The Price of Ignorance

God gave us a brain, and He expects us to use it . --Galileo Galilei

Rarely in human history does ignorance come back to reward those afflicted by it. But that conclusion is looming larger with each passing day as the primary factor with respect to delays in setting up safeguards against the Covid-19 virus. First, our unemployment rate jumped, then import shortages caused prices for thousands of products to rise; the Federal Reserve was forced to raise interest rates to stop the growing unemployment rate; while delays in taking aggressive action against the virus put us on course to a high contamination and death rate. President Trump had alerted US residents that the virus was no worse than the flu, and he did not enforce masks, or the 6 ft safety space, and generally downplayed the deadly nature of Covid. In 2020 he was defeated in his re-election bid, while Joe Biden succeeded him and properly received credit for bringing Covid under control.

But that did not bring an end to the Covid linkages and the causal chain of other events. Consumer prices got stuck at the high end from high interest rates, and they took until now to begin to fall. Meanwhile, Covid racked up a death rate in the US that was 12 times higher that the world rate. More than 1 million US residents here died.  Meanwhile, the US economy recovered in all aspects except for home prices linked to high interest rates imposed by the Fed, and food prices that lingered at very high rates stemming from gaps and delays in the food supply chain.

Then along came the 2024 elections. Consumers all but forgot about Covid. Instead, they focused on rents, home and food prices—all too high for the typical household. So who did they blame? Not Trump, but Biden and Harris on the faulty logic that despite the re-energized economy, interest rates were keeping food and home prices too high, and Kamala Harris was to blame. So they voted for change. And who was the recipient of that vote? Donald Trump.

But Trump knows almost nothing about cause and effect. Or economics. Or critical thinking. And apparently the general public is also ignorant about such matters. So the winner is Ignorance. And we are the losers. But wait. We are now on course to a few more whammies. Now democracy is on the chopping block. And so is freedom. And so is the economy. Trump's no-nothing Tariff scheme is doomed to failure before it starts. Apparently he also knows little about history. In 1930, Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It exacerbated the 1930 recession, and pushed all major world economies into the Great Depression. And Trump is now busy putting together the worst gang of misfits to run all the critical functions of government.

Martin Luther King opined that the “arc of history bends toward justice.” He did not live long enough to observe the downside of his thoughts. Now it could be 100 or more years, and 20 or 30 more crises away. And we are left to take the brunt of it all because Donald Trump failed the test of leadership by a pandemic with deeper divots than his golf game.