The whole thing about capitalism in its current disfigured configuration is that it's designed to be a rip-off game. Like a shell game where they put the pea under the dixie cup and move them all around with fancy handwork and then you're supposed to pick which cup the pea is under. You never can guess because the pea isn't even there any more, it's gone. You can't guess right. And we're like slow learners who keep wanting to try again and again all the while supplying the peas. We keep losing and they keep raking it in and pocketing it. At the end of the day, or when we run out of peas, they'll just close their travel cases and head off to Tahiti.
Capitalism by strict definition isn't necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't have to be practiced in its current form, there are other ways of doing it. It could be helpful and useful to us instead of being used as a whip to control us and make us slaves to the Prick Kings. Like any tool its purpose is supposed to be to make it easier for people to have productive lives and make it easier for folks to get things done. Money is a huge shortcut bypassing the whole barter, trade and negotiation angle we'd otherwise have to contend with. That might not be such a bad thing, not having money would slow us down exponentially. That said, it's not about speed per se, it's about not doing stupid things at break neck speed for all of the wrong reasons. Money doesn't abuse people, people abuse people.
Capitalism can be a helpful tool or a deadly weapon, and it's current mis-configuration is the latter. It is nothing but a weapon. All of the grand things "mankind" does come about for all of the wrong reasons and none of the right ones. Therefore we live in an insane world where the prevailing priority is always turning enormous profits. It doesn't matter what we're talking about here, it's to the point now where most everything is commodified and it's purpose is only to turn profits. The particular methods of turning those profits is irrelevant really because the profit seekers don't care and aren't interested in the crafting of quality or the provision of quality services. In fact the bulk of today's profits are steadily fed by cost cutting which comes directly out of quality reduction. We get crappy product quality and the worst customer service on record because they've slashed those things. They charge you more than ever before for those things and provide you with less than half of them.
It's worse than that really because in many cases they aren't providing anything you're paying for. They've skinned quality and value so thin to the bone that they're down to selling perceptions as opposed to the real thing. Take health care for example. Less than half of what you need in health care is an oxymoron. You need what you need when you need it. What they've done there is usurp the need end of health care because that is where they can extract more money for themselves. Insurance companies exist to deny needed health care procedures. The less they pay out in claims the more of the monthly premiums they take home to their private vaults. They brazenly hire people to specifically turn down claims no matter how urgent the need or how obvious the qualification. Some insurance companies have a standard policy of denying every single claim three times before they'll even look it over. That's what happens when capitalism is allowed to run loose in the world.
That's what happened and to the extent the insanity of capitalist greed has been allowed to manifest itself unhindered and unregulated, the equal and opposite result is that our world is going down the toilet.
How stupid do you have to be to not care that you're shitting in your own bed? Because a world driven by profit motive is doing just that. Capitalists are like great fat men lying in their beds obsessed with having a bowel movement. It's all they can think about. Everything they do all day is toward the aim of having their next great bowel movement. Then when the moment comes they're so consumed with the personal euphoria of passing their feces that they can't be bothered to get up and go to the toilet. They just lay in their beds and let it come. They're laying in decades of their own waste right now, and unfortunately we're all sloshing through their waste too.
Capitalists are not only too dangerous to allow out and about without a choke collar and a very short leash to reign them in at the first sign of straying, they're perhaps the single most useless form of human life on the planet. Think about it. What do capitalists do? They don't provide anything. They don't create anything. They're parasites. Enormous, bloated, consuming, voracious parasites. They are wholly dependent on sucking the wealth out of everyone else for their subsistence. Only they're not content to just subsist and be grateful for the charity. They're hog wild. They want everything you've got all for themselves.
Their game was and is creating closed and directly controlled systems wherein they will always win and you will always lose to them. They created a monetary system with that outcome in mind a very long time ago and stealthily implanted it into our country some time back. The result was money that isn't money but is instead a ticket of debt which can never be repaid.
Just think, when you get paid for your labor you're being paid in debt that you have to pay interest on to the capitalists. It's creepy as hell to realize that a fistful of dollars is not a fistful of wealth, but instead a fistful of IOU's. Your cash really ain't nothing but trash, just like Steve Miller told us.
