent. Eighty percent of these did not inherit but earned their fortunes. For those who inherit millions, their fortunes do not typically last more than three generations. Each year individuals, rich and poor, give over $300 billion to charities to help others find better destinies. When fortunes are inherited, what is not taxed or given to charity gets diluted with each generation. Each member of the fourth generation that has preserved but does not grown a large bequest is likely to inherit no more than 5% to 10% of its initial value, and frequently much less.

There is also great fluidity in American incomes. The median tenure of a CEO of a large cap American corporation is five years. The average NFL Career lasts less than four years. Elected officials face unemployment at every election. Every year there are people with new successes among the most wealthy and people who lose wealth through death or errors or economic misfortune.

In 2019, Americans started three and one half million new businesses. In each year one in every eighty-six Americans visualize their destiny as becoming the master of their own business and execute a major step. Many of these businesses are very small. Many will fail, but many will succeed and next year there will be a whole new crop. Each one of these that is founded with Integrity, Curiosity, Goals and Perseverance will be among those most likely to succeed. Each of the athletes who follow these principles will be more likely to succeed in their sport. Each year, many newly successful people will climb into the top income categories replacing others no longer at the top of their game. Each year many people in every imaginable endeavor grow and raise the top of their game.

Your personal purpose and vision of success can be anything you imagine. It may, but does not need to have any particular financial dimension. You can be thankful that in America you can be master of whatever destiny you define for yourself. Your success and your happiness will depend largely on your dedication to the practice of Integrity, Curiosity, Goals and Perseverance.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.”
WINSTON CHURCHILL

The headline in the New Orleans Times Picayune Advocate on January 21 read:

BIDEN TAKES OFFICE

46^th president declares ‘democracy has prevailed’

Prevailed over what? We had an election. The results were challenged. The challenges were not successful. Half the country is not happy. Power was peacefully transferred to the winners. This is the messiness and the grace of democracy, by which our republic has prevailed for over two centuries. Perhaps Biden felt he had to declare, to make the point that he won to the multitudes that still wonder or disbelieve?

The Wall Street Journal Headline for January 21 read:

Biden Seeks Unity, Healing

“We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue”

Would it perhaps have been a better start to “…end this uncivil war that pits Americans against each other?” Or perhaps this could have been said; “After this hard fought campaign I pledge to be president of all the people, to listen to all the people, to unify the people by leading us to what we all see as a better place.” 

Instead, what he did say was, “To all those who supported our campaign, I am humbled by the faith you have placed in us. To those who did not support us, let me say this: Hear me out as we go forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. “And if you still disagree, so be it!” “And if you still disagree, so be it!” are the words of a petty dictator, not a unifier.

The inaugural address was mostly a sweet speech, rich in feeling and void of content.  Notably missing was any suggestion that our new President would listen. He told us all to listen to each other, and to him. Later in the day he punctuated his bottom line, “And if you disagree, so be it!” with a multitude of symbolic and hardly unifying executive orders. 

The COVID orders principally extend the work in progress to administer the miracle vaccine he inherited.

The Paris Accord was initially joined by President Obama but never presented to the Senate for advise and consent. President Biden will “rejoin”, also without consultation or likely ratification.

On immigration he directed his administration not to enforce the nation’s laws he pledged to enforce earlier in the day. A moratorium on deportation of criminals and a flood of new undocumented immigrants will not provide more “equity” for Americans and legal immigrants struggling to re-enter the workforce. Instructions to Congress will follow in due course.

On energy he drilled a hole in western state royalty income, killed over 100,000 jobs drilling on federal lands, and stopped environmental clearances while his ideologues stiffen up regulations on private lands. None of this will reduce fuel consumption or carbon emissions by a single ounce. It will certainly increase the cost of energy for all of us, constrict the economic recovery, and make Arab, Iranian, Venezuelan, and Russian elites richer.

On girls sports he outlawed the idea that biological boys might have an unfair advantage in girl’s sports. So much for gender equity for female athletes.

In what way do any of these orders serve the interest of the American people?

The most consequential order, to reinstate teaching critical race theory, to officially replace 1776 with 1619 as the basis for our governance, cried out most for listening.  Perhaps the new President should listen to Amanda Gorman, his own official inauguration poet. Her moving work, universally applauded, apparently did not penetrate Biden’s tin ear!

Listen carefully to her words on her heritage from American shared values for civil rights…

 “Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president…”

And her words on why all lives matter…

“And yes we are far from polished
far from pristine
but that doesn’t mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man…”

And her words on ending all violence…

“…we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.”

And, most of all, her words on preserving and learning from our history…

“It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into…”

In her five-minute recitation this 22 year old prodigy said more about unity and healing and hope than the new President said on or since inauguration day. It is truly tragic that he was not listening and doesn’t seem to care. 

Michael Moffitt

January 25, 2021

August 17, 2019

The following story is from a highly confidential and wholly unreliable source. It seems to contain a fair measure of both fake news that should be true and good sense not permitted by thought police.  Hopefully, an astute reader will discern the difference.

We have been hearing rumors about Project Mar-a-Lago for over a year, but only now are reports filtering out about its substance.  It seems that President Trump is not at all a “climate denier,” but rather saw all the proposed solutions as baby steps, many in the wrong direction.  Sometime last summer he convened a golf outing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.  Included among the guests were climate scientists, geologists, mathematicians, leaders in the military and industry as well as top White House and Treasury advisors.  A project was formulated at that outing that has since been referred to by the code name, “Project Mar-a-Lago.”

One report recently emerged that Professor Amos T. Feare, director of the Climate Science Lab at Stamford, and reportedly a participant at the Mar-a-Lago meeting, is about to publish a new climate model.  Dr. Feare has discussed in several papers the inadequacy of models from the twentieth century as they used data from only about a century. With newer computers capable of processing hundreds of times more data, and using data inferred from geological studies spanning 65 million years, Dr. Fears’ work is said to be far more precise and insightful.  The project team is apparently using the new model to assess the probability of various possible climate change outcomes and cost benefit analyses of actions under consideration.  Dr. Feare would not comment on the project, or even acknowledge its existence, but he did say the twenty first century is giving us analytical tools Al Gore couldn’t possibly imagine.

