From even before the founding of the United States, Americans, in general, have been an impatient lot, and technology has made us even more impatient. With the arrival of cellphones, Amazon, and the internet, more and more people want what they want now, regardless of reality.

My wife, the music professor, encounters this all the time, with students who just want to Google an answer or who want to sing better instantly. They don’t want to hear that learning how to work out the answer develops skills that they need. Nor do they understand that it takes time to train muscles to produce the best singing, or to learn music – because, whether in a musical or in opera, you can’t Google the music while you’re on stage.

But the problems of wanting instant results also bleed into other areas. A few years ago, if you had the money – or the financing – you could go to a car dealer or other sources and get a car of your choice, or close to it, in days, if not hours. Now, depending on the make and model, people may have to wait months. Assembling parts and systems to produce a car takes most manufacturers around two workdays, but what gets overlooked is that the average car consists of around 30,000 parts, which come from different sources, and all of those parts take time to manufacture and ship to the assembly plant, and after assembly, the finished car has to be transported to a dealer. But until COVID disrupted the supply of certain critical computer chips, very few people understood or cared how long the entire process for building a car took. They just paid their money or financing and got a vehicle quickly.

Most products – even produce – get to the end consumer in a similar fashion, and most consumers don’t give the slightest thought to the process, or to the fact that nothing of value is produced instantly, even information on the internet.

The problem arises when there are glitches in the system… or when the system can’t produce the desired results. But the present system is relatively recent, especially historically.

I’m old enough to remember when the only items most people bought on credit were homes and cars. I didn’t even get a credit card until several years after I graduated from college, and in those times, it was difficult for women to get credit cards in their own names. Most people could only get what they could pay for in cash or check, and often you had to save for a time to afford large purchases.

Credit cards and then the internet changed all that, and, curmudgeon that I am, I’m not so sure that the instant credit and purchase system serves most people all that well, especially given the massive growth in personal debt and the seemingly ever-growing anger when instant gratification is denied.

As with many, if not most, of my books, the “reviewer” reviews of Contrarian include those reviewers who often review me but didn’t, to those who didn’t like the book very much, to those who liked it, and those who liked it very much.

As some readers may know, more than thirty years ago, after having published eight novels and nine short stories, all science fiction, over the previous seventeen years, I took on a new challenge, that of writing a fantasy novel with at least semi-realistic economics and politics, and a logical and internally consistent magic system integrated within the economics and politics of that world. That novel was, of course, The Magic of Recluce.

At that time (1989), there were few fantasy novels that even attempted the goals I set out. And then, and even today, many readers were looking for escapism unconstrained by reality. In either arrogance or naivete, if not both, I thought it was possible to write a fantasy novel with realistic people, economics, politics, and logical magic that some readers would buy and enjoy, and I think it’s fair to say that I’ve done so repeatedly, or at least come close.

But along the way, I’ve come to realize that many of the readers and even some professional reviewers who reject more “realistic” fantasies don’t reject them because they’re realistic, but because they don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, certain aspects of the real world.

That’s why one reviewer of the Grand Illusion books can term them taut political thrillers while another rejects them as boring and unrealistic, why one person smiles knowingly when reading about a seemingly boring vote on agricultural subsidies or “incidental” appropriations and another puts down the book.

In the end, how interesting and exciting a book is – or isn’t – depends not just on the author, but also what the reader brings to the book… or doesn’t.

People are angry, and they’re unhappy with the state of the economy. So they blame the current President. That’s not only unfair; it’s also stupid.

The current state of the economy is largely determined by events in the past. Most of the inflation we’ve suffered in the past two years was rooted in decisions and actions that occurred in the Trump Administration, but people blame Biden because they’re hurting now.

This is hardly new. George Bush senior made unpopular tax increases, but those tax increases were beneficial. Unhappily for him, they took effect in the Clinton Administration and boosted Clinton, not Bush.