It's not enough that they've got the sole right to create phony money out of thin air and charge interest on it for eternity. They want more than a piece of every single transaction and dollar paid out. They want it all. And why not? Once you've created and perfected the ultimate con game and insinuated it into every fiber of society, you're a guaranteed winner. You're the thief that will never get busted or punished after pulling off the greatest longest lasting permanent heist ever conceived of. The wealth literally pours in every second of the day and night as parasitic sky high interest is paid into your private parasite vaults. After a while you realize that you've passed the half way point in terms of owning everything there is. You might as well go for it all, eh? Your phony money was never worth anything but the labor people out actually creates wealth, and that wealth is transferred straight to you. They get nothing, you get everything in a slow steady transfer. You loan thin air and get back real wealth, both in the principal of that loan and in the interest.
It's no wonder why we're all going bankrupt and the quality of our lives is on the down elevator while the capitalists are enjoying back to back half million dollar spa adventures on our dime week after week while the country is in financial meltdown mode. Clearly these parasites are celebrating the cherry on top of their wet dream. They not only have our financial system by the balls, they just ripped them off entirely. In one fell swoop it is cast in stone. You are now a slave. Their slave. And you'll be working until the day you die to repay the loan they just gave themselves out of thin air at high interest so they could feather their own nests yet again and take their pleasant little five star resort golf and spa trips. Thanks for your business America. It doesn't get any better than this.
Instead of speeding away in black sedans shooting a hail of gun fire out of Gatling guns, they just sashay off to the next fine resort to laze about in. They're supposed to be the pinnacle of success. Kind of makes you want to hurl, doesn't it?
You know these types would get quite uppity over my statements of their uselessness, but so far none of them have ever wanted to press the point. That's because they've got nothing to stand on. Just how useless are they? Try this mental exercise. Imagine a second planet Earth just like this one is today except that there are no people on it at all. Now let's scoop up all the capitalists and NWO wookies in a giant bucket and dump them out on that other planet Earth where there's nobody there but them. Go ahead boys, let's see you make a nickel. Go on, what's the delay? I thought you all were so darn smart and special and everything.
Unfortunately, without their five star accommodations and nobody to wait on them for every little thing they desire, without their private five star chefs, their chauffeur driven limousines, their crack secretaries and staffs, and without all the cadre of little butt smooching minions kneeling at their heels, they're too unhappy to think about how to turn a profit where there's nobody to rip off.
I can just imagine these pink handed spoiled brats demanding each other to wait on them. Who's going to go fetch dinner? Who's going to make the bed? Where's my coffee? Why is there nothing on TV? Where is our priceless propaganda machine? There's no need for propaganda when nobody's there but you all.
For the first time in their lives these men would have to take care of themselves like the rest of us do. They'd have to cook or they'd starve to death, which suits me fine, frankly. They'd be catty, jealous whiners, complaining about everything. Brings a tear to your eye don't it? In only a day, the giants of high finance would be reduced to washing their own clothing, procuring and preparing their own meals, figuring out what to wear every day all by their lonesome selves, and somehow managing to get by. They'd realize real fast that when nobody lives and breathes to clean up after you that you have to do it yourself. If you don't, your life is quickly buried in piled up garbage and things that need cleaning up and maintaining.
Maybe the fact these guys are so spoiled has something to do with their lack of concern for the damage they do in the course of endlessly accumulating their pointless profits. Maybe they're so disconnected from what it's like to have a real life they have no concept of what it's like to scrub a toilet bowl much less how it effects half a million people when you dump industrial waste into their water supply. Everything else is always taken care of by somebody else leaving them free to do nothing but focus on getting more money for themselves.
This is the very serious obsessive/compulsive disorder that comes of being too rich for your own good. Your humanity rots on the vine and you aren't capable of thinking or feeling like a fully alive, aware, awake human being. You're cut off and shut off from the world and from your own self. You play games in your phony self made paradise. And you suck as a person. You do damage every time you make a move. And the worst of it is, you don't care.