Admiral I. R. Seaborne (USN Ret.), also rumored to be at the Mar-a-Lago meeting, declined comment on any project.  He does, however, frequently seem open to discuss his long-standing conviction that modular nuclear power using ship reactor designs is “shovel ready” for land based deployment world wide. Admiral Seaborne opined, “Over 3,000 reactor years of accident free operation at sea should be enough to convince most skeptics of nuclear reliability!”  After first demurring from any interview, he went on and on about the collateral advantages of modular units. Just as on shipboard, each reactor would have integrated water desalinization as a by-product of running with a constant load.  The modularity would allow less dependence on the grid, thereby increasing efficiency, safety and security.  Since the initial fuel charge would last for thirty years, reactors could drop into place with little infrastructure investment and few geographic limitations. Operating and maintenance procedures are fully in place and operating contracts can easily be supplied with the units by any of the three American suppliers of reactors to the Navy.  When asked about disposal of spent fuel, Admiral Seaborne replied impatiently, “Why do you think God made black holes in deep space?

Meanwhile, even without any formal announcement, excitement seems to be building at the White House.  High-level sources, on condition of anonymity, confirmed that President Trump was all but despondent prior to the meeting at Mar-a-Lago. Ideas such as the “Green New Deal” would impoverish us all and still make an insignificant dent in the global carbon footprint. (Since 2005 carbon emissions in the U.S. had contracted 14% while increasing globally 21%.)  The other hue and cry from pundits was for International co-operation. Trump realizes, as we all should, that International agreements are usually considered binding on the United States, but just a suggestion for everyone else.  It is totally different now, The President can hardly restrain from tweeting.  It is believed over twenty units are optioned world-wide, all built in America to American design and managed to U. S. Navy standards.  Half of these are said to be in the U.S. including three in California.  T. J. “Sparky” Breaker, CEO of Pacific Power is said to be fully on board with this solution to relieve his fire risks and provide a new water source for irrigation.

With all this information available to us we tried to understand the reason for hyper-secrecy.  There are apparently three contributing factors.  First, the results from the new models seem to show we have ample time to execute this solution.  Since there will no doubt be push back, the team wants to improve their confidence to an exceptionally high level.  After all, if we really don’t have time, lets just throw a big farewell party for planet earth.

Second, lack of an announcement is holding nothing up. The project is not in conflict with sensible conservation initiatives or gas, solar and wind power investments. The systems design, manufacture and operating procedures for Project Mar-a-Lago are all in place.  All aspects of the project seem to be moving ahead full steam. 

Finally, this is a huge investment program and the economics will surely be questioned.  The plan includes securing commitments for cost reductions with volume production and prepackaging financing with incentives.  Contrary to the government’s typical ready-fire-aim investment approach, the President sees a great need for thoughtful planning.

This story is so phenomenal that we felt compelled to check other journalistic sources for corroboration. Brazen Liehrer at the Times claims to have the whole story on ice, including transcripts from Mar-a-Lago and many other details. He and the Times view it as a hoax, just another bit of fake news from this White House.  They do not see it as “News fit to print.”

More to follow on this breaking story? 

(All data from Johns Hopkins or ncov2019.live/data as of September 16, 2020)

Politics and Science have never mixed well, at least not since 1633 when Pope Urban VIII’s inquisitor ordered Galileo to kneel and renounce his position that the planets rotated around the sun and sentenced him to house arrest and silence until his death in 1642. This was the political respect shown to the man Einstein referred to as the Father of Science.  Things have changed less than we might have hoped.

A “Political Scientist” thinks in terms of credit and blame, failure and success, winning and losing.  A real scientist seeks understanding and questions both for and against all possibilities in pursuit of truth. When asking about America’s experience with COVID – 19, the first and most obvious question is “Which America?”

Are we talking about America’s Northeast bubble?  New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island each have experienced over eleven hundred deaths per million of population. Together, these five contiguous states have lost over 1580 citizens per million of population. No other political subdivision in the world has lost so many of its citizens. If these states had been able to replicate the experience of the rest of America, forty five thousand lives would have been saved.

Differences in death rates do not just happen. They result from differences in resources and policies, differences in population density and demographics, differences in isolation, medical facilities and reporting of cases and deaths. “Political Scientists” both within these bubble states and elsewhere have often chosen not to examine cause and effect. They absurdly blame chance or federal leadership, even though federal policies directed more resources, not fewer to this suffering region. Real scientists would not prattle such nonsense.

To underline the local responsibility for this carnage, these high death rates were not caused by an exceptional rate of infection.  With 12.3% if America’s population, the five state bubble had 32.0% of U.S. deaths, but only 13.0% of the confirmed cases.  The states in the bubble either did not protect their most vulnerable population or they did not care for their infected population or they miss-reported too many deaths. It is fanciful to stretch the imagination beyond state lines to look for a cause.

If we look outside this Northeastern bubble, mainstream USA, 87.6% of our population, 289 million people in forty-five states have had quite a different experience. In this other America 472 people per million of population have perished. The table below compares the two American experiences to our peers and to places where we might seek insight.

Country                 Deaths/M              Country                Deaths/M

US 12.5% “bubble”    1580                 France                        463

Belgium                         827                 Netherlands           368

UK                                 632                 Israel                           128

Spain                             638                 Germany                     114

Italy                             594                 Japan                              12

Sweden                          567                 South Korea                 7                 

US 87.5% mainstream 471    

By the numbers, mainstream USA has managed the pandemic more effectively than most of our European peers. Real scientists would insist on understanding these numbers. “Political scientists” prefer to ignore numbers in favor of invective and out of context quotations. The same people argued against lockdowns and travel bans that now fear even grammar school openings. Many ignore Sweden’s outsized death rate for a sparsely populated country and express a strange admiration for their “taking a different path.”  Criticizing a lack of testing is especially curious since the United States has performed more tests both in total and per capita than any other country in the world. Scientific minds take a different path. They seek to formulate hypotheses and gather evidence. They try to offer some performance standard and illustrate a better result before spouting gratuitous evaluations.

