Hole in the Wall
Historically speaking, a “hole in the wall” has always signified a “small and unpretentious place.”
For the past four years, “The Wall” has signified a concrete barrier along the U.S./Mexican border built to keep “illegal aliens” out of the Land of the Free.
Roughly $11 billion has been sunk into building the so-called “Border Wall”—a structure promised to be impenetrable by human smugglers, drug smugglers, unlawful migrants, and a host of other life forms like rapists, murderers, and cockroaches.
But last year media reports surfaced, that smugglers of every stripe could buy a cordless $100 tool known as a “reciprocating saw” from any hardware store that can cut through the border wall like a warm knife through butter.
Now, frankly speaking, I wouldn’t know a “reciprocating saw” from a butter knife, much less how to use one to cut holes in an $11 billion border wall.
So what we really have is an $11 billion “border fix” that a $100 saw can unfix!
There’s a saying (and from where it came I don’t know) that a “fair exchange ain’t no robbery.”
An $11 billion dollar fix that can be unfixed for $100 is not a “fair exchange.”
As events have played out (which is probably why we have not heard much about “build the wall” or “who’s going to pay for the wall” in the current presidential race), the Wall was not needed to stem the “hordes” of unlawful trying to enter America.
The coronavirus pandemic (what we now uniformly refer to as “Covid-19”) has proven to be a barrier to anyone wanting to come to the U.S.A. The government’s incompetence at handling the Covid-19 pandemic has made the U.S. the world leader in the number of deaths and infections from the lethal virus.
Who would want to break into the United States today?
Anyway, hardware stores in Mexico now have a surplus of reciprocating saws that they cannot even unload for $20 on eBay.
I suspect (although I do not have an iota of proof) that the companies involved in building The Wall either owned or were heavily invested in the company’s manufacturing those reciprocating saws.
And I further suspect (and, again, I have no proof) that the companies so adroit at building The Wall immediately invested all their profits from the reciprocating saws into Lysol and Clorox once they learned that these over-the-counter products could do to Covid-19 what their saws did to The Wall.
That’s the beauty of true capitalism—the unbridled ability to put profit before people.
But this unholy desire more often than not fails much like The Wall.
Research Briefs found that 70 percent of the “upstart tech companies” fail within 20 months and 97 percent of the “consumer hardware startups” also die and become what is known in the business world as “zombies.”
So, in the business world over the past two years the Wall has failed, the “Reciprocating Saw” has failed, and the mixture of Lysol/Clorox has failed.
And who said “what America needs is a business man running the country?”
As a business sidebar, if you think the manufacturers of those reciprocating saws are pissed at Covid-19, think about the “private prison” industrial complex. Their companies are suing states right now for not delivering to them a sufficient amount of inmates to house because the states have joined the “prison reform” movement that demands a reduction of their inmate populations.
Private prison executives, the real founders of the “lock her up” mantra, have been forced to become focused on developing new sources of revenue: converting prisons into homeless shelters at a cost of $100 per head each night; making it a felony for anyone to stand in an early voting line for more than one hour; or creating an assortment of mandatory sentencing minimums for anyone wearing a mask in public.
These are just a few possible new inmate revenue sources.
Back to the “hole in the wall.”
That’s been the American business model the past four years.