A Slip and a Fall

Mixed markets and broken bones...

(Icarus crashes to the shores below having flown to close to the sun. Jacob Peter Gowy, 1635, in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public Domain)

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”

~ Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentinas...

Trade wars and hot wars... bombast and guffaws... politics and market lores...

What a moment to be alive, dear reader! Debates we thought long dead, relegated to the dusty tomes on our bookshelves, are once again playing out among the chattering class and honest citizens alike.

In hotel bars and on Zoom calls, on television and Tik Tok, over family meals and weekend picnics, tongues are set to waggin’...

Free markets vs central planning... liberty vs security... free speech vs censorship... it’s all there, the eternal squabbling and diversions of the passing parade, showcasing man’s uncanny ability to multiply hubris by calumny.

History is not some ancient thing of the past; it is living now, unfolding before our eyes!

Last week, we hosted a live event, in which we invited three esteemed investors and free thinkers to help us make some sense of the world around us. Aptly dubbed Crisis & Opportunity at the End of the World, we listened as our guests outlined Argentina’s competitive (and comparative) advantages in an age of increasing tariffs and trade barriers.

George Gammon, founder of the popular Rebel Capitalist podcast, made the case for Argentine-style, freer markets as a way to achieve some oft-stated goals:

“The way to bring back manufacturing in the United States… is to reduce regulation, is to reduce bureaucracy, is to reduce red tape…”

NB: If you missed our event, but would like to watch or listen to the recording (or even read the transcript), all these resources are available to Notes Members, right here.

Our next conference is scheduled for early July. Upgrade to paid membership today:

On Wings of Wax

Meanwhile, right in the middle of all the chaos, when you’re busy looking elsewhere, something else tends to happen: Life.

A few hours from now, we’ll be burning up the atmosphere in a common commercial jetliner, stomping our filthy carbon footprint all across Jupiter’s blue skies.

(We reached out to St. Greta Thunberg to see if we might hitch a ride but, alas... there’s not enough room in her holy ark for all the wretched animals in this world.)

Yes, dear reader, it is that time of year again, when your editor’s carry-on sized family of three (numbering dear wifey, dear daughter and yours truly) pack their bindles and hit the road... and the skies... and the seas... etc.

Today’s technology almost makes traveling too easy. Indeed, the abundance of modern conveniences make a four-month, three-continent, dozen-nation voyage seem like a walk in the proverbial park... something even a one-armed newsletter writer could ostensibly manage.

Which is a good thing... given that your editor will be embarking on this year’s journey in something of a handicapped position, having fractured his elbow during an epic battle royale with the shower curtain, one which left him humbled, beaten and broken on the slippery bathroom tiles.

(Yours truly, taping away on today’s Note. Source: Dear Wifey)

Not to worry! Modern medicine had us back on packing duties within hours. The flight is on schedule and, barring any spontaneous duals with other household appliances (we’re looking at you, toaster!), we’ll be on it.

And so, we count ourselves among the fortunate, the few. Taking to the skies is indeed a gift. To think that Julius Caesar never dined from a seat back tray table... Mark Antony never heard of the mile high club... Cleopatra never got the additional pat-down from leering TSA creeps...

Far greater beings have walked the earth before us... and gazed at the heavens in idle vain. It’s time we check our privilege...

... and give thanks!

Thanks to long-dead fossils and wayward meteors and to sticky tar pits too...

Thanks to energy-dense hydrocarbons... and inexorable chemical processes... and the slow march of time...

Thanks to heavy-sour crude and the light-sweet stuff... to oil sands and the fracking revolution, to black gold and Texas tea and holes drilled deep in the ocean floor......

Thanks to glorious, super high-octane jet fuel!

And while we’re at it...

To the Dreamers and the Doers

Hats off to Colonel Drake and his Titusville gusher... to nodding donkeys and humble derricks... to lonely posts on offshore rigs and patient wives, waiting back home...

Cheers to the brave... the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur... to Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes and Amelia Earhart, too... and to all the unnamed pilots who plunged to watery graves so that their tearful, dogged colleagues might return to the drawing boards, tinker with the models, streamline their designs, and try, try again...

Thanks to the brainy... the engineers and idiot-savants and all the math whizzes who nutted out the dihedral effect and the lift coefficient and the aspect ratio... and all the other ballistic and aeronautical inputs far beyond our own innumerate grasp.

Thanks to the minds behind radar and GPS and even (yes, even) inflight entertainment...

Praise be to the high and the low, the grease monkeys and air traffic controllers and baggage handlers... the airport janitors and the lounge waitresses too...

And to everyone who turns the impossible, the miraculous, the positively stupendous – human flight! – into a banal reality at which the elites of the world so dismissively scoff... we salute you!

Thanks to the civilization built on cheap, reliable, high-density fossil fuels... a New World, capable of carrying us to the Old World and beyond, on wings even dear ol’ Daedalus could never have imagined.

Stay tuned for your next Note From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. It’s been about 15 months since we embarked on this little Notes journey and, thanks to the generosity of our dear Members, we’ve been able to parlay our scribbles into something that threatens to become a full time endeavor.

In fact, we’re now read in all 50 US States and across 137 countries around the world. Consider us chuffed.

Here’s what a few dear Members have to say about their Notes experience…

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