If we look at our European peers, we should recognize solid performance by America and Americans.  Anyone who claims we have failed to manage this pandemic owes it to self and all to describe a better path and provide some evidence that path could have been taken and would have yielded a better result. Americans who live in, and especially those who manage the Northeast bubble should take a long hard look in the mirror before they criticize Washington or the rest of America.

Considerable thought has been given to the clearly superior experience of Germany, Israel, South Korea and Japan. Each of these countries has their own story and there are honest discussions about lessons to be learned. The reasons for each are a unique mixture of demographics, testing, isolation, treatments, experience with earlier epidemics and national scale. A century from now, historians are likely to marvel at how much we all have learned and how fast.  Hopefully, they will also marvel at our ability to survive the even more toxic virus of hatred for constitutional order driving an ever-growing wedge between reality and “Political Science!”

Michael Moffitt

September 16, 2020

August 6, 2019

It is past time we stop talking about a possible war with China and realize we

have been there for some time. Their worldview and their resources have

been concentrated on disrupting ours for at least two decades. China locks

its people in and works them to the bone for one sixth of U.S. GDP per capita

(unadjusted) while we debate about free health care, free college and open

borders. Xi is more polished than Mao, no less of a totalitarian and a far more

ambitious colonialist. Trump was scoffed at three years ago when he warned

that China was a currency manipulator, stealing our technology, and building

military bases in the South China Sea in violation of international law. These

are only a few of the fronts in this war. The belt and road initiative is thinly

veiled new age colonialism. Build “free” assets in foreign lands and use them

to control the economies and politics of your host. So it is with port facilities in

Cambodia, energy from Venezuela, the largest foreign investor in Brazil, and

$60 billion invested for natural resources from Africa.

Who is propping up North Korea and doing nothing to curb its nuclear

ambitions? Should we imagine for a moment that North Korea is less a

dependent and puppet of Xi than they were of Mao? What was the route

through which Iran’s centrifuges arrived? When we speak to China of world

co-operation on climate change, they speak of all their high-speed electric

trains and Tesla’s but do they mention their new coal fired power plants built

to generate the electricity? And what is going on in Hong Kong if not a

preliminary to the subversion of Taiwan?

We might also ask why is China building a nuclear navy; already 27 nuclear

submarines and now Aircraft Carriers, one commissioned in 2012, one now

in sea trials and a third planned for 2022. Clearly these are not competitive

with the 430 ship U.S. Navy but enough to dominate the neighborhood and

hopefully keep a risk averse U.S. from interfering.

Obama and his immediate predecessors were all Chamberlain. “If we work

with China they will become more like us!” How did that work with the last

seekers of world hegemony? Xi is more sophisticated and deliberate than

Hitler, and his ambitions are no less dangerous.

In our corner we have Donald Trump. He understands the threat that all

others in the world were ignoring. He saw the hollowing out of our technology

leadership. He sees the dependence of unbalanced commerce enabling China

to compete unfairly and to own too much of our debt. If there is any doubt

the competition is unfair, remember China is not free. The Government and thParty own and control and finance everything. They print money at will and repress their people to control prices. Western corporations are putty in their hands when they do business in China or try to compete elsewhere. Trump sees that we must use our power to defeat evil empires, not just call them names. “Xi is my friend.” “I love Kim.” “I believe Putin.” He will talk nice as long as there is progress. But he simultaneously makes sanctions work with all three plus the Iranian mullahs and Venezuela with little help from our still sleeping allies. Nobody predicted we could accomplish what he has. Too few understand it.

The talking heads strut and fret upon the stage. “What will who do next?”

“We need international cooperation.” “How much will tariffs cost us?” When

China devalues, in China an American product that used to cost ¥6 will now cost ¥7.

In America, a Chinese product that used to cost $1 will now cost 86 cents plus the tariff.

The devaluation helps China to keep selling us stuff by subsidizing the tariff.

Trump contradicted the talking heads and told us that China would pay the bill. The devaluation hurts Americans selling to China as it doubles down on the cost of the tariff to Chinese consumers. Some Americans will have to find other markets. In the short term China seems to win, but devaluation’s flip side is loss of assets and weakness in the long term. Meanwhile it is fair that we soften the disproportionate cost to soybean farmers.

The players at the table, Xi and Trump, are both several moves ahead of the

talking heads and the press. We have the advantage of human resources

that know and use freedom. We still have technology leadership, wealth, and

systemic financial power. On every front, China has been frustrated, but they

have a strong will and centralized power. They will not yield easily. The game

continues but it is not a game, it is war. It hopefully will not be much of a

shooting war but it will be long and hard and have many dimensions.

This war need not end in defeat for China. Winning for us means teaching

China that if they choose to trade as gentlemen in a community of lawful and

honest nations, they will be welcome. If they choose to live in a ruthless and

dishonest world, they will always find a stronger adversary who will make that

an unwise choice. The stakes are no less than Western Civilization itself and

we are its only hope. All of us are soldiers. Fortunately we have a leader at

the helm who will no longer give an adversary permission to take advantage

and who has the will to win. Lets hope we the people do as well.

Michael Moffitt

August 6, 2019

Michael D. Moffitt

August 23, 2018

Many, including myself have worn a fresh collared shirt every day for a very long time.  Once that meant a cost of three of today’s dollars every day for the laundry. Now if we buy only permanent press shirts they go to the washing machine, not to the laundry. If I have a favorite shirt that is not permanent press, and plan to wear it seventeen more times, it costs nothing to throw it away and buy a brand new wash and wear shirt for fifty dollars.

