I’ve argued against it for over 30 years, this whole dumb idea of push/pull systems.  People in the world need to be pushed.  When you go to Europe and ask the waiter to hurry up, and they say, “Why, don’t be in such a hurry, take your time.  Make love not war, enjoy the smell of the roses, and drink some fine wine,” you are listening to the effects of a socialist from a country infused with Marxism.  Not someone trying to be their most productive self, and that is the heart of the argument between push systems of manufacturing and pull.  Pushing is where product flow goes downstream and puts pressure on the weakest links to pick up the pace.  Pull is where the lowest links send the demand signal upstream, and everything gets built around the identity of the constraints.  Push systems force your most honest understanding of what a true constraint is.  Pull systems yield to the weakest interpretation and build around that false assumption.  Pull systems work pretty well in places like Japan because they have a society that genuinely tries to do an excellent job at all levels.  But in Western cultures, for many reasons, people need to be motivated to do good things, and they certainly need to be pushed.  Because their default personality is to be lazy and do as little as possible, any culture that does not enjoy hard work is prone to this condition, so trusting them to define their constraints is a fool’s game.  It’s also why we know that Covid was a fake plot created by radical elements of the world’s economic manipulations to convert the world to Marxism hidden behind a health crisis manufactured in a Wuhan lab in China during a critical election year.  How do we know, well, by economic measures. 

I’ve been talking about a recent trip I took my family on to Disney World, which was a long time in the planning phase.  In 2019, my wife and I took a scouting trip there to plan for the larger group: our kids, grandkids, husbands, dogs, lodging, and various factors.   Of course, as soon as we returned, COVID-19 hit, and it has been nearly four years to get everything back on schedule.  Due to Covid rules at Disney, such as social distancing and mask mandates, they were very slow to return to normal, and we weren’t going to go until that happened.  Some of my kids are so anti-mask and anti-vaccine that anything close to those regulations at Disney World was a hard pass, no.  So we had to wait a while for Disney to get its act together, and this year of 2023 was the first year of that normalcy.  Disney is an excellent example because it’s a uniquely American economic experience, so it’s a good barometer for general economic behavior, and measuring from 2019 to 2023 was an excellent way to compare before-COVID and after-COVID realities.  And what I was able to see easily was obvious in supply chains across the world.  Hidden in the health policies of COVID was outright Marxism that is still permeating the employee marketplace.  What we ended up with in 2023 was a lot of the Democrat policies that were only talked about in 2019, such as wage rates.  After COVID-19, employers had to throw money at employees to get them to come to work because COVID-19 had destroyed the value system entirely for all employees.  Why go to work when the government would pay you to stay home?  And why work harder if the wage rates were artificially propped up for everyone?  Even now, too many employees still want to work from home because they fear they have Covid, leaving employers stuck trying to fill production gaps with new weak links in the supply chain, not knowing if people are going to show up for work, and what they could do about it.

It was clear Disney was suffering from this very problem: their lines were less productive, their employees were much less engaged, and many things were broken that wouldn’t have been damaged or long in 2019.  I went to several restaurants selling souvenir glasses, expecting to buy them, only to be told they were out of stock and they had no idea when they would be.  In 2019, that wouldn’t have been the answer.  Even for Disney they were having difficulty getting parts of their supply chain to perform reliably.  And, of course, they were dealing with the same staffing shortages the rest of the world was: people who didn’t show up for work, believing that COVID recommendations would still get them out of work as good as a doctor’s note.  And there was nothing they could say about it.  The new message from Disney, which wasn’t the case in 2019, was that it would be expensive to vacation there.  And we will do our best.  Instead of expecting the best, they’d at least try.  It was that old Marxism acceptance of yielding to constraints instead of pushing them through competition to solve those problems.  And Covid was the means of forcing mass society to accept those constraints.  Previously, the supply chain would be pushed to ensure the market’s satisfaction.  Now, the market would have to wait and be happy with it.

People have been slow to admit to themselves that COVID was a weapon of global Marxism to do what they couldn’t do politically through health policy.  Yet the proof is everywhere, and behind some blatant lies of Bidenomics trying to hide horrendous economic news is the imposed Marxism that has slid under the door to just about every part of the global economy.  I see it everywhere. I just traveled through the Toronto International Airport, where they were trying to rid themselves of any memory of Covid policy, yet their employees were still functioning from the call-off effects, the unstable management of their workforce, and knowing who was going to be at work, how long they’d be there, and whether or not they could even hire enough people to staff their positions.  The holes were evident, and everyone was supposed to look the other way and pretend everything was fine, just like at Disney, and not even ask the question.  The world had imposed on it during COVID this Marxist pull system where the constraints were artificially created to serve that radical economic theory.  It wasn’t voted for; it was built into the COVID policy from the beginning and was undoubtedly one of its goals, which nobody saw coming.  But because of that aspect alone, there should be massive prosecutions of everyone who played their part in this global insurrection.  The evidence has been left behind and is evident to those with the eyes to see it.  And it was never about health.  Marxism was always the motivation for COVID-19, and it still lingers economically until people wise up to it and scrap the entire footprint it has left behind.  That’s a hard admission for many, but the reality is that for a proper economy to work genuinely, Marxism must be pushed out of it.  And until that happens, we will be left with a less-than-optimal economy and a general state of unhappiness always associated with Marxism.

Rich Hoffman