It's odd that to us becoming a diseased loser is a bad thing but to them it's the greatest thing in the world. That must be part of the disease. And they say recreational drugs are bad. Well what else would they say? They do have to create monsters out of thin air to cover the fact that they create money out of thin air.
One can't help but get to wondering just how much of the circus out there is contrived just to distract us from what they're up to. My guess is, almost all of it is made up. They're darn good at it too. Not very creative though. Sex and violence. Oh whoopie. Like I said, they're not good for much.
Speaking of which, I've long been wanting to press a point about what we're getting for our money these days. The whole money situation is already a rip-off in itself, but the rip-off continues in a fractal spin off.
I've been hearing a lot of complaints from people about the fact that their cell phones die after only a few months and they have to buy new ones. This is a repeating pattern. Cell phone users will indeed purchase several phones in the course of their lives. But the same can be said for all electronics. And household appliances. And furniture.
I can't even believe how cheap furniture is these days, it's not even made of wood anymore. A sofa or recliner wears out within a couple of years and starts to look like beaten up trash, as well as becoming uncomfortable. Most all consumer products are being manufactured in this manner. They are purposely built to fail in as short a time as they can get away with. The reason for this is obvious. They want consumers coming back to the store to buy stuff again. Again and again and again.
As much as we can all understand their desire to sell as much merchandise as possible, I don't think that building in cheapness is anything to be proud of. But there it is again, as previously mentioned, the profits are coming out of the quality we deserve.
Think of something. If you went out and performed some form of labor, you would be creating actual wealth. Labor is wealth creation, there is no other genuine way to do it. Now lets say you were real smart and would only accept payment in gold coins.
How long would those gold coins last if you put them away in a safe and never touched them? They would last forever. They wouldn't rot, or decay, or cease to be of value. They wouldn't melt or be temporary gold coins. You would have your wealth for all eternity if you never spent it. You could pass it down to your kids and they could pass it down to their kids in endless succession.
What this means is that the value of your money is forever. Wealth, once created, lasts forever. It will be there for as long as you hold onto it.
Now enter the merchandisers. The sellers, the manufacturers, the stores. All of them clammoring ceaselessly to get their hands on your wealth. They don't want you keeping it, they want it and they want to keep it. After all, hanging on to your wealth is the only way to grow it and become wealthy.
That's pretty hard to do when the products you buy are so crappy that they break after two or three months and you have to buy new ones. It's yet another not so subtle form of wealth transference, and it should piss you off. You're getting stiffed coming and going and the only ones not being rolled for every last dime are the ones on the other side of the fence.
When my grandmother died our family ended up with many of her things. We got her beds and her furniture and her kitchen appliances. Let me tell you about her toaster. It was made out of rock solid, shining chrome. It glistened and shone and she kept a cover over it that was a beautifully hand made doll in a long gingham dress, the skirt of which covered the toaster. Not my taste but it was her toaster.
The point is, that toaster still works today. It was manufactured in the 1940's, some sixty years ago, and it still works just like it did on the day she bought it. Her vacuum cleaner still works too. And so does her telephone. Her solid wood furniture is still beautiful and useful. It is not chipped and scratched and trashy. It's gorgeous as a matter of fact.
Which means what? Which means that it is well within capability to manufacture quality goods that last an entire lifetime. Why should you ever have to buy a replacement tool? Why shouldn't your refrigerator or your sofa or your car last your lifetime? Because I have to ask, why would you trade your forever lasting wealth in exchange for something that will not last just as long? How dumb are we?
It used to be that people understood that hanging on to your bucks was the desired configuration of life. You did not want to spend money on anything that you didn't have to. Money wasn't to be wasted on nonsense or on things you could do for yourself. Doing things for yourself was the way to go, and people made note of how other people did things and were rightly impressed quite often. It was a matter of some pride to make your own clothing or tools or anything else for that matter. The trick and the game was to cheat the stores, the marketers, the manufactures, and not give them your wealth. People knew what wealth transference was and they were dead set to keep their hard earned wealth.