Think for a minute how such a simple change in technology gets reflected in economic statistics and in my standard of living. The new shirt usually costs no more because it is permanent press, but its value is equal to that of an old technology shirt plus an income stream to me of three dollars for every day it is worn.  Since inflation is measured as a loss in the value of currency, new technology shirts are exceptionally deflationary. Without any new money coming in they add $900 to my annual spendable income.  Since productivity is defined as value produced per unit of cost, the manufacturer of these shirts has significantly increased productivity even if he produces the shirt for the same price and at the same cost as an old technology shirt.  The added value I receive from my new shirt, is not reflected by changes in inflation or income or productivity statistics.  My new found $900 each year to spend on stuff other than shirt laundering is invisible to economists.

This little story reminds us of a basic truth about statistics.  Statistics are most useful when they are used to examine or compare consistent data sets. Think of the root of the word.  Statistics explain a static world.  Dynamic statistics is an oxymoron. No amount of adjustments can make it otherwise.

My permanent press shirt is just one of thousands of examples.  How does one adjust for the change in value of a car that needs routine maintenance only every 20,000 miles or uses less fuel or can save your life?  When I use a government subsidy to install solar panels on my home, and as a result buy less electricity, I am clearly better off. I end up with more money to spend, but my income does not go up and the unit cost or price of electricity does not go down.  According to economic statistics there was no return on the investment made for my solar panels.

How does one adjust inflation statistics to reflect lower cost and higher resolution of digital medical images? To our lives, these can be huge improvements.  Statistically they may be inflationary only if early diagnosis and treatment are more expensive than later diagnosis and quicker death.

How do we count the time and parking savings from using Uber, and where do we find 400,000 Uber drivers around the world in employment statistics?  All of them have sufficient capital or credit to own or lease a modern automobile.  Virtually none of them are, statistically speaking, employed as Uber Drivers. Perhaps we can find many of them in discouraged worker or poverty statistics.

As inadequate as statistics may be, our brightest economists, central bankers, pundits and politicians constantly use economic statistics to persuade us they understand our dynamic world and we are loosing ground. To grasp the scope of their error, we need look no farther than Moore’s Law.

In 1965, Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel Corporation published a paper predicting that the capacity of integrated circuits would expand exponentially, doubling in power at constant size and cost every two years for at least a decade.  At the time, the integrated circuit had only been around for seven years.  While this was initially an observation of a trend, it quickly became ”Moore’s Law”, a goal and mantra for the electronics industry.  The innovation of electronic design and manufacturing costs, including the placement of whole “systems” on a single chip, miniaturization of all electronic devices, and the seamless integration of electronics into the fabric of our daily lives are outcomes from the continuous innovation embodied in this goal for over five decades.

Surely you know what happens to a dollar when you double it 26 times, once every two years for 52 years. To save you the arithmetic, that single dollar becomes $33,554,432.  If Gordon Moore had projected forward his “Law”, he would have predicted that the computing power of his UNIVAC costing $2 million in 1965 would cost just 6 cents today.  If, in 1965, he could have visualized a $900 I-Phone he would predict it to have about 15,000 times the speed, storage and bandwidth and use .0067% of the power of a $2 million 1965 UIVAC.  In fact, the I-Phone has overshot these expectations.

Moore’s law accurately describes this torrid rate of innovation across the entire electronic sector, including the pace of price-performance, miniturization, improvement in processing speed, memory, storage, digital networks, and image resolution all growing exponentially while controlling cost.  None of this is controversial at all. Nearly everyone wonders that it has gone on for so long, and for how long it can continue. 

How might Gordon Moore have visualized life in America today?   One half of the population owns a computer 15,000 times as powerful as the most powerful computer available 50 years ago, carries it and its power supply in their pocket and interacts by voice or touch in high resolution color and high fidelity sound with computers around the world including digital libraries containing all the accumulated knowledge of mankind.  Could he have imagined the added productivity and value that would bring to each of our lives?  What is the value of all the information in the world at our fingertips, the value of being able to comparison shop for anything from our easy chair, the value of a high resolution color scanner and image transmission at our fingertips, the value of free video-phone calls worldwide, the value of high resolution color medical images and life extending medical devices from pacemakers to hearing aids?  Could he have imagined, when the first cells were installed in 1972 or when smart phones were invented in 1996 that two and a half billion smart cell phones would be in use around the world in 2017?  When Pong, the first two-dimensional black and white video game was released in 1972, could anyone possibly imagine today’s videogame or movie industry? Could Amazon or Netflix have been invented with logistics and communications capabilities available in 1965, or even in 1985?  Could Gordon Moore have imagined what you mean when you speak of “artificial intelligence” or “electronic shopping” or “streaming video” or “mapping DNA?”

Most startling of all, if he could visit us here today, how would Gordon Moore react to economists or pundits who assert: “The middle class has not increased their standard of living for two generations”?

He would be likely to recognize that when mail is replaced by e-mail or pay phones are replaced by cell phones or magazines are replaced by websites or cars get self driving features or software implementation becomes less costly or shoppers get smarter there is no way for the statisticians to keep up with their “adjustments” to the value of currency. He would surely note that it is computer technology that allows Amazon to reduce delivered prices on so many products while list prices remain constant or rise.  In thousands of ways our economic lives have become better while income statistics say we have not improved our lot.  And as long as that is true Gross National Product as measured by economists will understate Gross National Value that is delivered to each of our lives.  As long as Moore’s Law continues to describe the pace of innovation in both electronics and now in biotechnology as well, this disparity of economic statistics from reality will continue to increase.

How good is this? It says our economy is far stronger than it seems.  It explains that inflation is low because the value and quality of many things we buy is increasing faster than the prices we pay for them. This is not just American news. This is deflation at its finest. It is good news for the entire world.  Technology and its benefits have no respect for borders. 

