Biden mocks Americans’ intelligence: “If we were all going out & having lunch together & I said let’s ask whoever's in the next table, no matter what restaurant we’re in, have them explain the supply chain to us. Do you think they’d understand what we’re talking about?" pic.twitter.com/lHAwLJZBfy
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 6, 2021
The people in the next booth are probably links in the supply chain and they see what is going on around them on a daily basis.
Biden is a technocrat. The entirety of the Democrat party and a fair number of Republicans are technocrats.
They believe that society is too complicated for the average citizen to understand but they, people who got the right degrees from the right schools and interned at the right think tanks, are smart and knowledgeable enough to manage society and should be in charge.
The Soviet Union employed armies of mathematicians and actuaries to try and plan their economy and they failed and had shortages every year until they totally collapsed.
Liberal technocracy is just a milder version of that.
Biden says the supply chain crisis is too complicated for the average person to explain but he can so they should just listen to him.
But he has failed at fixing it. His Harvard educated, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey credentialed Transportation Secretary has proven to be an incompetent dumbass.
The truck drivers, freight yard operators, dock foremen, and others have far better ideas how to fix out supply chain problems because they are part of the supply chain.
But Biden says they are to unsophisticated to do that because they lack the right credentials.
The Biden Administration (like the Obama Administration before it) is a testimony to why technocracy is a terrible way to run a country.
I spent 40 years in academia. Some of my colleagues understood the limitations of their knowledge, but a disappointing number didn’t, while displaying the same arrogance. My friends in the private sector told me the same about expensively “ educated” executives who wouldn’t dream of talking to anyone actually doing the work.
Amen to everything you said, J.KB and Jack. These guys haven’t changed their playbook since the days of Woodrow Wilson, except to become more overt in their contempt for the people about whom they purport to care so much. As the Preppie girls used to say, “Gag me with a spoon!”
Biden is not technocrat. He is a politician and bureaucrat. So are his flankies.
In my observations of the system, there is abundance of politics and MbAs, but a dearth of technical knowledge and expertise.
I do nor equate ‘credentials’ with ‘expertise’
I don’t think of Biden as a technocrat either. Nor a bureaucrat. Instead, I’d argue he is a machine politician. That means: someone selected to be a public face, with enough personality to fool the electorate, just enough judgment to stay out of scandals too big to be spiked, and above all a willingness to follow orders.
Being a machine Senator is perfectly plausible, few people would notice and if you have a safe seat it’s a nice sinecure for someone with little competence or integrity. But an executive position, President most of all, is problematic for a machine politician. I keep wondering: are we going to find out some day who Biden’s boss is?
“The Supply Chain.”
As if there is ONE Single All Encompassing Supply Chain that every single product has to traverse? Every single product has its own supply chain. Some products have thousands of supply chains, each with its own constraints, bottlenecks, issues and strengths.
I just had green beans with my dinner. Guess what? There are lots of different supply chains for beans. Canned Beans? Frozen Beans? Fresh Beans? It is critical for all of them to be harvested at the right time, and rushed to the processing plant, or by an entirely different route to the Farmer’s Market.
Fresh beans keep for a week or maybe ten days, after that they are compost at best. Ditto if the canned and frozen beans are not cooked and canned, or cooked and frozen.
Canned beans can sit in a warehouse for months, even years, with not much needed than to keep the boxes dry, intact, and not freezing, Truck gets stuck? Warehouse coloses for a month? No problem. Frozen beans need to be frozen 24 hours a day right up to you pull them out of YOUR freezer.
Then look at the difference between the Consumer and the Commercial Market.. Remember the stories about supply disruptions when all those restaurants closed in March 2020? I buy beans by the bunch, 14-1/2 ounce can, or 1 pound frozen bag, not the 1,000 pound tote, 48 ounce can, 5 pound tray, 10 pound or 100 pound frozen bag.
Now do beef steak, gasoline, nuts and bolts, refrigerators, automobile seat belts, and a hundred million other individual products. All different raw materials, processes, shipping requirements, storage requirements, and end uses. Each has its own limits, choke points, useful lives, etc.
Thankfully not everything goes through the ports at Long Beach or LA. Although it seems like it, most products do not come from China, although Made in USA products seem to be as mythical as Unicorns sometimes.
Imagine some bureaucrats in Washington DC telling everyone exactly how to do their own business?
And Biden, if he wasn’t reading of the jumbo sized teleprompter screen, would think that a supply chain & logistics had something to do with lumber or something- and would then demand ice cream & a nap while pooping his pants.