Food for thought on Fuels
Builders,
Below are four observations on fuels, a subject that rarely sees opinions based on numbers and reason. The topic of fuels draws out emotional responses ranging from compulsive cheapness to conspiracy theories, neither of which serve the serious builder. Feel free to use the comments section, keeping in mind I reserve the right to delete any comment which doesn’t have a human name attached to it.
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(1) Yes, high octane unleaded fuel exists. Above is a can of 110 Octane unleaded fuel in my hangar. We use it for dyno tests and other research. The detonation resistance of this fuel meets or exceeds 100LL. I buy it in our little town, off the shelf, it is about $8 a gallon, a price which includes a healthy profit and the container. It is sold at a little golf cart repair shop near our town’s drag strip. If ordered in a 55 gallon drum, it is substantially less than $5/gallon. Every year I hear “Experts” at Oshkosh talk about how having unleaded fuel with an octane higher than 94 would require a scientific breakthrough. Reality: it already exists, no one need ask for a federal grant to re-invent it. I strongly suspect that if it were manufactured in the volume of 100LL, it might even be cheaper. Even if it wasn’t, aircraft engines would live a lot longer without lead in them. Extending the life of a motor 20% would offset a substantial price differential. Think it over.
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(2) Fuel cost is a much smaller cost of aircraft ownership than people think. When the price of fuel goes up by a dollar, several people in every EAA chapter will pontificate that “flying just became unaffordable.” Try this at your next meeting: Poll ten people who have a hangar at the airport on how much their hangar rent was last month, and then ask them how many dollars they spent on fuel the same month. 9 of 10 will have bought less fuel than rent, yet they don’t complain with the same venom. Picture this: A lower cost homebuilt which took $25,000 to build, not to mention years of labor, which costs $1,000 a year to insure and $250 a month to store. The builder has an AARP card and may have only 10 or 15 good flying seasons left. If he flies 100 hours a year at 5 gallons an hour, he will spend $1,500 on $3/gallon fuel or $2,000 on $4/gallon fuel. Only a fool would choose to fly a lot less because his annual operating cost went from $5,500 to $6,000/year. Reality says the sand is running out of the hour glass and you built the plane to fly it, not to protest the price of hydrocarbons.
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(3) Aviation Gasoline is not expensive and apparently here to stay. Above Is a photo I took at the Palatka Florida airport the day Paul Salters Panther flew. Notice the $3.29 100LL price. This isn’t accurate today, as the price has come down 9 cents in the last 2 weeks. I have worked in aviation basically every day since 1989. In that time I have heard several dozen experts and magazine editors citing “new laws” , “Federal standards”, “lead being outlawed” all predict that 100LL would disappear in 1990. 1992. 1996, 2001, 2002, 2008, 2012, and 2016. Lord knows, there will be people saying it is being outlawed in 2017, and people will believe them, in spite of the fact they have never been right. On the price of 100LL, people like to quote the price at the signature FBO at Miami International Airport, because it justifies their statement “I would fly all the time, but no one can afford to anymore.” The actual local price of 100LL is a small fraction of this distorted number..
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(4) There is a very ‘popular’ internet forward that states “Gas was $1.89 the day President Obama took office, and it is a record high today at $3.69” People like this, it gets passed around in aviation circles all the time, it just doesn’t happen to be true. The record peak gas price in the US was August 2008, when George Bush was president, and it was $4.11/gallon. The change to $1.89 in 5 months reflects the economic collapse in the fall, and it says nothing about either president. The $3.69 was July 2014, the actual national average today is $2.13 a gallon. essentially unchanged in eight years. There are a lot of people who think the price of gas is set in the oval office, and there are even more who decide if they can enjoy their life based solely on which party is occupying the public housing at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue. My personal love of airplanes goes so far back in my life, it certainly predates my awareness of politics. Given an chance to go flying or argue partisan debates with misleading data, I confess to being in the minority, the people who would rather build and fly.
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Corvair Performance from 1980-2016
Builders
Yesterday was Dan and Rachel Weseman’s “Black Friday” party, which is a day long celebration of freedom at our airpark. Our side kick and neighbor Vern Stevenson took the occasion to give his Corvair powered sand dragster, which he hand crafted in 1980, to Dan and Rachel’s sons. They plan on putting in back in action at our town’s 1/8 mile community drag strip. It should prove to be a great learning tool for them, and an important example of the generosity of spirt that some people make the centerpiece of their lives.