******************

The point of this discussion is that we are all better off than we think; we are far richer and have more opportunity and share our wealth more broadly than economic statistics admit. The pace of innovation in our society is the reason we are better off, and also the reason it is hard for statistics to describe our progress. Reflect on the world without integrated circuits into which everyone over 55 years old today was born. Everyone over 25 years old today was born into a world without a commercial internet or e-mail or smart phones and everyone over 20 years old today was here before touch screens on phones or the first mapping of DNA.  How can we not appreciate that every day our lives are invaded and enriched by this innovation?  At the same time “we” is a very large group.  All of us, young and old, rich and poor Americans and all citizens of the world enjoy many fruits of this innovation every day.

The downside to all this innovation is that our world is becoming more dynamic and more complex.  The people in charge of keeping our growth stable, especially governments and central banks have no compass.  Their models do not predict well because it really is different this time.  Never in history has conventional wisdom been based on the quicksand of recent data that no longer represents approaching reality. 

In 2016 and 2017 Janet Yellen several times publicly wondered why inflation is so stubbornly low.  Of course she should wonder because her models say that all of the liquidity pumped into the world economy, all the debt and debasing of currencies around the world should cause rampant inflation.  But since her models do not see the torrid pace of innovation as deflationary, she and other central bankers and economists do not see innovation as an antidote for our profligate fiscal behavior. Using these models, Jerome Powell and others on the Federal Reserve seem intent on steadily raising rates to the “old normal.”  We need to ask them to hit “pause” and ask, ”What is it that we want in the new normal?”

Our trading partners have debased their currencies through easy money, excessive debt and trade restrictions resulting in hugely unbalanced trade. We are no different except as the world’s reserve currency we cannot manipulate against ourselves and we have the lowest tariffs and the fewest trade restrictions in the world. The United States is the ultimate sponsor and personification of free trade. Our reward has been a half-trillion dollar annual trade deficit.

So, lets check our logic…. Do we need to raise rates because outdated models do not account for the power if innovation to fight inflation?  Should we or can we re-calibrate the models? Do the models say we need not be afraid that increasing rates will throttle down investment, even though it surely will.  Do the models say we need not fear the inevitability that that higher interest rates will strengthen the dollar and produce the same result as a tariff on all our exports and a discount for all exports to us, while we pay for both? Do the models say we need not worry that a stronger dollar and higher rates on our debt will sap our economic strength to square up trade relationships while giving our trading partners, friend and foe alike, a winning hand in a currency war?

If we blindly follow a path focused only on past charts and old models for interest rates, historians will not write about its wisdom, only that misguided policy resulted from failure to recognize the deflationary power of innovation.  What is needed are policy makers who at least recognize how little they really know and who take care to give interest rate changes a little time to work and let the rest of the world catch up before running too far.

Michael D. Moffitt,

August 23, 2018

June 8, 2019

Headline: Shrinking Middle Class A Threat to Stability

Dateline: April 11, 2019, The Wall Street Journal, page A6 

This article opened, “The middle class is shrinking and its economic power diminishing in the U.S. and other rich countries, a development that threatens political stability and economic growth according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (OECD)”

The article goes on, never questioning or explaining the opening assertion of doom, “At the peak of its powers in 1985, the aggregate income of the middle class was four times that of the richest group.  Three decades later it had fallen to less than three times… While 70% of baby boomers were members (of the middle class) in their 20’s, that has fallen to 60% of the generation known as millennials.”  The alarm of panic was sounded in the article by the dreadful 30-year shrinkage of the middle class all the way from 64% to 61% of our population.

It seems strange that, on the sports page where statistics are always prominent, we never read such statistical mumbo jumbo.  We see frequent celebrations of new performance records but never comparisons between the best and the average. There are no statistics about the middle class of athletes because nobody cares. There is seldom whining about how sports are being ruined by the over-achieving of those few who outperform all others.  People don’t complain that new marathon records don’t help them walk their dog any faster.  Is there any field of human endeavor or any place on earth where everyone is above average or where eighty percent of the entrants can remotely hope to compete with the best one percent?  Do we ever teach our children to strive for their personal average?

We frequently hear this assertion of doom resulting from the financial over-performance of the few.  Since it seems to be a call to action, it is useful to explore, even if with a measure of skepticism.  Who is this “middle class”?  How badly are they suffering?  How fast are they falling behind and why? Is the trend reversible? Has it discouraged mobility? What can or should be done about it. None of these seem to be the most frequently asked questions, which makes them all the more interesting.

Wikipedia says you can find definitions of the middle class that vary from the middle 20% of incomes to the middle 60%.  Note that by either of these definitions the middle class can become richer or poorer, but it can never grow or shrink. Our WSJ article (above) cites an OECD definition of middle class as households with incomes between 75% and 200% of median household income. (Note 1) In the United States this translates to $23,400 to $64,000 for a single person or from $41,500 to $166,000 per household. Using this definition and Bureau of Labor Statistics data we can establish that two above average high school dropouts in a household, both working, together make more than $53,000 putting them squarely in the middle class.  We also learn that an above average single fresh computer science or engineering graduate is too rich to be in the middle class. Personally, I find this information more confusing than illuminating.

Perhaps there are lessons from the great depression.  In 1933 unemployment reached 24.75% not including many others working part time or at reduced wages.  Manufacturing activity shrank by 25% from its 1928 peak.  The farm population surged to 24.9% for the first time on record as people moved back to the land in large numbers. Farm prices plummeted. Peak wheat prices in 1925 at $2.14 per bushel fell to less than $.50 in 1932. Farm output was decimated by widespread drought. The value of stocks in the market fell by 83%.  Over half of our population was desperately poor.  The middle class evaporated.  Government was helpless and strangled liquidity in financial markets.  Only World War II and debt pulled the economy and the middle class back. The resulting debt was paid off with post war growth and cheaper dollars after post war inflation.  

