And so today, I make the obvious literary reference. Terry Pratchett. Because this is funny, right? I'm sure Stephen Miller is laughing, anyway. In Going Postal, the ruler of a city called Ankh-Morpork in Pratchett's "Discworld" decides to install a character named Moist Von Lipwig as the head of the local post office. Yes, his name is "Moist." Moist is a con artist, but he prides himself on never committing acts of violence. He doesn't kill anyone, so he can't be that bad a person, right? During a conversation with the golem assigned to keep an eye on him (Mr. Pump), he makes such an assertion, and Mr. Pump ascribes a body count to Moist's schemes. Moist is horrified by the body count because he never considered the indirect effects of what he had done, but when he wreaks economic havoc, the consequences are real, and while indirect, they can be matters of life-or-death. Moist just didn't see them because he had already absconded with the loot. He was deluding himself by pretending there were no such consequences. He was a con artist. That made him, effectively, a thief, and that caused economic damage. That economic damage killed people, if indirectly. More people than if he had just stabbed the occasional random person in an occasional random mugging. Yes, Moist was charming and witty and urbane, but he had a body count. Mr. Pump made him see that.
I am sure that you have watched the images and heard the sounds of screaming children, separated from their parents. Over 2,000 children. That is the easy story to tell. That is the easy toll to see and hear. Did you remember/know that Trump-the-mercantilist's trade war is escalating? That won't have the immediately obvious consequence of separating children from their parents and sticking them in cages, giving us those images. By the numbers, though, the consequences may be bigger, once we calculate the indirect effects. [Pump, pump, pump...] In economics, everything is about indirect effects. Tariffs choke off trade. Prices of imported goods go up, making it harder for consumers to get by, employers who are dependent on intermediate goods that are imported have to lay people off or shut down, and people lose jobs. Other countries retaliate with their own tariffs, and our businesses suffer, and you get more layoffs, and... Putting the human faces on any of it is just hard, in contrast with child separations. That doesn't mean the consequences aren't real. Or bigger. How big will the consequences of Trump's idiotic fucking trade war get? I don't know. It is just getting started, but in a country of 300,000,000, they can be minuscule and still far outpace the human toll of Trump's child separation policies.
Mr. Pump confronted Moist with the human toll of his schemes to deny him the illusion of thinking he was really that much better than a mugger who stabs the occasional victim. But, what if the con artist with the indirect mass body count is also a small-time thug?
Just call me Mr. Pump.