Karl Denninger considers the possibility that he may have been wasting his time warning his fellow Americans about the coming hard times:
Tell me, how many of you have demanded your Representative and two Senators place the military on the border and treat the influx of illegal crossers as an invasion, shutting down all passage of bills and other Congressional activity until the Executive does exactly that and implements 100% E-Verify, ejecting all illegal aliens already here? Oh yes, the so-called “Conservatives” have, several times, placed 100% E-Verify in a bill but every single time they’ve pulled it rather than insist it pass to get anything else, yet that IS within their power to do. How many of you have demanded all the scams and frauds in the medical system, including that ruled illegal under 15 USC Chapter 1 forty years ago, be met with immediate indictment, prosecution and imprisonment? I have, publicly and repeatedly for over a decade and been raising hell about it for more than two decades. Have you? Or is it only a problem when the invading mass of people show up in your city and start taking whatever they want? Is that not what an invading army does? Do you only complain when you get hurt and need a physician — and get personally screwed with a bill ten or even one hundred times that someone else pays, or when you’re prescribed a drug that is one hundred times as expensive as the same drug, made in the same factory, sold in Europe.
WELL?
I get it, people go along to get along.
But every now and then I have to look at the record, along with the over 15,500 articles I’ve written (not counting replies and discussions) since 2007 and ask: What has come of all the put-in effort, other than a bunch of worn-out keyboards?
After all there’s only 24 hours in a day, and now matter what I do, and how much money I have (or not) I can’t get a single one of the hours I spend doing this — and its a fairly significant investment in time and effort, for which I expect and earn basically nothing in terms of money — back.
I’m going to spend some of them doing something else since, at a certain point, you have to wonder if you really are tilting at windmills.
By Karl’s chosen metric, saving the American nation from itself, he has been a complete failure and all his efforts have been a complete waste of time. And it’s true, he has been and it was. But this failure was inevitable, because there is no saving a nation from itself. The task that he set himself was always impossible from the start.
A better metric, I think, is to ask whether one’s efforts have been beneficial to others. And on that basis, it is absolutely inarguable that Karl’s efforts have been a near-unprecedented success. He has almost certainly saved more individuals from unnecessarily experiencing poor health, degraded immune systems, and sudden death than one thousand doctors over the entire course of their medical careers. That is more than success, that is time well-spent and a life well-lived.
I’m not saying this to try to persuade Mr. Denninger to devote more time to his Market Ticker, or to make him feel any better about how he has spent his time and efforts, or to curry any favor with him. I’m simply an observer pointing out the observable facts, and the observable fact is that by any historical measure, if there was still a real Catholic Church with a genuine servant of Jesus Christ at its head, Karl Denninger would be beatified as a literal living saint for his selfless services to humanity.
Lest any readers here fear for my own feelings about the complete failure of my own 27,333 blog posts and even more significant time investment to save the American nation or Western civilization, please take comfort in the reminder that I am a quintessential Sigma male, I have always believed most people are self-serving idiots who are totally incapable of recognizing the inevitable consequences of their collective actions, and I have never expected anyone to understand, let alone agree, much less take any action on the basis of, my efforts. I observe because I am an observer and I write because I am a writer. That may not be enough for others with more ambitious objectives, but it is enough for me.
Perhaps we are all just tilting at windmills. But so what? Dragons or windmills, some of us are just born to tilt.