Perhaps the lessons here are that the Great Recession of 2008 was not such a big deal, and that recessions great or small can be extended by government misdirection and will cause shrinkage of the middle class. Most of all, the middle class can shrink to great depths and be brought back quickly by a vigorous people and a free economy. If we think about it, we know several things about how this all works.

First, in any economic downturn, the most vulnerable get hurt first.  The least powerful and least productive are the first to loose their jobs.  The least profitable businesses are the first to go broke.  More people slip out of any given level of prosperity due to being less well off than climb into it due to increased income. By definition, income disparity decreases and “middle class incomes” shrink

Second, in periods of economic recovery or growth this process reverses itself.  The people that have nothing gain at the fastest rate. As employment expands, the unemployed find jobs, part-time workers work more hours, starting wages are the first to rise and marginal businesses build a cushion of profits.   More people climb into any given level of prosperity due to being better off than slip out of it due to reduced income. By definition, population in every income category except the very least well off grows.

Third, rising levels of education create a rising middle class and greater income inequality.  If this were not true, there would be no economic incentive to seek higher education. Today, about 35% of our work force has no formal education beyond high school vs. 45% twenty-five years ago. Meanwhile, today 40% of our work force has bachelor’s degrees or higher vs. 28% twenty-five years ago. It should not be a surprise that the 40% with the least have only grown incomes by about 0.5% annually over that twenty-five year period.  The world has become more competitive but this group as a whole has not added qualifications to learn higher-level skills. Nor should it be a surprise that with higher levels of education, income level in the middle of the top 40% has grown at a 1.0% annual rate, two times the growth rate of the bottom 40%.

Fourth, rapid innovation makes the most successful innovators more wealthy and makes it more difficult for the least competitive to catch up. In a free society, every great period of innovation produces great fortunes. Think Railroads, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan and Vanderbilt in the nineteenth century. Think Ford, Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, Xerox, Watson (IBM), Semiconductors, Gates (Microsoft), Jobs (Apple, Pixar), Fred Smith (Federal Express) and Walton (Wal-Mart) in the twentieth. We begin the twenty first century with Page and Brin (Google), Hastings and Randolph (Netflix), Bezos, and Zuckerberg and many more in the wings. These great fortunes increase the number of people with great wealth. Millions of other lives become better and richer with economic growth resulting from their innovations. Unsuccessful innovators lose, but those losses are dwarfed by benefits of innovation and the rising economic tide it creates. People at the bottom of the economic ladder often do not have the skills or resources to keep pace, but they still enjoy many benefits from innovation, and at least the opportunity to breakout to a higher level of prosperity.

Fifth, freedom is far more powerful than just the freedom to innovate.  Free markets are the essence of democratic society.  In an economy regulated by free markets every buying decision by every citizen is a vote by the buyer to give resources to the seller in exchange for a product or service the buyer deems worthy of the price. If a seller does not provide value in the eyes of buyers, the seller goes broke.  If the seller produces the best products or services at the lowest cost, the seller gets richer and his business grows. Sometimes it becomes important for government to overrule the free market, but each time it does, an economic price is paid.  In the eyes of the people who ultimately pay all the bills, the market sets the most equitable price and government’s decision to alter the allocation of resources in the economy makes the economy less just and less productive.  Even with good reasons for government to regulate the free market we should always remember that in the extreme, government allocation of economic resources is incompatible with economic growth and individual freedom.  There has never been and there can never be an innovative and growing economy that is not primarily regulated by free consumers who assess the value of all things and pay all the bills.

Finally, subsidies do not get counted in most income statistics and as a result are not recognized in many discussions of income distribution and disparity. Nevertheless subsidies are important and they do count.  In the last fifty years in the United States we have implemented a regimen of subsidies to remedy adverse effects of unequal distribution of income. Many of these, including Medicare and Social Security go to all citizens or are counted in income statistics.  When we total only the income transfers from richer to poorer citizens that are not accounted for in income statistics, we find the cost of these transfers approaches one trillion dollars per year. (NOTE 2). Roughly this means that the average household within the top 40% of incomes gives the average household within the lowest 40% of income an annual income transfer of over nineteen thousand dollars tax-free.  Stated more dramatically, this means that nearly every family within the lowest 20% of incomes has more than doubled their real income in the last fifty years. With these subsidies, the poorest 20% of us has more than kept pace with the income growth of all income groups except those in the top five percent of incomes.  To discover the total scale of generosity in our great country, add to this one trillion dollars all the non-cash benefits provided to our less fortunate funded by great and small foundations and the $400 billion donated to private charities each year by individual citizens.

If our goal is to preserve the middle class and increase their economic welfare, we need first to recognize what we did to become the richest nation in the history of the planet.  Then we need to do more of these things; to facilitate and stimulate economic growth: to promote education for those who value and appreciate it; to preserve and promote natural and democratic regulation of the economy by the free market and especially to promote incentives and freedom to innovate. We need to celebrate the rock stars and entertainment stars and science stars and athletic stars and business stars. These are the people who raise the bar for all of us and upon whose shoulders the next generations will stand. We need to emphasize to our political stars that the citizens produce all the wealth and government’s only legitimate role is to protect their freedom to do so.  Real political stars understand they serve the people, forsake demagoguery and embrace equal protection and opportunity under the law. They also embrace the natural law that equality of everything for everyone is a utopian nightmare and the antithesis of equality of opportunity for all.

Some argue that this discussion ignores the frustration of those who do not participate in or are left behind by economic growth. To these people we should ask. “Is it just that each of us is free to try?” “How can success have meaning or purpose if failure is not a possibility?” “How do we help those who fail without eroding their responsibility and incentive to be creative and productive?” “How do we strike the balance between freedom for those who are productive and security or comfort for those who are not?”