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Above, Vern’s hands hold a photo of him launching in 1980. Sand drags are only 100 yards, a mere 300′, but with an exceptional power to weight ratio and paddle tires, this can be covered in 2.3 seconds with a terminal velocity in the 85 mph range. Yes, that is launching on loose sand. In the photo, Vern is 28, today he is 64. Stop and look at your own craftsmanship on your plane and ask yourself if you can imaging giving it to a young person 36 years from now. Things that you make with your own hands are far more important to the quality of your own life than anything someone could buy.
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The dragster, dusty from 25 years of storage, was moved across the runway to take up residence with another Corvair Powered vehicle, Dan’s Panther Prototype, now powered with a 3.3 liter engine and propped to hit 180mph turning 3,500 rpm. The dragster has a 2,700cc Corvair fed by 2 two barrel Del’ortos, set to turn 7,000 rpm. It has a reversed VW transaxle with live 3″ axle through the differential case. it only uses 2 gears. The narrow tires are just for transport. Every bit of this was made from raw materials, to his own design by Vern. It was highly successful and very competitive. It had only one issue: In the early 1980s a friend showed Vern what a Weed Hopper ultralight was, and started his long addiction to ultralights and experimentals, and all of Vern’s ground based adventures kind of fell by the wayside.
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American made tools, built to last.
Builders,
Today I was running errands in support of our second Corvair finishing school this weekend. Steve Glover, Local host of Corvair College #37 ( Corvair College #37, more photos.) , flew in yesterday. We spent the day moving parts and equipment between the Airport and the SPA/Panther factory, where the finishing school will be held. During one of the trips, we stopped by the hangar of my side kick Vern Stevenson.
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Vern was down at his hangar complex, welding up a heavy I beam to act as a cantilever roof support in his ultralight hangar. The welder he was doing this with was a classic, made in America, Lincoln 225 “Buzz Box” AC stick welder.
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Above, Vern and his Lincoln welder. The top of the 20 foot I beam is in the foreground of the picture.
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In previous stories like: Why “Made in America” matters to me. and Made in America – data plates – obituaries to US manufacturing jobs, I speak strongly as an advocate of American tools and products, produced by American workers. Here is the perfect example of my point, the same one I argued in this story: Machines vs Appliances Part #2.
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READ THIS SLOWLY: Vern is 64 years old. The same welder he used to weld many feet of high strength beads, has also welded countless other project for him. It is one of his most used tools. He bought this welder brand new, when he was 15 years old , 49 years ago. He has used it to weld miles of beads, and it has never failed to work, nor has it ever had a single day in the shop. It just works period, because it was built by Americans, when we expected both our tools and society to simply work, reliably.
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Want to improve the quality of your life? Make things with your own hands, and use quality tools when doing so. This will add a richness to the hours of your life that a person fooling with consumer electronics in search of entertainment will never have. Vern may have owned a TV set at some point in his life, but it didn’t last 49 years, and it never gave him the opportunity at the end of an hour to step back, survey the results of the time spent and say “I made that.”
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Thought for the day: The lesser of two evils
Alert: This post contains no technical information. It is provided as a stimulus for thinking only. The reader decides if they wish to participate. No answers provided, just concepts to ponder. This particular story is the first in a short chain or related questions to consider or ignore.
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Builders:
During the Soviet purges and mass executions of the 1930s, Winston Churchill was a harsh critic of the Soviet Union, and this continued when they joined the Germans invading Poland in September of 1939, igniting WWII. 21 months later, the Germans turned their fury on the Soviets, who now found themselves on the allied side of the war.
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Churchill, by then Prime Minister, was put in a difficult positon of now supporting the Soviets as an ally. His political opponents called him a hypocrite. After short consideration, he decided that on very rare occasions one must decide between the lesser of two evils, and defended his choice with the famous quote:
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“If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
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Above, Churchill holding an American M1928 Thompson submachine gun.
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This week in America, about 100 million voters are facing their own Winston Churchill moment. I have no advice to offer, save this: 25 years ago I decided that I would only vote for people or ideas not against them. There is a lot less heartburn simply voting one’s conscious and ignoring all the media, polls and amateur strategy. In a normal year, such action might anger 40 or 45% of your friends, but this year affords the opportunity to anger up to 98% of them, and in doing so you can give them something they will have in common.
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In the last 25 years I have heard countless times “A vote for X is really a vote for Y” or “You will be throwing your vote away”. I will politely listen, but what if a vote for X is really just a vote for X? Perhaps you are never throwing anything away when you are acting with your conscious. In the long run, the best way to stop being served choices between two evils is to demand a choice which isn’t evil.
