We make a minor breakthrough when we realize that bribes are the major component of government decisions. Bribes come from two goals. The first is a desire of the briber to maintain existing cash flows. They may be described as “Old Cash Flow Bribers”. The most powerful among them are the established producers of energy, food, medicine, and other widely used goods and services.
The second type of bribers are “New Cash Flow Bribers”. They manifest the bribers’ desire to divert existing cash flows into new channels that profits the “New Cash Flow Bribers”.
When the process of “fracking”, injecting water and other chemicals into shale formations over a mile underground, was invented, it produced amazing quantities of natural gas at low prices. Immediately, war between “Old Cash Flow Bribers” and “New Cash Flow Bribers” broke out.
The mercenaries, as usual, were environmentalists. They immediately began to complain about imaginary dangers of the clean, cheap natural gas they’d praised when it wasn’t a threat to the cash flows of those who hired them. Few people take these hired guns with advanced degrees very seriously. Those who confuse mercenaries paid by marketing departments with “intellectuals” are among the least intelligent of people, and are the rightful target of organized charlatans.
Environmental mercenaries have long praised electric cars, mostly because they don’t, and can’t, work well. One reason electric cars are uneconomical is the high price of copper. The motor windings of their beloved electric cars need lots of copper. “If only copper were cheaper, we could save the world from Global Warming. Or, cooling. Or, something.”
The Pebble Mine was recently discovered in Alaska. It holds an estimated eighty billion tons of copper. The he left’s beloved electric cars became a little more feasible. Finally.
But, fast-responding environmentalists, paid by the “Old Cash Flow Bribers” who are running very profitable copper mines of their own, immediately began to shoot down the benefits of cheaper supplies of copper. The usual salmon, seals, and walruses were said to be “Endangered, as never before!” Soon, movements to turn the area around the Pebble Mine into a National Park will emerge.
Only those on the left side of the intellectual bell curve will take them seriously. “What about the precious coastal abalone?”, the smarter questioners may ask after marketing mercenaries mention them repeatedly in news releases. They will ask such questions with wide-eyed sincerity, never stopping to find out if such creatures actually exist.
Those in the “big bulge” of the intellectual bell curve are easily led to be “greatly concerned” about things of little or no importance. Their mindless, unquestioning credulity is the greatest asset that either kind of Cash Flow Briber has.
