Globalism: A 15,000 Mile Supply Chain Dependent on Petroleum
Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” is a perfect colloquialism for Newton’s third law of motion. In life as in physics; for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Even our good deeds- perhaps especially our good deeds- have consequences. Everything does.
Every action we take or don’t take, or don’t take far enough, or take too far; every trail blazed, every shortcut and work-around, every painstakingly engineered process and carefully calculated action: Everything we set in motion- no matter the purity of our intentions, the quality of our work or our attention to detail- produces an outcome and we can’t always predict it.
In fact, we can almost never predict it.
We can convene quorums of experts, plumb the depths of human knowledge, spend decades in market, tax and policy scholarship and still get it wrong. Or rather, still fail to predict with any accuracy the outcomes of our actions.
Which is why none of our good deeds goes unpunished; solving one problem creates two others, like some sort of mythical hydra. We are Hercules performing his endless labors, we Sisyphus pushing that forsaken rock up the hill for all eternity; try as we might, we can’t get…