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Your Aviation Connection:
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Countless times in a single flying season, you will hear pilots, mechanics and builders, all frame questions in aviation as a required choice between two evils, when a clear minded person listening will reject it as a false choice;
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You will hear pilots say: “we have to either fly VFR on top or scud run below the clouds.” The pilot making the statement is framing it as a required choice between two evils, when it isn’t. One simply has to decide that it isn’t flying weather they are ready for.
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When you are at the airport, be alert to any proposed action which is presented as a choice between two evils, as almost invariably, there are better options, even if taking one of them hurts someone’s feelings. Keep in mind that it is your well being and life, and you don’t want to ‘throw it away’.
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Thought for the day: The challenge of honest evaluation
Alert: This post contains no technical information. It is provided as a stimulus for thinking only. The reader decides if they wish to participate. No answers provided, just concepts to ponder. This particular story is the first in a short chain or related questions to consider or ignore.
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Builders:
My understanding of underground and resistance fighters doesn’t come from movies, it is from my 7th grade French class. I attended a small, tough private school that afforded our instructor a chance to share her personal experience. When she was 15 and her sister was 17, living in Paris, they ‘entertained’ German Officers and collected information. Her sister was caught and tortured to death by the Gestapo, our teacher evaded capture. She never said what happened to her family.
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As a 13 year old, I listened and quietly understood that I wasn’t made of the same kind of flesh and blood as my teacher. The story brought an honest humility that prevented any daydream that I inherently had the same courage. For a young man it was an uncomfortable awareness. As an adult, I was glad to have traded hollow bravado for a realistic understanding and appreciation of the fact some humans can control their fear better than others. I also understood one couldn’t generalize who they were by appearance or claim, just by their deeds.
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Above, A Polish youth, fighting to the death against the German SS during the 63 day Warsaw Uprising in 1944. His submachine gun is a “Blyskawica” an ingenious all-Polish design made by the hundreds in advance of the uprising, right under the noses of the German occupation force. The resistance fighters killed over 8,000 German soldiers in savage fighting.
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They had hoped to liberate the city, timed just as the Soviet red army arrived. The Soviets halted and allowed the Germans to exterminate the resistance, because it eliminated most of the potential post war Polish democratic leadership, and made way for the Soviet puppet government. Churchill and the west were outraged, but powerless to force Stalin on the issue. Arguably, this is the first move of the Cold War.
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People debating private firearm ownership today can hardly restrain themselves from trying to draw parallels to resistance to the Third Reich, and what effect it might have had. The discussion is never nuanced, and it ignores the most obvious factor, people living today are mostly marshmallows addicted to IPhones, a different species than Poles in 1943-44.
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There is an often cited American anti-gun ‘study’ which claims private gun ownership in Europe would have been meaningless, and the resistance in Warsaw only killed 20 Germans. The idea that this ‘study’ was written by some modern urban American writer, living in freedom and safety is frankly, repulsive. Everyone can have a point of view, but this is a grotesque distortion of a history which belongs to the memory of some of the most courageous people in the 20th century. The Blyskawica shows how determined the Poles were to be armed, and crucially the number of German dead is from a notorious SS propaganda document called “The Stroop Report”, which is actually about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. No matter how badly I wanted to win an argument, I am not going to resort to intentionally misapplying ‘data’ from Nazi SS propaganda to do it.
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Your Aviation Connection, in two parts:
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Can you accurately access your own skills? Pilots are notoriously poor judges of their own skills and abilities. Some have sound training and judgement, but lack confidence, often because an instructor subtly sent the message the student was not trusted. The other end of the spectrum are pilots full of unwarranted self assurance, which prohibits them from honestly assessing their skills in comparison to exceptional performance. When listening to pilots this month, watch for both of these to be present. Determine that you will fall to neither extreme. Set yourself to have skills and judgement, and a realistic measure of their quantity and quality.
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Is the information presented valid and applicable? Aviation has ‘studies’ and data also, and most of them are not valid. In the consumer world, people understand that ‘studies’ associated with products or ideas are just an extension of marketing, and they are written out of thin air to support a position, sell a product or provide you a preformed opinion. Aviation is no better, and it might actually be worse. Pilots have much larger than average egos, and they do need to be ‘right’. They will frequently find any statistic or article that can be employed to substantiate their old wives tale. Be alert for this when looking for the answer to any honest aviation question. Be selective about information, put effort into evaluating not only its validity, but if it is even applicable to your situation.
