Markets Keep Trying To Correct Our Direction

Let’s imagine that you went to college and then graduate school for the express purpose of going into the widget business. You believe in widgets. The business of America is widgets! Where would the world be without widgets? Everybody needs them. The government oversees the widget industry. Lobbyists spend billions a year influencing the Bureau of Widget Management. In fact, widgets are so important to the economy that the government subsidizes them. Thousands upon thousands of people make a mighty fine living off the widget industry.

However, there is a growing body of evidence that widgets are not only completely unnecessary, but they cause a great deal of harm. “Doohickies” and “whatchamacallits” are 1/10 the price of a widget, and they are a much better product with no ill health effects.

If you have a PHD in widgetology and make $500,000/year practicing widgetness, are you likely to notice that widgets suck and are slowly killing people?  Even if you did, are you going to buck the Widget Industrial Complex? Do you want all your friends and associates to hate you! More than likely, you are so immersed in “widget world” that widgetry becomes a theistic religion.  Anyone who questions Widgetianity is a heretic, a kook and a dangerous Alex Jones fruitcake! Burn the infidels at the stake! Widgeters must stand united to protect their most noble industry at all costs!

Well folks, welcome to just about any heavily regulated, entrenched business in America. If you’ve invested a good portion of your life in one area of study and avocation, you will be blind to what others see so clearly.

I just got through reading Casey Means’ book Good Energy.   Everyone has heard the adage, “you are what you eat.” The average American eats 70 metric tons of food in their lifetime.  Without getting too technical, Means explains how all our body’s trillions of cells have “mitochondria” inside them which function as an engine and an operating system to send signals to the rest of the body. Feed these cells the right “nutraceuticals” (food) and these mitochondria keep us from getting chronic illnesses, because that is what the body is intelligently designed to do!  If you overeat with the wrong types of food, the system is gummed up and all cattywampus, taxing cells and sending all sorts of agents to rescue the cells that these poor food choices have damaged.  When these cells are overworked and weakened, they can’t keep the body healthy. Means suggests that virtually all chronic diseases are a result of this imbalance, including cancer, Alzheimer’s and even the astonishing rise in mental health deficiencies.  The good news is the body is amazingly regenerative. It can fix itself when fed the right energy. She cites a long list of dramatic increases in chronic health diseases that either didn’t exist 65 years ago or were extremely rare. The reason for this dramatic rise is processed food, the effects of bad medicine and other modern lifestyle practices.

“Big Food” produces what Means calls “poison,” food laced with harmful additives that are purposefully addictive, such that the eater is never satiated and keeps eating and eating, getting fatter and fatter, and of course making the food industry richer and richer. Just like Covid, when it comes to nutrition standards and health advice, our federal government has been amazingly wrong about everything. The federal regulators live in “Widget World.”  Lobbyists corrupt the regulators, the federal government spends $166billion/year on crappy food, sugar is heavily subsidized, and the food producers write white papers that say all these artificial, lab made ingredients are perfectly fine. Meanwhile 74% of Americans are overweight and 90% are suffering under some form of metabolic dysfunction. The cellular science is not only very common sense credible, but also fascinating. Bad food can lead to psychological disorders, sounds crazy I know, but read the book. Sugar inflates the frontal lobes, the part of the brain that regulates our “animal” side through rationality and self-control.

Markets don’t operate with their usual efficiency in Widget World. The bureaucracy is entrenched, it does not react to market forces, but market forces must kowtow to regulators. Capitalism at its finest is creative destruction. Productive new ideas make old ideas obsolete and new businesses replace old businesses with regularity.

In addition to Good Energy, I’ve consumed other books and podcasts on nutraceuticals. I am now a believer, especially after the experience I’ve had the past year. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, no prescription drugs. I walk 6 miles a day, and run another 15 miles/week. I’ve always had the self-discipline to watch what I eat. Last year, I upped my game, ate a Caesar salad every day for lunch and became even more meticulous about eating “healthy.” I gained nearly 25 lbs. I also for the first time in my life was getting tired in late afternoon. How could this be! I listened to a Casey Means podcast and within 3-4 weeks all that weight was gone. The foods I was eating were all heavily recommended as healthy by the widgeters in the federal government. 

The widgeters were 100% wrong about Covid and they have been wrong about nutrition and health standards for 60 years, which begs the questions, why do we have these regulatory agencies? I’m convinced we would be better off without them. I’m all for individual choice and autonomy. The widgeters muck up everything and make it harder for markets to work. Big government tells us that it is here to make our lives easier, it will educate our children, tell us what medicines to take, even what we should eat, and the result is the populace has been slowly numbed to rely on government, instead of themselves.

These are exciting times. The revolution in health care is circumventing the Widget Industrial Complex and empowering individuals to monitor their own health. Markets are at work making this happen. I have an app on my phone, Yuka. It allows one to scan the barcode of any product in the supermarket, lists the harmful ingredients and grades each item for its nutritional value. I just bought a glucose sensor which will tell me what specific foods will give my cellular mitochondria the greatest energy to power my body. My son has a device, the “Ultrahuman Ring Air,” a sophisticated diagnostic device. A ring on your finger sends signals to an app which monitors and grades dozens of internal functionalities.  The purpose of all this technology is to power the individual to maintain cellular integrity; the body stays healthy and has the ability to fight off diseases. Stay healthy. Live longer. Be more productive. Lower medical bills.

Markets are telling the widgeters we have a better way! Let’s hope the widgeters get out of the way.