Most important of all, we all need to recognize and reject demagogues; those who promise ease and promote blame; those who divide us according to race or sex or age or religion or income; those who would suppress debate and demand simple solutions for complex problems and those who preach doom if they are not heeded. In their place we should seek leaders who challenge every citizen to strive for our personal best in every aspect of our lives. We should believe in our history where a free and responsible citizenry has demonstrated the path to the most productive, generous and mobile society on the face of Earth.

Meanwhile, looking at census statistics and defining the middle class symmetrically around median income, simple arithmetic tells us the following.  The middle class will never grow or shrink as a percent of the population.  The income of the middle class is growing.  The income of most below the middle class has grown faster than the middle class only because of increasing federally mandated income transfers. Those above median income up to the top five percent of incomes are growing incomes more rapidly due to higher levels of education and innovation. Those in the top five percent are growing their incomes, their taxes and their generosity even more rapidly, driven by education, innovation, accessibility to international markets and investment income.

How could it be otherwise?  Why should it be otherwise?

(NOTE 1)  In elementary statistics we learn that any subset defined as a positive function of the median of a distribution will inevitably shrink as a function of any growth in the standard deviation of the population.  Further, this shrinkage will be amplified if the subset is asymmetric and the standard deviation grows asymmetrically in the same direction.  In simple English this means that the OECD decision to define middle class as asymmetric around the median household income guarantees that the middle class will shrink if the population becomes more prosperous.

(NOTE 2)  The bulk of these funds are distributed via Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program ($583 billion), Social Security Disability Insurance ($143 billion), Earned Income Tax Credit ($72 billion), Food Stamps ($70 billion) and Federal rental assistance ($44 billion)

Black Lives Matter founders tell their own story. Co-founder Patrice Cullors, in a 2015 interview with Jared Ball: “The first thing, we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia (Garza) in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories…”

Let’s begin by understanding what that means.  Frederick Engels wrote succinctly to Marx, “…it was always our view that in order to attain this [proletarian revolution] and the other far more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first take possession of the organized political power of the state and by its aid crush the resistance of the capitalist class and organize society anew.” This tells us where Marx and Engels and their disciples want to take us. It also points to their obsession with power.

Marx and Engels also had convictions about families. They saw state and church-regulated marriage as a form of class oppression Engel’s denounced the nuclear family as a Capitalist arrangement with the purpose of reproducing inequality; “The children of the rich grow up into wealth while the children of the poor remain poor.”  They did not live to see millions realize the American Dreams of entrepreneurship and mobility. They ignored parents that have taught their children the lessons of life from the Old Testament through the empires of Egypt and Greece and Rome, and the spread of wisdom of Confucius and Buddha and the Hindu Upanishads.

Black Lives Matter does not ask, “How does a single parent find the personal resources to earn an income to support a family and to teach children basic lessons for success?” or “Exactly how does the collective replace the disrupted family?”  Before school-age children need to begin learning the golden rule, the value of integrity, curiosity to motivate learning, the need for goals to enable self-direction in a free society, and perseverance to overcome obstacles and disappointments. How is it oppressive for two parents to commit to each other and their children to transmit these values?  Is it not the most destructive possible sin for a father and mother to abandon teaching life skills and values to their children? Do we even need to understand this to observe the data on excessive suicides, drug abuse, mental disorders, poverty, and crime by children who grow up without fathers? How can any honest or sensible person argue that disruption or destruction of the nuclear family is not damaging to all mothers and children deprived of their fathers, and thus to our civilization?

Yet here we are. The BLM website talks in generalities about all things except three tenets directly from Marx. They open with their mission “To build power…” and their first accomplishment, “The Black Lives Matter Global Network is as powerful as it is…” an uncompromising commitment to securing power, not power to the people but power to their organization, and an equally uncompromising commitment that, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family.”

To disrupt the family is to condemn mothers and children to abandonment. It is to impoverish and subjugate them to the power of the party or the state, or worse. To enforce the BLM commitment to this path, they take a page from every tyrant in the twentieth century; marginalize and destroy accountability of local police and replace law enforcement with centralized enforcement of government policy or anarchist thugs or both. How is it helpful to mothers and children to replace local police with KGB or CCP or SS or Brown Shirts or CHOP vigilantes?

Marxist regimes in Russia and China and Cuba and Venezuela and elsewhere do not protect the lives of mothers and children. They have each slaughtered multitudes of their own people. They have always built their power to do so with the support of many well-meaning people in the name of worthy reforms. They have hijacked altruism with high-sounding slogans and empathetic language, and by shaming those who disagree into silence… and also with deceit.  These are the self-avowed role models for Black Lives Matter.

If you would like to contribute to Black Lives Matter, go to their website and press “Donate.” You will be guided to ActBlue Charities to complete your donation. A Google of ActBlue will reveal it is not a charity you are giving to, but a Political Action Committee affiliated with the Democratic Party that has raised over $5 Billion since 2004.  Go figure.

Reprinted from The Tuchfarber Report

July 20, 2020

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling in 1843, a treatise on the anxiety that must have possessed Abraham on his journey to the land of Moriah to sacrifice his only son at God’s instruction. In 1849, Kierkegaard published The Sickness Unto Death, a meditation on the despair of having to live suspended between apparent earthly knowledge and real infinite truth.

Is it little wonder that Kierkegaard’s writings are still of great relevance. Anxiety and despair have plagued the human race since its beginning and stories teaching us to cope preceded the written word. Wise men and women through the ages have recognized the destructive power of anxiety and despair. 

Today, we are being told by arrogant power-seekers and hapless repeaters that anxiety and despair are necessary and constructive. We must fear the virus. We must fear the lockdowns. We must fear opening up. We must fear our neighbors as well as strangers. We should be angry that our government has failed to protect us. A constant barrage of contradictory wisdom presses us all toward a state of anxiety and despair.

Calm down. Take a deep breath. Try to cope by looking at the numbers. You will find astounding comfort in the truth.