Back in the 1940's manufactures knew this too, and they also knew that in order to get people to shop in their stores they'd better be offering something for people's money that was worth the money. They knew they had to have products of equal or better value than the dollars they'd be getting for them.
No one back then was interested in any outrageous 30 or 90 day warranties. What the hell does a 90 day warranty say? It tells you up front, "This item is a piece of shit. It will break." They'll still charge you three hundred dollars for it and you're supposed to be okay with that. You're supposed to not care that your forever wealth is being traded for a piece of shit product that will die inside of six months.
I'd say it's high time for us to get back to making our own things, and electronics cannot be that hard to make. There are so many old appliances and electronics out there now that parts can be picked up cheaply and making our own stuff might mean a return to quality and to products that serve us instead of ripping us off to benefit the most openly greedy consumer market known to man. It's really beyond belief how much we are taken to the cleaners. And you won't see this happening all over the world, not everyone is as used to being ripped off and cheated and forced to pay exponentially higher prices than things are worth as we are here in America. You can't pay more for less anywhere else than here.
To put this in perspective, how much would the stores or the manufactures or the sellers like it if the money you paid them for their products was only good for 90 days? What if it was temporary money? What if, at the end of 90 days, the stack of bills sitting in their vault suddenly turned into a puff of cloudy smoke and vanished into thin air? How well do you suppose that would go down for them?
And how well do you think it would go when you went to their stores and tried to explain to them that they need to accept your temporary money and they need to just accept that it will evaporate out of their bank accounts somewhere inside of six months? How would that go do you suppose?
Because that's what they've sold you. That's what they've sold all of us. We are supposed to believe and expect our dollar value to simply spontaneously evaporate within a few weeks and be okay with that.
There used to be such things as lifetime warranties, no fine print either. People demanded value for their dollar, and they got it. Because even the upheld promise of a purchased good lasting the buyers lifetime was still a generous deal for the seller. The wealth you gave him for that product will still last forever. The product you bought for it will not.
It's something to think about the next time you're going to lay your money down for something. Maybe it is time to start sending the message again that we want what we're paying for, and then some.
All of that leads me to a question I've been pondering for a while now. I don't know the answer to it and honestly, something about the question itself is hard for me to wrap my brain around, so I'll ask you to ponder it. Maybe you can come up with something.
The question is this. What has happened to all of the actual real wealth that's been created by working Americans? Where has it gone? We know that wealth, once created, is forever. We trade dollars for goods and lose in the bargain, but that wealth still exists. So how come everyone's broke? How come the country is on the verge of bankruptcy? How come most every county is on the verge of bankruptcy? How come so many people are filing bankruptcy?
Why is there no money for education, which used to be free through the graduate level? Why is our infrastructure crumbling?
Think of all of the cumulative real hard wealth that American labor has brought into existence since the 1940's. At the turn of the last century all but two percent of Americans owned their own homes. Only two percent were paying bankers for mortgages. At the turn of this century that's exactly reversed with only two percent owning their homes and 98% paying bankers for mortgages.
What's happened here? We've created who knows how much genuine physical wealth over the last hundred years in this country, so where is it?
This is going to piss you off but I think it boils down to interest. The interest we are forced to pay the federal reserve for the existence of their made from thin air money. We also pay interest on that money again when banks pretend to be loaning us money, like on credit cards or through a loan at a local bank. No actual dollars much less gold coin changes hands. But how do you have to get your money? You have to work for it. You have to create actual wealth with your hard labor. Then you get to pay back that real wealth for the ghost loans from the bankers and the credit card companies and the federal reserve. You also have to pay income tax when you get it, and you have to pay sales tax when you spend it. Just how much is left of a dollar as soon as its in your hand?
Add in inflation, which is really not anything getting bigger its your money losing value and really, what are these green pieces of paper in our wallets if not some kind of demonic invention? They are an invention that was lied about, telling us, "This is money" when the fact is, it never was money. It was debt. It always has been and it always will be because every dollar you see belongs to the federal reserve PLUS INTEREST. We've never once been paid in wealth for a job we've held. We've been working for free and giving the wealth we create to the bankers.