But the internet and instant everything has made people even more impatient. When people can order something online and get it in days, if not sooner, they tend to think everything can be done quickly, not even considering that they’re ordering something that was already manufactured.

Biden pushed through the inflation reduction and the infrastructure act over a year ago. With the time that it takes to determine what projects can be done, to let the contracts, finalize the plans, get the permits, and assemble the right workforce, any project takes time, and most of those projects are just beginning. They’re barely breaking ground on the first of the new computer manufacturing facilities.

This also isn’t new. At the beginning of WW II, it took time to change auto plants into aircraft factories… and then there was a recession when the auto plants had to retool back to producing automobiles.

But the “I want it now” mentality, unfortunately, isn’t just limited to politics and industry. It’s pervaded everything.

I’m astounded at the number of automobile accidents, many of them fatal, caused just in southwest Utah by drivers speeding through yellow and red lights or not even stopping at stop signs. That doesn’t include those caused by speeding – and I mean really speeding, like at 100 mph. All of which are caused by impatience and the “I want it now” mentality.

Some people want environmental improvement now. Others don’t think the environmental conditions aren’t that bad. Both types fail to understand, or accept, that decades of using fossil fuels and greenhouse gases can’t be undone any time soon, and possibly not at all, given human nature.

Some people on Maui are already getting impatient at the “slowness” of disaster relief and the lack of housing for those whose homes burned, while “property sharks” are trying to gobble up burned-out properties even before authorities and families have sorted out who’s dead or missing, but Maui is an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and all the necessary goods, tools, and personnel have to be flown or shipped in. That takes time.

Some Americans are now getting impatient that Ukraine hasn’t been more effective against Russia, apparently without considering that Ukraine has stalled one of the largest military forces in the world, and without having adequate airpower. And these impatient Americans are wondering why the U.S. can’t get the F-16s to Ukraine quicker. These folks don’t seem to realize that it takes the U.S. a good nine months to train a pilot in the F-16. U.S. military experts have consistently made the point that it will take 4-6 months to adequately train a Ukrainian pilot already proficient in flying a MIG 29 – and that’s if the pilot’s fluent in English. Compressing that training much will just result in dead pilots and lost aircraft.

Lots of times, you just can’t have it now, but too many Americans can’t or won’t understand, and then they blame whoever’s in charge, even when it’s not the fault of who’s currently in charge.

For more than fifty years, the Republicans have been preaching that tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans, are good for the country. Yet years of research all across the world show that tax cuts, possibly except when the marginal tax rate is above 70%, actually hurt the poor and the middle class, while benefiting the rich.

A recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also rejects the trickle-down theory and states that “increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20% results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down.”

Why? Because the expenditures of middle- to-low-income sectors are the drivers of the economy, and increasing the incomes of low-income earners increases gross domestic product (GDP), while increasing the income of the top 20% of high-income earners decreases GDP.

Not surprisingly, U.S. tax cuts over the last thirty-five years have resulted in almost no increase in real income for typical working families in the U.S., while the wealthiest one percent of Americans became $29 trillion richer, and more and more assets flowed into Wall Street and the financial community.

A study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group — the rich. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn’t, and then examined their economic outcomes. The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered, but that “prosperity” didn’t even trickle down to the middle class, let alone to the working poor.

Research from two prominent economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, published in 2019 shows that for the first time in a century, the 400 richest American families paid lower taxes in 2018 than people in the middle class. Even before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest point in 50 years, according to Census data.

And since the pandemic began, the combined wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has jumped by more than 25%, that growth exceeding $1 trillion, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.

Yet while we’re still not catching up on collapsing bridges, highways, and other infrastructure, or the medical needs of veterans, and quite a few other needs, America’s billionaires are doing just fine, and the GOP is pushing more tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts for the working poor and increasing deficit spending as well to finance those tax cuts – while blaming it on the Democrats.

What’s more… most people seem to believe the GOP about tax cuts and have for fifty years, despite all the research findings to the contrary.