Whether taken as a proverb or a nursery rhyme, the lesson of the lost nail stands today as a warning of the escalating damage that can be caused by a seemingly trivial loss. “For want of a nail,” the saying goes, “the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost; for want of a rider, the battle was lost; for want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.”
I was thinking about this proverb the other day when I read that merchants in the U.S. are beginning to complain, in significant numbers, about the abrupt end to penny production by the US Treasury Department.
Earlier this year, the oval office resident (may his time be short) told the Mint to stop making the little coins, saying it costs more than one cent to make one cent.
McDonalds, Kroger, and others are now complaining that they are no longer able to make exact change. Not wanting to overcharge their customers (some states have already made it illegal to round up), they are rounding down, greatly to their aggregate detriment. Kwik Trip, a midwest convenience store chain, reports a loss of almost three million dollars, already.
The knee-jerk decision was sadly typical of this regime. No forethought given to the possible consequences of an action. Tariffs hurting the American farmer? Never thought of it. Sorry that no one is buying your soybeans any longer. Cut foreign aid? Never meant for all those children to starve. Etc. etc. etc.
Apparently given the choice, like contestants in an early TV game show, between truth and consequences, this regime said, “Neither, thank you. We prefer to get away with murder and pretend we knew nothing about it, never met the guy and don’t recall ever hearing about it.”
However, Tuesday night, the consequences of his actions, like chickens, came home to roost. Anti-Trump feelings, organically growing with each escalating outrage, paid him back, big-time, and candidates who even shared a party label with the east-wing destroyer lost decisively. Trump got slapped on all cheeks. Let’s hope he sticks to his strategy and we will stick it to him.
Maybe he will even bring back the beloved Abe Lincoln penny.
Tension With Democracy
A while ago, I wrote here about Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, father of the uber-spying-on-you information gatherer, Palantir, godfather to J.D. Vance, and amasser of a net worth of about 28 billion dollars. Lately, he was quoted by Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in economics and columnist for the NY Times, as writing, “Capitalism and true freedom are in tension with democracy.”
While I was pleased to see that Thiel actually said it out loud, it betrays, as Krugman points out, the true nature of the rich guys who have dominated our tech fields for so long and the disproportionate influence they have had in warping our politics to the right.
Combining a self-pitying narrative with a growing conviction that only they are equipped to take this country in what they consider to be the right direction, they have woven a fantasy for themselves in order to justify their unquenchable hunger for more, more, more, for them, and, of course, less and less for anyone who is not part of their master class theories.
Essentially, what they are practicing is not, in its pure sense, capitalism, but rather monopolism, greed and hubris. The old Silicon Valley vibes are dead. There is no real building of new ideas any more. Uh, what about AI. And more AI. Old and tired.
Also, has anyone noticed that these former tech whiz kids are older, slower, and mostly fixated on finding a way to live forever? This is not a joke. A huge amount of the research money for Musk, Trump’s crypto and AI czar, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen, who launched Netscape, is going into what they are calling “moonshot” life extension projects. They want to live forever and are feverishly seeking the newest version of the fountain of youth. It would be sad if they weren’t so influential.
In the meantime, other nations are providing the innovation, though, for many of them, tech leaders are also beginning to flex political muscle and are skewing right.
Looks like it’s up to the millions of us non-billionaires, to keep on protecting democracy.
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