It's a staggering rip off. But it's also reality. Tell me if you see anything different, and then answer me that question? Where is all of the wealth?
Capitalism by strict definition isn't necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't have to be practiced in its current form, there are other ways of doing it. It could be helpful and useful to us instead of being used as a whip to control us and make us slaves to the Prick Kings. Like any tool its purpose is supposed to be to make it easier for people to have productive lives and make it easier for folks to get things done. Money is a huge shortcut bypassing the whole barter, trade and negotiation angle we'd otherwise have to contend with. That might not be such a bad thing, not having money would slow us down exponentially. That said, it's not about speed per se, it's about not doing stupid things at break neck speed for all of the wrong reasons. Money doesn't abuse people, people abuse people.
Capitalism can be a helpful tool or a deadly weapon, and it's current mis-configuration is the latter. It is nothing but a weapon. All of the grand things "mankind" does come about for all of the wrong reasons and none of the right ones. Therefore we live in an insane world where the prevailing priority is always turning enormous profits. It doesn't matter what we're talking about here, it's to the point now where most everything is commodified and it's purpose is only to turn profits. The particular methods of turning those profits is irrelevant really because the profit seekers don't care and aren't interested in the crafting of quality or the provision of quality services. In fact the bulk of today's profits are steadily fed by cost cutting which comes directly out of quality reduction. We get crappy product quality and the worst customer service on record because they've slashed those things. They charge you more than ever before for those things and provide you with less than half of them.
It's worse than that really because in many cases they aren't providing anything you're paying for. They've skinned quality and value so thin to the bone that they're down to selling perceptions as opposed to the real thing. Take health care for example. Less than half of what you need in health care is an oxymoron. You need what you need when you need it. What they've done there is usurp the need end of health care because that is where they can extract more money for themselves. Insurance companies exist to deny needed health care procedures. The less they pay out in claims the more of the monthly premiums they take home to their private vaults. They brazenly hire people to specifically turn down claims no matter how urgent the need or how obvious the qualification. Some insurance companies have a standard policy of denying every single claim three times before they'll even look it over. That's what happens when capitalism is allowed to run loose in the world.
That's what happened and to the extent the insanity of capitalist greed has been allowed to manifest itself unhindered and unregulated, the equal and opposite result is that our world is going down the toilet.
How stupid do you have to be to not care that you're shitting in your own bed? Because a world driven by profit motive is doing just that. Capitalists are like great fat men lying in their beds obsessed with having a bowel movement. It's all they can think about. Everything they do all day is toward the aim of having their next great bowel movement. Then when the moment comes they're so consumed with the personal euphoria of passing their feces that they can't be bothered to get up and go to the toilet. They just lay in their beds and let it come. They're laying in decades of their own waste right now, and unfortunately we're all sloshing through their waste too.
Capitalists are not only too dangerous to allow out and about without a choke collar and a very short leash to reign them in at the first sign of straying, they're perhaps the single most useless form of human life on the planet. Think about it. What do capitalists do? They don't provide anything. They don't create anything. They're parasites. Enormous, bloated, consuming, voracious parasites. They are wholly dependent on sucking the wealth out of everyone else for their subsistence. Only they're not content to just subsist and be grateful for the charity. They're hog wild. They want everything you've got all for themselves.
Their game was and is creating closed and directly controlled systems wherein they will always win and you will always lose to them. They created a monetary system with that outcome in mind a very long time ago and stealthily implanted it into our country some time back. The result was money that isn't money but is instead a ticket of debt which can never be repaid.
Just think, when you get paid for your labor you're being paid in debt that you have to pay interest on to the capitalists. It's creepy as hell to realize that a fistful of dollars is not a fistful of wealth, but instead a fistful of IOU's. Your cash really ain't nothing but trash, just like Steve Miller told us.
