When I post titles like this, I realize how recursive the Web and the blogosphere are. Anyway, Advance Indiana has a good post on John Ketzeberger’s column criticizing Treasury Secretary John Snow’s assertion that the current economy is beneficial to everybody.
The market, Snow explained, is rewarding the nation’s most productive people with the highest compensation. And the rising tide, he argued, is lifting all boats.
I’m a collection attorney. I can tell you that the tide is not lifting all boats. I’ve boarded and captured a few myself after they’d run aground. I’d say it’s more like a hurricane that’s moving the biggest ships along at a nice clip while sinking or waterlogging the rest.
I could always do more with a sloop than a war galleon, under most conditions.
Hell yeah. Load the sloop with a pile of guns, then run circles around the galleon. It’s kind of like the Maginot Line versus the blitzkrieg.
On the other hand, if you’re intent on sacking Havana with a stiff breeze at your back, it’s probably better to take the galleon loaded up with extra men and hope to name a Governor.
There are endless life lessons to be had from Sid Meier’s Pirates!
But ship rigging with three masts can take a lot more damage than a sloop and still sail. I vote for moving down a couple of centuries and going for a frigate.
As for the Maginot Line, we’ll never know how it would stood up to the German Blitzkrieg, since the French didn’t cover their entire frontier with the line. It seems they had concluded that the Germans couldn’t send their tanks through the Ardennes. The Germans evidently read that part of the script, and so they sent their tanks through the Ardennes (but only after drawing the French and British into northern Belgium by their massive “feint” into the Netherlands. Interestingly, just four years later, at the “Bulge”, the U.S. Army also concluded that the Germans couldn’t send their tanks through the Ardennes and left the area lightly protected. It is not that the Maginot line was necessarily poorly conceived, but the Wehrmacht had a real talent for exposing any mistake in execution.