Doing Something: The Most Dangerous Policy

How the Government Stole Christmas

The town of Whoville is on fire. Trees are burning, cars are crashing, Whos are running in every direction, and the Mayor — freshly shaved up the middle by the Grinch — is staring at his assistant in panic. Do something, he begs. The assistant nods gravely, considers the weight of the moment, and reaches for a razor. A beat later, his own head is shaved up the middle too.

It’s played for laughs in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000). It’s also the most honest thing Hollywood has ever filmed about how governments respond to a crisis.

Because right now, every central bank and finance ministry on the planet is holding that razor.

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The Compulsion to Act: How Governments Amplify Crisis

I believe that in a twisted way, this is the exactly what we’re seeing across the world. The call to “do something”—which is always a distorting effect against our ability to live stable, predictable lives. Three points stand out as being particularly relevant to this scene.

Governments and central banks with “all of their tools” are helpless to the chaos throughout the world that they themselves have provoked with their endless centralization, intervention into foreign affairs and the global economy. Since governments have next to zero understanding of market dynamics, they’re completely unaware with what to do when volatility begins to occur.

Likewise, once the chaos had began in this movie, it was impossible for the “leadership” to contain it. In a similar sense, especially with respect to a war, Pandora’s box is open and the forces of the world are unleashed. Even if they were aware of the problems, central planners are helpless to contain something as vast as prices at the pumps, food stock on the shelves, missile fire overseas or clean water supplies—even if they pretend they’re in control. It’s an illusion they tell themselves and others.

Secondly, not only will governments “do something”, but they will tend to copy other actions of the other governments, either due to a mix of foreign influence, ignorance or safety in numbers (this was certainly true about rolling out the same toxic encapsulated spike protein in the Covid “vaccines”, globally). This creates a domino effect of exponentially bad decisions that only aggravate the existing chaos. If your head is shaved, I’ll shave mine too.

Lastly, and crucially, they never want to be seen as doing nothing. Doing nothing is seen as inferior as doing something even if it’s counterproductive. As long as they did something, it is thought to be a productive move and “at least they could not be blamed for not taking action during a crisis”. This is the mentality of all governments around the world, especially ones who have an oppositions who can argue “remember that crisis 4 years ago, we remember you did nothing and you should have done something!” to try to make them look bad.

Governments are structurally incentivized to act—even when inaction would be better—and this leads to reflexive, imitative, and often destabilizing decisions.

The Message

In a roundabout way, this relates to State Speculator—the proclivity for government’s around the world to “do something” has never been stronger for us to speculate. This means influencing policy, increasing spending, introducing laws and supporting an agenda in favor of some market sectors and antagonist towards others. Now, since we have serious concerns over LNG, oil, fertilizer, helium, critical minerals supplies and equity markets at all-time highs—we’re about to see a lot of new top-down decisions. From here, we can position ourselves accordingly.

Come to think of it…maybe this wasn’t a children’s movie after all…

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Follow State Speculator for more bottleneck opportunities that arise globally and how we can speculate for the long-term. And if you like these movie analogies—here’s another one:

Prepared to Do Something