It's not enough that they've got the sole right to create phony money out of thin air and charge interest on it for eternity. They want more than a piece of every single transaction and dollar paid out. They want it all. And why not? Once you've created and perfected the ultimate con game and insinuated it into every fiber of society, you're a guaranteed winner. You're the thief that will never get busted or punished after pulling off the greatest longest lasting permanent heist ever conceived of. The wealth literally pours in every second of the day and night as parasitic sky high interest is paid into your private parasite vaults. After a while you realize that you've passed the half way point in terms of owning everything there is. You might as well go for it all, eh? Your phony money was never worth anything but the labor people out actually creates wealth, and that wealth is transferred straight to you. They get nothing, you get everything in a slow steady transfer. You loan thin air and get back real wealth, both in the principal of that loan and in the interest.
It's no wonder why we're all going bankrupt and the quality of our lives is on the down elevator while the capitalists are enjoying back to back half million dollar spa adventures on our dime week after week while the country is in financial meltdown mode. Clearly these parasites are celebrating the cherry on top of their wet dream. They not only have our financial system by the balls, they just ripped them off entirely. In one fell swoop it is cast in stone. You are now a slave. Their slave. And you'll be working until the day you die to repay the loan they just gave themselves out of thin air at high interest so they could feather their own nests yet again and take their pleasant little five star resort golf and spa trips. Thanks for your business America. It doesn't get any better than this.
Instead of speeding away in black sedans shooting a hail of gun fire out of Gatling guns, they just sashay off to the next fine resort to laze about in. They're supposed to be the pinnacle of success. Kind of makes you want to hurl, doesn't it?
You know these types would get quite uppity over my statements of their uselessness, but so far none of them have ever wanted to press the point. That's because they've got nothing to stand on. Just how useless are they? Try this mental exercise. Imagine a second planet Earth just like this one is today except that there are no people on it at all. Now let's scoop up all the capitalists and NWO wookies in a giant bucket and dump them out on that other planet Earth where there's nobody there but them. Go ahead boys, let's see you make a nickel. Go on, what's the delay? I thought you all were so darn smart and special and everything.
Unfortunately, without their five star accommodations and nobody to wait on them for every little thing they desire, without their private five star chefs, their chauffeur driven limousines, their crack secretaries and staffs, and without all the cadre of little butt smooching minions kneeling at their heels, they're too unhappy to think about how to turn a profit where there's nobody to rip off.
I can just imagine these pink handed spoiled brats demanding each other to wait on them. Who's going to go fetch dinner? Who's going to make the bed? Where's my coffee? Why is there nothing on TV? Where is our priceless propaganda machine? There's no need for propaganda when nobody's there but you all.
For the first time in their lives these men would have to take care of themselves like the rest of us do. They'd have to cook or they'd starve to death, which suits me fine, frankly. They'd be catty, jealous whiners, complaining about everything. Brings a tear to your eye don't it? In only a day, the giants of high finance would be reduced to washing their own clothing, procuring and preparing their own meals, figuring out what to wear every day all by their lonesome selves, and somehow managing to get by. They'd realize real fast that when nobody lives and breathes to clean up after you that you have to do it yourself. If you don't, your life is quickly buried in piled up garbage and things that need cleaning up and maintaining.
Maybe the fact these guys are so spoiled has something to do with their lack of concern for the damage they do in the course of endlessly accumulating their pointless profits. Maybe they're so disconnected from what it's like to have a real life they have no concept of what it's like to scrub a toilet bowl much less how it effects half a million people when you dump industrial waste into their water supply. Everything else is always taken care of by somebody else leaving them free to do nothing but focus on getting more money for themselves.
This is the very serious obsessive/compulsive disorder that comes of being too rich for your own good. Your humanity rots on the vine and you aren't capable of thinking or feeling like a fully alive, aware, awake human being. You're cut off and shut off from the world and from your own self. You play games in your phony self made paradise. And you suck as a person. You do damage every time you make a move. And the worst of it is, you don't care.
It's odd that to us becoming a diseased loser is a bad thing but to them it's the greatest thing in the world. That must be part of the disease. And they say recreational drugs are bad. Well what else would they say? They do have to create monsters out of thin air to cover the fact that they create money out of thin air.
One can't help but get to wondering just how much of the circus out there is contrived just to distract us from what they're up to. My guess is, almost all of it is made up. They're darn good at it too. Not very creative though. Sex and violence. Oh whoopie. Like I said, they're not good for much.