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Thought for the Day: America, 1963
Disclaimer: No technical information follows, just food for thought, a nutrition that zealots have no taste for.
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Builders;
Tonight I fly back to Florida, having completed a 9 day shift caring for my parents in NJ. The time spent with them affords the chance to look back on the world we came from, and take a moment to consider both its blessings and its challenges.
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My mother, age 36, with the four children. ( That’s me in the stroller ). We are sitting on the tailgate of our 1961 Buick station wagon. The photo was taken by my father in front of our tiny house at 433 Woodrift lane in Pleasant Hills, PA. The negative was printed backwards, the driveway was actually on the left hand side of the house. My parents bought the house when it was brand new for $14,000 in 1958. During my fathers 33 years in the Navy, the moves were frequent enough that this was the only home my parents ever purchased.
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We lived in the Pittsburgh area because dad was the project officer at Shippingport, the worlds first atomic power station. It was a joint Naval Reactors/Atomic Energy Commission project, the reactor core being identical to the ones used in Navy ships and subs. Six years was a long time to be on one assignment by Navy standards. My father had a diverse career. He went straight from Shippingport to Vietnam.
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About 18 months after this picture, my father deployed to Vietnam. Before leaving, he sat with my brother, then 14, and gave him a short set of instructions; He was to follow my mother, without question or hesitation; he was to remain positive at all times, school and at home, set an example for us; and if my father did not return, he would then be the eldest man in the family. This last point required no detailed instruction, he would just faithfully follow my fathers example of conduct. With that, he departed, was gone for 14 months.
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There were letters, but not a single phone call. This was the beginning of my brother’s lifetime of being absolutely loyal to a trust or an oath, without further reminder nor reward. If you find the above paragraph moving, it is actually a commentary on America today, because in 1965, that type of conduct was expected, not the exception worth noting.
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While it is easy to remember the summer of 1963 as a time when we had passed the missile crisis, the space program was getting into high gear, a time when no president had been assassinated in 62 years, there were still many things wrong. One sixth of Americans were systematically denied the right to vote. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI as a dictator, in a way that was a serious threat, not just to individual liberty, but to the lives of many Americans he personally defined as enemies. Hollywood still depicted Native Americans as savages to be treated with little remorse. People who were different, just as God made them, were afforded no place in society, far less an equal one. We were hardly beginning to understand the damage we were doing to the environment, the home we all had to live in, with rampant pollution.
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I listen to the calls to “Make America Great Again” with some understanding, although my personal concept of the idea focuses on individuals returning to ethical lives and treating each other with simple decency, more than plans to make everyone rich. They are not mutually exclusive, but the former can lead to the latter, and the latter by itself is hollow and meaningless.
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There are many people who claim that anyone stirred by the slogan secretly desires the return of many of the darker things I listed above. That is a pretty broad brush, one I don’t particularly appreciate being painted with. I am an individual, and it is my absolute belief that people should be treated as such, and their sole measure taken by the ‘content of their character’. I carry the fair expectation that anyone who wants to assessed as an individual, will resist painting others with broad brushes.
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I say that with no malice, and a fair amount of understanding for people who don’t think anything in this countries past was better than today. I actually feel sorry for them, because it tells me they never met anyone like my brother, to understand that we once generated a very different kind of teenager, a person well prepared to take their place as an adult in America, and that is the missing keystone, the element too rarely spoken of. I have my doubts that it will be brought to the center stage, and commonly understood as the issue, but lack of public awareness is no excuse for an individual to retreat from a better path.
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Thought for the Day: Bob Hoover – What did you learn from him?
Builders:
Last week marked the passing of R.A. “Bob” Hoover, arguably the best stick and rudder pilot who ever lived. There were many ‘tributes’ to him that spoke of things like “What a great loss” and sentiments of that sort. For a slightly different take, let me share a few thoughts that came from a brief conversation with Gus Warren.
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“ I was a bit tired of all the “huge loss” and RIPS. ” said Gus, “He was in his 90s, led a great life, and figured about every way possible to tell everyone else about what he learned.” At the root of Gus’s thought is a serious question of perspective and philosophy. It can be summed up by asking if you saw Bob Hoover as an instructor or as an entertainer.
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Gus, myself, and many other people see Hoover as an instructor. Yes, he put on thousands of great shows, but they were to demonstrate physics, not a claim to magic. He had a healthy ego, and could play the showman part with the best of them, but it was his consistent message there was no magic, only understanding, focus and practice.
