How much do we control what is going to happen in the future?

Recently I attended a management conference for the electronic industry. One of the key speakers was a futurist. He spent most of his presentation talking about the past and how understanding what happened before influences what is going to happen in the future. I surmised from that position he was saying that we keep making the same mistakes over and over and do not learn anything from our past failures. He criticized the Federal Reserve because they continue to take positions using data from what has already happened instead of trying to see what could change things in the future. Part of his presentation was how policy changes our economic trajectory but failed to address the elephant in the room, which is energy policy. I submit that energy policy drives the economy as evidenced by the influence that OPEC has maintained over recent decades. How much would we care about the middle east if they had no oil? He said that politics plays a major role in determining what happens in the future. I took that as an understatement since our lives seem to be controlled by politics and the policy decisions that they make for us.

The recent environmental stance that has been adopted by many countries has caused them to make energy policy decisions that have negatively impacted the economy. The wind and sun have proven to be unreliable when the demand is the greatest while fossil fuel sources, which they want to eliminate, still prove reliable during those periods. Electric vehicles have also proven to be unreliable in extreme cold or hot conditions and still cost much more than their fossil fuel counterparts. Car manufacturers were mandated to produce electric vehicles that the public are not buying, causing unsold inventories to pile up. These same governments have discouraged exploration for more domestic fossil fuel sources making us dependent on foreign sources that we are not friendly with driving up the cost to the consumer and make us dependent on our enemies. The real environmental time bomb is the disposables at end of life of electric vehicle batteries, windmill parts, and solar panels which will be a problem a few years from now polluting the environment more than now. More people are realizing that going electric is not the panacea that they first believed, and they are now making more informed choices.

How about foreign policy decisions? What are these decisions based upon? In a perfect world it would be about the common good of the country but many times that is not the case. Greed, politics, naivety, personal power, and personal enrichment many times trump the common good. Many times, this ends up in conflict that might have been avoided by taking the high road. Negotiating this mine field is not for the inexperienced or the weak as our collective future is often in the balance.

The downfall of many past superpowers can be partly linked to their moral decay. The founders of the USA all strongly embraced the concept of maintaining our moral compass or our republic would not endure. I never thought I would see the decline of our morality in my lifetime, but I was wrong.

I certainly didn't anticipate that my government would be complicit in the decline by forcing it to happen even quicker. The attack on traditional religion, the family, parental rights, and established judicial practices that have gained the support of the political left by radical movements has increased dramatically in recent decades. We seem to be heading down the path of moral decay that our founders warned us about. This trend has awakened the silent majority, and they are no longer silent.

The decline of our education system is well documented. We are spending more and more, and the result is trending the wrong way. In the 1950s we were spending about 2% of GDP on education and now our spending is the highest in the industrialized world at around 6%. Yet our test results are among the worst. In the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test for 15-year-old students by the OECD the US ranked 13th on Mathematics and 31st on science test scores as of Sep 19, 2022. This is among the lowest in the industrialized world. We seem to be spending more of our educational dollars in indoctrinating our young people with social engineering than concentrating on STEM subjects. The mean spending for other industrialized nations is around 4% of GDP with better resulting test scores. These young people are the future. How prepared are they to lead the nation forward or even maintain it? A positive outcome of the COVID lockdown was that parents were able to see what their children were taught, and they were not happy, and they are becoming a strong voice for reform.

Canada, on the other hand, ranks much higher than the US as far as test scores are concerned while Mexico is either at or near the bottom. Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong consistently rank at or near the top of the rankings.

As someone who lives part of the year on the border in El Paso TX, I can attest that the border is wide open. I have also had the experience of working in countries that have very secure borders. I know a secure border when I see it and the Southern border of the USA is definitely not secure. There is a reason that countries have borders and that they have laws that regulate who can enter the country. Letting everyone come into the country without proper vetting is a disaster for any country. The EU learned that lesson when they allowed immigrants from Africa into their countries. Now they have serious crime problems they never had before, and their welfare roles have swelled to unsustainable levels. The border patrol has indicated that those coming are from over 100 different countries and that most of them are young military age men.

This practice is unsustainable, and the downstream results of this policy will plague the USA for years to come. Recent polls indicate that public concern about the border policy has increased.

On the whole I remain optimistic about the future. I believe that if people are forced to make radical changes they will eventually wake up and influence our leaders to reverse these policies. I don't think we are beyond the point were this can happen but we are dangerously close.

Author: Tim Eyerman