Speaking of which, I've long been wanting to press a point about what we're getting for our money these days. The whole money situation is already a rip-off in itself, but the rip-off continues in a fractal spin off.
I've been hearing a lot of complaints from people about the fact that their cell phones die after only a few months and they have to buy new ones. This is a repeating pattern. Cell phone users will indeed purchase several phones in the course of their lives. But the same can be said for all electronics. And household appliances. And furniture.
I can't even believe how cheap furniture is these days, it's not even made of wood anymore. A sofa or recliner wears out within a couple of years and starts to look like beaten up trash, as well as becoming uncomfortable. Most all consumer products are being manufactured in this manner. They are purposely built to fail in as short a time as they can get away with. The reason for this is obvious. They want consumers coming back to the store to buy stuff again. Again and again and again.
As much as we can all understand their desire to sell as much merchandise as possible, I don't think that building in cheapness is anything to be proud of. But there it is again, as previously mentioned, the profits are coming out of the quality we deserve.
Think of something. If you went out and performed some form of labor, you would be creating actual wealth. Labor is wealth creation, there is no other genuine way to do it. Now lets say you were real smart and would only accept payment in gold coins.
How long would those gold coins last if you put them away in a safe and never touched them? They would last forever. They wouldn't rot, or decay, or cease to be of value. They wouldn't melt or be temporary gold coins. You would have your wealth for all eternity if you never spent it. You could pass it down to your kids and they could pass it down to their kids in endless succession.
What this means is that the value of your money is forever. Wealth, once created, lasts forever. It will be there for as long as you hold onto it.
Now enter the merchandisers. The sellers, the manufacturers, the stores. All of them clammoring ceaselessly to get their hands on your wealth. They don't want you keeping it, they want it and they want to keep it. After all, hanging on to your wealth is the only way to grow it and become wealthy.
That's pretty hard to do when the products you buy are so crappy that they break after two or three months and you have to buy new ones. It's yet another not so subtle form of wealth transference, and it should piss you off. You're getting stiffed coming and going and the only ones not being rolled for every last dime are the ones on the other side of the fence.
When my grandmother died our family ended up with many of her things. We got her beds and her furniture and her kitchen appliances. Let me tell you about her toaster. It was made out of rock solid, shining chrome. It glistened and shone and she kept a cover over it that was a beautifully hand made doll in a long gingham dress, the skirt of which covered the toaster. Not my taste but it was her toaster.
The point is, that toaster still works today. It was manufactured in the 1940's, some sixty years ago, and it still works just like it did on the day she bought it. Her vacuum cleaner still works too. And so does her telephone. Her solid wood furniture is still beautiful and useful. It is not chipped and scratched and trashy. It's gorgeous as a matter of fact.
Which means what? Which means that it is well within capability to manufacture quality goods that last an entire lifetime. Why should you ever have to buy a replacement tool? Why shouldn't your refrigerator or your sofa or your car last your lifetime? Because I have to ask, why would you trade your forever lasting wealth in exchange for something that will not last just as long? How dumb are we?
It used to be that people understood that hanging on to your bucks was the desired configuration of life. You did not want to spend money on anything that you didn't have to. Money wasn't to be wasted on nonsense or on things you could do for yourself. Doing things for yourself was the way to go, and people made note of how other people did things and were rightly impressed quite often. It was a matter of some pride to make your own clothing or tools or anything else for that matter. The trick and the game was to cheat the stores, the marketers, the manufactures, and not give them your wealth. People knew what wealth transference was and they were dead set to keep their hard earned wealth.
Back in the 1940's manufactures knew this too, and they also knew that in order to get people to shop in their stores they'd better be offering something for people's money that was worth the money. They knew they had to have products of equal or better value than the dollars they'd be getting for them.
No one back then was interested in any outrageous 30 or 90 day warranties. What the hell does a 90 day warranty say? It tells you up front, "This item is a piece of shit. It will break." They'll still charge you three hundred dollars for it and you're supposed to be okay with that. You're supposed to not care that your forever wealth is being traded for a piece of shit product that will die inside of six months.
