The Great Tightening That Never Was

Inflation did not just happen to us. We caused it through overspending. We overspent because we were weak and disconnected.

An advantage our tribal ancestors had over us was quick decision-making. “There’s a storm ahead. Let’s hide here in the trees. That enemy has more soldiers and more advanced weapons. Let’s do an end-run.”

Today, with all our charts and granular analyses, we fail to tell each other obvious truths, so we can collectively take action to avoid clear danger. Instead, we politically punish anyone who dares to be honest. So, I will be.

Inflation did not just happen to us. We caused it through overspending. We overspent because we were weak and disconnected. We were hit by a black swan virus event. We should have been compassionate yet judicious in our response. We were not. We figuratively dropped trillions of dollars from airplanes with no strings attached. Even then, we could have avoided the worst.

But for completely daft political reasons, our doddering hack of a President spent like a drunk sailor. Anyone with a brain knew inflation was coming, but Biden acted as if it was not. His own Treasury Secretary said it would be mild and temporary. It was bad. Now we need a remote coterie of economists, The Federal Reserve, to tank the economy in order to get us to do what Congress and the President should have done on their own.

Here’s how a more collectively oriented, sagacious, even tribal society would have responded. “The value of our money is going down. We worked hard for that money. We need it to retain its value for decades to come so that when we retire we have a little left. We will all spend less.”

Americans could have stopped inflation in its tracks if we had any Stoic virtue left. We would not take the family vacation. We would not buy the second home. We would postpone the new car, new phone, new clothes, new medical procedure, new everything unless desperately needed. We would eat at home. Get to know our neighbors and stop being “consumers” for two-quarters of economic activity.

Our government would follow suit because it cares; because it knows it is the least efficient deployer of capital; because it knows it too must participate in The Great Tightening. Like the rest of us, the government would take an immediate 25% haircut on all spending, starting with the political indoctrination programs spread throughout its distended mass. The great project to turn Americans against themselves and their history would take a pause. Unemployment would rise, and inflation would dramatically fall.

The elected money mandarins in charge of maintaining the political patronage system essential to their and K Street’s survival would balk. “It’s too harsh. It would send persons into penury. The government would need to feed and clothe them!”

It would not. That job would be up to us. Because we saved. Because we prepared for this day. Because we cared.

This, of course, never happened. Because we no longer act as Americans but as one great swath of bitter entitled individualists untethered to the commonweal.