COVID 19 cases in the United States have increased in an amazingly straight line at around 25,000 per day before and during the lockdown. Our increased control of damage by the virus did not result from reduced growth in cases. Rather, our successes were avoiding increased contagion and learning how to treat and cure infected patients. In mid-April we saw 25,000 new cases per day and 2.300 deaths per day, a ratio of one death for every 9.2 new cases.  By early June, still with 25,000 new cases per day, we were seeing only 700 deaths per day or one death for every 36 new cases. Yes, you read that correctly… with no reduction in new cases per day and more finely tuned health care, in two months we were saving 1,600 lives per day. The lockdown accomplished its primary purpose.

Beginning on June 22, we saw two dramatic changes. First, there was an increase in new cases to 40,000 per day. There are two obvious causes.  Testing increased to over 500,000 per week. Seven to ten percent positive test outcomes explain 6,000 new cases daily.  These new cases are by definition less serious. Test subjects are no longer limited to those already with symptoms. Selection of those to be tested is more random and most who test positive are asymptomatic at the time. More of these patients will be cured because of earlier detection and more vigorous health. Fewer of them will die.

The remaining increase in new cases results from people being less careful.  This is not a good thing, but it is not surprising that many people see “opening up” as a time to function more freely. Before we panic, let’s look at the second important change. Deaths per case have more sharply decelerated. During the period from June 22-28, deaths fell to 308 per day or one death per every 83 of the 25,000 new cases per day experienced in the previous two months. Failure to focus on this statistic is an egregious omission. The declining death rate is a credit to thousands of doctors and hospitals and researchers who have created more tools and set new standards of care while discarding less effective approaches. This trend will continue and more lives will be saved.

Some point out anxiously that the virus is now attacking more young people.  How could it be otherwise? Many “clusters” have been reported at parties or crowded events. Seniors remain more careful, especially those in nursing homes.

Lets look ahead and see what we might fear the most.  Imagine if new cases increased to 75,000 per day, three times the rate of April and May, with no further decrease in toxicity. That would result in 900 deaths per day, about the same as we experienced in early June.

We will not triple our pre-lockdown level of new cases. We will not stop improving treatments. Every pause will be followed by accelerated progress. The current “surge” turmoil is a normal growing pain, not a crisis, not even to be remembered next year. Every state and community will continue to govern itself according to its individual demographics. Every individual American will continue to make decisions in the interest of his or her own health.  Most of us will never meet this virus, especially if we remember to wear our mask and wash our hands.  The economy will recover unevenly. How could it be otherwise? Those who call for fear and trembling and those who politicize the discussion do not do so in the interest of truth. Those who preach, “Wait for the vaccine,” are betting on a horse with no pedigree. There has never been a successful and safe vaccine for any coronavirus.  We will prevail with or without a vaccine. Those who wear their mask, and wash their hands will rarely face this sickness unto death.

Michael Moffitt

July 1, 2020

The problem with capitalism is that bad people are motivated to do bad things to good people while seeking profits and power for themselves.  Of course, this has been a problem with every system of organizing civilization in the history of mankind. It is not a problem that can be solved by perfecting mankind.  We will always be imperfect. Solzhenitsyn perhaps expressed it best: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

This is not a problem that can be solved by re-dividing profits. Those who produce profits would have less incentive to produce.  Those who buy the fruits of production would have less to buy, less to buy with, and less to say about what is produced.   All would be poorer, except those who decide how the profits are re-divided; they inevitably keep a little extra for themselves. If we look at experience, people do not get just a little poorer. Per capita income in Russia is 40% of that in the US. In China and Venezuela per capita income is less than one-third of that in the US. Data from Cuba and North Korea would surely be even worse if it were published. Many in the “Middle Class” in these countries live in poverty by US norms. There is no country in the world, Socialist or otherwise, that spends more than the United States to lift up the less fortunate among us because there is no country productive and generous enough to do so. The productivity and wealth results from a vibrant free-market economy. The generosity comes from the hearts of a free people.

There are only two means to limit the misuse of power.  One is Freedom and the other is Law.  Neither can survive without the other. Freedom by definition means the distribution of power to the people. It means making every individual responsible for his or her own pursuit of happiness. It means protection not of just the right to vote, but the protection of all the rights guaranteed in our Constitution.  Preservation of Freedom requires that power be distributed among all people so that none are strong enough to seize or abuse the power of others.  Law is the means of protecting Freedom from being abused. Law limits behavior uniformly among all people without limiting thoughts or ideas.  Our founders recognized that if laws are to be applied equally to all, the legislators who make the laws and the prosecutors and the judiciary must be independent of each other. If these three powers are centralized, then law is whatever that central power says it is to any particular person at any particular moment, without any appeal. This is how laws work in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Cuba today. This is how laws worked in Russia, Germany, Italy, and Japan before and during World War II.  When all the power of government is centralized in the administrative bureaucracy, the result is laws without Law. The result is that all freedom is at the pleasure of the State; all property is private only at the pleasure of the State. The result is that there is no real power or freedom among the people.  This is the definition of Socialism.  Socialism always promises “Power to the people!” but it always delivers power only to people in control of the State.

It is possible to have State Capitalism. That is Socialism. That is Russia and China. The State controls all property. It is delusional to compare free-market Capitalism with Socialism.  They are diametrical opposites. In the United States, government power is shared among three branches and fifty states.  Economic power is shared by tens of thousands of corporations each competing for the approval of, and thus governed by, more than three hundred million customers.  It is very messy, in a challenging and creative way. In Socialist nations people who defy the government disappear.  That is quite efficient, in a very ugly way.

Those who compare Socialism to Capitalism do so either from naiveté or to deceive. Socialism is not an antidote or opposite to Capitalism. It is an opposite and antidote to Freedom and Democracy.  Democracy vs. Socialism is a choice. “Democratic Socialism” is an absurd contradiction, an oxymoron.  Freedom, especially free-markets, cannot co-exist with Socialism. Without freedom, Democracy is a sham.

Michael Moffitt

February 2020