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He was an honest writer, who’s goal wasn’t to have you marvel at him as a demi-god, but to have you actually learn something from him. Most basic case in point: Hoover frankly discussing that he was relentlessly airsick in primary flight training. Think of how many student pilots questioned if flying was for them based on being queasy, but how few advanced pilots took the time to say it happens and how you get past it.
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Hoover offered countless frank lessons like that. As an instructor, his work is timeless, and it didn’t die with him. As an entertainer, it is all just video now, and his Commander is stuck in the NASM, where it will never fly again. If you only know Hoover the entertainer, the guy pouring iced tea in a glass during a roll, you are missing the better half. Make the transition to understanding him as an instructor by picking up a copy of his 1997 book “Forever Flying”. It is a good start.
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Above, Gus Warren in the front seat, with his Father Clare Warren in back of our Piet in 1997, Edgewater Florida. Gus’ father, the legendary Clare Warren, soloed in 1932, got his pilot’s license in 1936, became an instructor in 1940, logged more than 20,000 hours of instruction, and flew most of the models of light aircraft ever produced in the U.S.
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Gus is a flight instructor, and I learned at least half of what I know about good flying directly from him. I had the privilege of knowing Gus’s Dad, and I well understood that things Gus taught me came from his fathers lifetime of experience, as an instructor. Bob Hoover made it to 94, and Clare Warren made it to 97. We don’t have them with us, but we get to cherish everything they worked to share, and in that way they are both still here.
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Read the rest of the story: The Warren’s 1997.
Thought for the Day: Adam Smith, capitalism in a theoretical vacuum
Disclaimer: No technical information follows, just food for thought, a nutrition that zealots have no taste for.
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Builders:
Last week I wrote the story: Made in America – data plates – obituaries to US manufacturing jobs . The basic premise of the story was pointing out what we lost as a country when we turned to buying cheap products from overseas.
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Above, a 2,850 cc Corvair. The only used parts in this engine are the case halves, the head castings, the oil case casting, the distributor body and some misc. hardware. The rest, including the cylinders, pistons rods, crank, and all conversion parts are brand new, made in the United States of America.
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Ironically, a Wall Street Journal writer, Bret Stephens wrote an editorial the same day, part of which extolled the virtues of buying cheap products from overseas. Because Stevens’s biography says went straight from the University of Chicago to the London school of economics to being a New York City resident and editor of the WSJ at the ripe old age of 24, I am going go out on a limb and guess that Stephens doesn’t know much about manufacturing that made America, nor the lives of the people who built the country he lives in.
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Many journalists with a masters degree in economics want to justify their love of Lexuses and perhaps their embarrassment for their parents blue collar jobs, turns to the same paragraph in “The wealth of Nations” written by Adam Smith in 1776, as justification for avoiding buying anything made in America:
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“It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better to buy it of them.”
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OK, econ. 101 refresher course: Western Civilization is allegedly based on Judeo-Christian thought, but unfortunately it is mostly based on the worship of money, not God; Most faiths have an ancient text and a prophet, and the worship of capitalism has the book “The Wealth of Nations” and a prophet in the form of a peculiar Scotsman named Adam Smith. Like other malicious worshipers, the truly greedy benefit from selective reading of their good book and conveniently ignoring unholy elements of their prophet.
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Before getting to why the quote above is ludicrous when applied to both families and countries, a few words about Smith are in order. First, he wasn’t as most people believe, an American, nor in favor of our countries existence; He never made anything other than two books; he was considered by his contemporaries as somewhere between totally absent minded and seriously mentally ill; in spite of his family analogies, he expressed no interest in women, was never married, had no children, and lived with his mother until he was 61. As a Scotsman, he was required to be a cross dresser, and wear women’s skirts and knee socks. ( I don’t judge them for this, but does everything have to be plaid?)
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Here is why “The Wealth of Nations” is a distorted view of capitalism: In Smiths world it was ‘normal’ and legal for people to own slaves. Great Britain took this concept to the national level, where they owned other countries (like us). If you can own people, labor has no value, and if you have colonies that have to buy your products at gunpoint, the term market value doesn’t exist. Lets gloss over ideas like 9 year olds working in coal mines because 14 year olds want too much money, and slaves are too valuable for that kind of work. These were ‘normal’ in the world of the prophet of pure capitalism. He also didn’t take into account, corruption, lobbyists, currency manipulation, the eventual rise of imaginary financial instruments like credit default swaps, legislatures for sale, countries bent on war over trade, or any of the other factors that exist outside the vacuum of Smiths imagination. Just maybe, people should be a little more reluctant to draw random quotes from the good book of greed.
