Debt

It's hardly shocking news that rapid recovery is typically financed by debt, as is revolution.

Years ago, I read a real estate book by an author who got rich via real estate. At some point, he remarked that unlike most people, he "loved debt."

Good debt is debt that more than pays for itself. Bad debt is debt that doesn't add more value than it costs you.

There's not always a clear, bright line cut off between the two and poor people borrowing money to eat probably can't readily quantify that not eating will cost them more in medical bills, lost productivity, etc.

The above quote is from a post I wrote in reaction to a video about "the German economic miracle" under Hitler and the author predictably vilified Hitler and dismissed the accomplishment out of hand as having no value because "it was financed by debt" and he claims that even without World War II, Germany was at best a few years away from economic collapse.

Let's start here: All successful economic enterprises are an exercise in "plate spinning" where if you stop what you are doing, the whole thing can rapidly fall apart.

There's no Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of money anywhere. Billionaires are not people with a pile of money somewhere. They are people who own things that make money, like shares in a company.

That company has value because it creates something of value and it has many moving parts, including qualified employees showing up regularly to do their job. And if one retires, quits or dies, they need to be replaced and their replacement, no matter how talented and hard working, will not immediately be able to provide the same level of value as the experienced person who vacated the position.

Running a company is an exercise in plate spinning, including getting enough people to show up and do the work and it can and probably does include substantial investment in training them to do what you want done.

The insurance industry is an information-dense industry. They have trouble finding enough qualified applicants and after they hire them, they train them for months.

After three months of training, I started my entry-level insurance job at half quota and I think they ramped me up to full quota over the course of like six weeks.

The reason franchises are so popular is because all businesses involve so many moving parts, there's a high failure rate when trying to figure it out from scratch.

A plot point of Léon: The Professional is that this hitman isn't very literate. Between his low education level and illegal job, a restaurant owner with six kids is basically robbing him blind.

Restaurants have such thin profit margins that upgrading all the lightbulbs and appliances to more energy efficient ones can be the difference between failure and success.

One of my favorite business stories is that a sausage company was successful and built a new facility. One longtime employee wasn't willing to drive further to get to work and retired.

The sausage being made at the new facility wasn't coming out the same and it was a disaster. While reminiscing one day about the employee who retired, they realized their new design was too efficient and had eliminated a thirty minute step in the process that no one thought was essential to making the sausage. They added a holding room or warming room to replace the previous thirty minute trip from one part of the facility to another.

This is where we get sayings like "If it's not broken, don't try to fix it." Because trying to tweak something that's working can mess it up and you may never figure out how to undo the damage.

City planning is notoriously complex and the people who are good at it typically cannot adequately explain what they do. This contributes to the phenomen that after a disaster, communities frequently seek to rebuild it EXACTLY like it was.

They didn't know how to improve it before the disaster. They certainly don't know how to reimagine something better whole cloth.

Jane Jacobs had enormous criticism of planned communities built all at once. She felt strongly that you needed a mix of old and new buildings to have a functional community.

She described such spaces as "It was dead from the start and no one noticed until the body began to smell."

I don't necessarily agree that you need old buildings. The Main Street America program is posited on historic preservation and I think it actively discourages removing or adequately remediating problems like mold, asbestos and outdated designs.

I lived in two different old buildings in a Main Street downtown core. They were both over a hundred years old and they had a lot of problems that were never going to be remedied.

I used to have a car I didn't like and one day I was telling my sister something like "If I had enough money, I would like to paint it a different color and do this, that and the other." And she busted me and said "If you had enough money to do all that, it would make more sense to buy a new car."

In SimCity games, checking on your old power plants and replacing them before maintenance costs start bleeding you financially is a key detail to making your city financially viable.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, your peasants and the land were your means of production. If you weren't an idiot, you tried to handle the war such that peasants felt "New face, same deal. Who cares? Moving on."

Whomever was in charge was going to charge them taxes and if you weren't abusive, most of them didn't really care to whom they paid taxes and what country they nominally were in.

The video I wrote in reaction to described "the German economic miracle" as an armament economy and dismissively claimed it only worked as long as the German government kept buying armaments from the factories, thereby keeping people employed.

I have absolutely no idea what Hitler or the German government had in mind as an end game but Germany was in dire straits because they were last man standing on the losing side of a war in The Great War (what you may know better as World War I). So they were solely responsible for paying war reparations.

My understanding is that demanding war reparations of the loser was standard practice throughout the world for all of human history. General Grant broke with that tradition when General Lee surrendered to him at Appomattox, ending the American Civil War.

He listed only three conditions of surrender, one of which was "You will allow us to come in and help you rebuild."

This became a new American tradition and following World War II, America became an occupying force in both Germany and Japan and helped them rebuild. This is the reason Germany and Japan have two of the strongest economies in the world.

Germany was everyone's bitch after The Great War and perhaps they decided "We are done with that." They may have had plans to acquire territories that contained materials they needed, potentially making their economy sustainable.

It's not a given that debt will ruin you. It ruins you if it buys you a future incapable of paying it back comfortably.

We don't know what Germany's plans were. There may be absolutely no record of what the big picture plan was. That may have only existed in the minds of a handful of people or even only in the mind of one person and those people are long dead.

The US has a history of shrinking it's military in times of peace and having to ramp it up rapidly because conflict broke out. And we have a reputation for being war mongers.

In contrast, Switzerland has a reputation as a very peaceful nation. It's mountain terrain is listed as a huge asset in articles analyzing why no one invades them.

So is their policy that something like 80 or 90 percent of all citizens are officially in the military reserves.

In one of the Kung Fu TV show episodes, one of the Shaolin priests says "A man of peace must be strong." Shaolin priests were such fierce fighters that when called upon by the emperor as a desperate measure, the emperor was frightened by their ability to win wars and considered dismantling them as his bizarre idea of saying "Thanks for saving my ass."

Hippies imagine you can have a peaceful world where we all smoke dope, make love not war and no one needs a standing army. They were the offspring of World War II veterans and took for granted the peace and economic stability paid for with their father's blood and personal sacrifice.

Yes, armament factories only stay open and paying their employees if they get ongoing new orders. That's true of any and all businesses and doesn't per se prove it was an unsustainable plan.

The video criticizes the German economic miracle for requiring constant expansion. This is a problem we still have the world over and it's a serious problem causing dire problems.

We call that capitalism and I wish we would push back against the Red Queen Effect of needing to run ever faster to stay in place because it's running humanity and planet Earth into the ground.