I'd say it's high time for us to get back to making our own things, and electronics cannot be that hard to make. There are so many old appliances and electronics out there now that parts can be picked up cheaply and making our own stuff might mean a return to quality and to products that serve us instead of ripping us off to benefit the most openly greedy consumer market known to man. It's really beyond belief how much we are taken to the cleaners. And you won't see this happening all over the world, not everyone is as used to being ripped off and cheated and forced to pay exponentially higher prices than things are worth as we are here in America. You can't pay more for less anywhere else than here.
To put this in perspective, how much would the stores or the manufactures or the sellers like it if the money you paid them for their products was only good for 90 days? What if it was temporary money? What if, at the end of 90 days, the stack of bills sitting in their vault suddenly turned into a puff of cloudy smoke and vanished into thin air? How well do you suppose that would go down for them?
And how well do you think it would go when you went to their stores and tried to explain to them that they need to accept your temporary money and they need to just accept that it will evaporate out of their bank accounts somewhere inside of six months? How would that go do you suppose?
Because that's what they've sold you. That's what they've sold all of us. We are supposed to believe and expect our dollar value to simply spontaneously evaporate within a few weeks and be okay with that.
There used to be such things as lifetime warranties, no fine print either. People demanded value for their dollar, and they got it. Because even the upheld promise of a purchased good lasting the buyers lifetime was still a generous deal for the seller. The wealth you gave him for that product will still last forever. The product you bought for it will not.
It's something to think about the next time you're going to lay your money down for something. Maybe it is time to start sending the message again that we want what we're paying for, and then some.
All of that leads me to a question I've been pondering for a while now. I don't know the answer to it and honestly, something about the question itself is hard for me to wrap my brain around, so I'll ask you to ponder it. Maybe you can come up with something.
The question is this. What has happened to all of the actual real wealth that's been created by working Americans? Where has it gone? We know that wealth, once created, is forever. We trade dollars for goods and lose in the bargain, but that wealth still exists. So how come everyone's broke? How come the country is on the verge of bankruptcy? How come most every county is on the verge of bankruptcy? How come so many people are filing bankruptcy?
Why is there no money for education, which used to be free through the graduate level? Why is our infrastructure crumbling?
Think of all of the cumulative real hard wealth that American labor has brought into existence since the 1940's. At the turn of the last century all but two percent of Americans owned their own homes. Only two percent were paying bankers for mortgages. At the turn of this century that's exactly reversed with only two percent owning their homes and 98% paying bankers for mortgages.
What's happened here? We've created who knows how much genuine physical wealth over the last hundred years in this country, so where is it?
This is going to piss you off but I think it boils down to interest. The interest we are forced to pay the federal reserve for the existence of their made from thin air money. We also pay interest on that money again when banks pretend to be loaning us money, like on credit cards or through a loan at a local bank. No actual dollars much less gold coin changes hands. But how do you have to get your money? You have to work for it. You have to create actual wealth with your hard labor. Then you get to pay back that real wealth for the ghost loans from the bankers and the credit card companies and the federal reserve. You also have to pay income tax when you get it, and you have to pay sales tax when you spend it. Just how much is left of a dollar as soon as its in your hand?
Add in inflation, which is really not anything getting bigger its your money losing value and really, what are these green pieces of paper in our wallets if not some kind of demonic invention? They are an invention that was lied about, telling us, "This is money" when the fact is, it never was money. It was debt. It always has been and it always will be because every dollar you see belongs to the federal reserve PLUS INTEREST. We've never once been paid in wealth for a job we've held. We've been working for free and giving the wealth we create to the bankers.
It's a staggering rip off. But it's also reality. Tell me if you see anything different, and then answer me that question? Where is all of the wealth?
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If health insurance was a free market enterprise, those companies screwing their customers would recieve so much negative press that other companies would step in to compete with them, offering a better quality service.
ReplyDeleteMany of the problems with capitalism are derived from it's association with the state and the formation of corporatism that results. Any time the state becomes involved and begins enforcing monopolies, standard suffer.
Nathanial.