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He is an easy (and true) example of why Smiths quote above is national suicide for profit: I have an old friend who is a citizen of an extremely wealthy middle eastern oil country. He tells me that his country is in deep trouble; They have never made anything domestically, they just followed Adam Smiths quote above, and paid for it with oil revenue. They also came to believe that nearly everything in the country, including pumping the oil, could be done by paid foreigners. Every semi-skilled task is done by Palestinians on open work visas. Even the security forces are staffed with mercenaries. Now the problem: Every day, the world is figuring out how to use less oil, and he finds himself living in a country with fellow citizens who are several generations into having no have no idea how to make anything, while having the work ethic of a millennial addicted to video games. He ends all these conversations with the same exhaled sentence: “We are so screwed”.
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What has that got to do with the good old USA? Follow this idea: We don’t have oil to buy everything with, so we made up something called the ‘national debt,’ spent 20 trillion dollars on that credit card, and the overseas banker got all the money to loan us buy moving our jobs to his place and selling us ‘cheap’ stuff he made in big box stores. This made 1% of America astoundingly rich, and most of us just got stuck with Craftsman tools that are now made in China, and a pile of personal debt. Now the problem: Just as people are figuring out how to use less oil, so are they figuring out that they may no longer need loan us money for our debt. We buy defense critical items from people who hate us and sell uranium to the Russians. Now go back to my old friends quote about his country, and think to yourself “We are so…….”
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OK, before you walk across the street and torch your neighbors Volkswagen that still has the “Gore 2000” sticker in the back window, realize we can still turn this around. We are only one generation into blowing this, and we still have a giant percentage of people who know how to make stuff in this country. We are well educated, and we have a legacy from our parents and grandparents of actual hard work. The key thing is to cut way back or stop buying imported things that we should be making here. Adam Smiths example is stupid, unless you are the kind of parent that says “I can just work all the time if I hire a minimum wage babysitter to raise my kids.” In reality, your country is your family and buying things made here is an investment in your family, which is a lot cheaper in the long run if they learn productive trades rather than you paying kids in families on the other side of town to learn productive trades. Think it over next time someone tells you they bought the imported one because they thought it was “Cheap” or they said they bought it because they support “Free Trade.” Both of these are very surface goals when pitted against the survival of our country.
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Hey William, why are you picking on Al Gore? The reason why I dislike old Al is because he was the single most outspoken champion of making it profitable and easy to ship manufacturing jobs out of this country, NAFTA. One of the great things about YouTube is that you can go and look at how Gore predicted it was actually going to bring waves of new jobs to this country. Right next to him was Ross Perot, who famously said that if NAFTA was passed there would be a “Giant Sucking Sound” until jobs in Mexico went up to $6 an hour, and Jobs in the US came down to the same wage. He wasn’t exactly right, the people in the US who would have had jobs in manufacturing actually work for $7.25 an hour, but a lot of them have no job today.
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“Formal, but here to party”
Builders,
An acquaintance of mine sent an email saying “I’ll bet you don’t even own a tie.” Well, below is the photo showing he is incorrect. Never pays to jump to conclusions about people, they might be a lot more classy than you first suspected….
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Rachel Weseman took this photo of me arriving at their post thanksgiving party last year. Every year Dan and Rachel host a big event that starts with a Skeet shooting contest on the south overrun, morphs into a cookout-pool party, and ends 10 or 12 hours later with a giant bonfire. As a guest, I never like showing up empty handed, that is why I rode over with a box of clays, 200 shells and a 20 gauge.
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While many airports, particularly big public ones, frown on dirt bikes and firearms, our little grass strip is still a place which understands many forms of expressing ones sense of freedom, and how the perfect afternoon can often be made by the judicious (but sequentially intelligent ) blending of these expressions.
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Although I am known for a wardrobe best described as “Clothing discarded by the homeless”, I would still be the first to deride America’s relaxation of formalities of proper guest behavior. Simply put, there is no reason why a civilized person would RSVP a social gathering, and then show up without a Club tie in a Windsor knot on a Brooks Brothers shirt. In a time of ever coarsening behavior, perhaps we can all agree on better manners.
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Confession: The title of this story owes it’s origin to the sagely advice dispensed by one of the greatest southern sportsmen of our times, Cal Naughton Jr. An immensely influential person, his observations on the human condition bring sense into a world woefully short of it, and offer a philosophical path for many of your countrymen.
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