Playing Age of Empires as a kid was magical.
Bedtime had no chance against it. If you were as serious as I was then you created endless variations of team matches and eight-civilization royal rumbles in addition to tirelessly battling the computer in story mode.
Maybe you even went ‘online’ and played your friends or a stranger.
HOW DO I TURN THIS ON
Then something unexpected happened.
One day, as you carefully calculate the optimal fishing spot, you hear the ‘being attacked’ sound. You scroll back to your base to manage the defense only to behold a black Ferrari comfortably parked in the middle of your town. It is firing a rocket launcher at your granary and your villagers are all dead.
You feel a little cheated, but not to be outdone you quickly find the cheat codes yourself.
PEPPERONI PIZZA gives you an additional 1000 food.
PHOTON MAN summons a… photon man.
Best of all, HOW DO I TURN THIS ON spawns a rocket launcher Ferrari.
You create your first rocket launcher Ferrari. The code works!
You joyride the map hilariously liquidating alligators and bighorn sheep. Next, you max out your population with rocket launcher Ferraris and carve up every catapult, legionary and horse archer on the map. It is cool!
Then the game is over. The day you summon 50 Ferraris is the last day you can reasonably take Age of Empires seriously.
It fundamentally ruins the game.
The Trump administration is summoning rocket launcher Ferraris
The financial bailout taking place right now is beyond unprecedented. Analysts project that Trump’s total bailout costs will total UD$10 trillion. Krishna Guha, head of global policy and central bank strategy for Evercore ISI, believes that the Fed’s efforts alone will reach US$10 trillion.
There is surprisingly little difference between summoning rocket launcher Ferraris in Age of Empires and inventing UD$10 trillion from thin air. These actions structurally undermine the concept of fairness. Despite that, the Fed is not shy in announcing that they will do “whatever it takes.”
Historical context and Fed analysis make it crystal clear that printing money in exactly this way leads to economic ruin. Why should we think we can do this at unheard of levels no less and not face similar consequences?
For context, Obama’s bailout totals were close to UD$700 billion. Today, after interest and repayments it stands at US$121 billion. Some calculate it at US$498 billion. Think about what a big deal that was at the time; these numbers are entirely trivial in comparison.
But… other countries do this too!
That’s a valid point and you are correct. Many central banks print money.
The difference is that central banks increase their pool of available money with extreme caution. Countries like Germany post-WW1, Zimbabwe and Venezuela are just a few examples of reckless money printing leading to cataclysmic hyperinflation.
More reasonable countries might invent enough resources to build a few additional elephant archers or maybe even a galleon, but no one has ever been so bold as to pump out fleets of rocket launcher Ferraris.
What happens to all the villagers?
In the game, the moment a rocket launcher Ferrari arrives, the villagers labor becomes inherently valueless.
Why should some chump in a loincloth bust his balls breaking rocks all day when you can just type QUARRY into a chat box and gain 1000 stone? He won’t even approach those numbers in his lifetime. Why gather berries or chop wood at all? Any villager continuing to honestly collect resources in this new, cheat-code-enabled landscape is, definitionally, a sucker.
Furthermore, why should villagers bother with taxes, loan repayments or mortgages? It’s more convenient to just invent that same amount. In fact, go ahead and printout ten times that amount. Print a thousand times that amount.
If there is a hyperinflation threshold to be crossed, it is now a distant speck on the horizon, in the collective rearview mirror of a fleet of rocket launcher Ferraris.
Trump’s solution is entirely absurd, appallingly uncreative and embarrassingly short-sighted. While we should expect economic challenges in dealing with a pandemic of this nature, this response jumps a pool of laser-beam megasharks.
