Tag Archives: economic reform

October 19, 2017

Collapse Is The Product Of Unsustainability. Sustainability Is the Product Of Sustainability.

By wise sloth

The economy is bad, and every politician running for office these days gets hard pressed to explain how they’re going to create jobs and raise wages. The problem with looking to campaigning politicians for answers to the world’s problems is they’re only going to tell you the answers that win them votes. So you can only expect to get the “Sunday school answers” from them that gloss over the hard, embarrassing roots of economic crises.

They’re never going to tell you the economy is bad because it’s fundamentally broken, and it’s not that the economy just all of a sudden broke after working properly for some time;  it’s designed to eat its own tail. So, technically, it was successful at doing what it was designed to do.

If you don’t know how America’s economy works, here’s a quick introduction. Companies try to sell as much stuff as possible. They try to spend as little money as possible for the things they buy and charge as much money as possible for the things they sell.

On the surface, this formula may seem reasonable. Lots of companies have gone bankrupt because they made products that lasted forever, and once everyone bought one, the business couldn’t sell anymore. So companies have learned not to make things that last. They make products as cheap as possible not only because it guarantees them more sales after those things break, but cheap junk is also cheap to produce. So companies make a higher profit at both ends of their business model. Then they can make even more money if they constantly raise the price of everything for any reason that sounds remotely justifiable.

 

 

There’s no giant conspiracy behind this. The state of the economy was probably inevitable. Businesses that minimize expenses and maximize profit make more money than businesses that sell high-quality products at reasonable prices, and once a business has more money than their competitors they can buy all the advantages they need to put their competitors out of business. In a free (or even not so free) market only the most profitable businesses survive, but when the majority of businesses sell the cheapest products at the highest price you cross a tipping point where the economy just eats itself alive.

Mass consumerism is burning through all the world’s natural resources at a mind-boggling rate. This destroys the environment and raises the cost of goods as resources become more scarce. Instead of those resources being used to build a permanent world, they’re used to fill garbage dumps and pollute the eco-system. Then we have to divert more resources to managing these problems we’re creating. All the while the businesses we rely on to sell us the products to manage the problems we’re creating keep raising keep selling us cheaper and cheaper tools while their cost keeps going up for any reason that sounds remotely justifiable. So for every two steps, we take towards a stable economy and a clean environment we take one step back.

But that’s a best-case scenario. In the real world, we’re running as fast as we can towards an economic collapse by making everything as expensive as it can be. The more expensive everything gets, and the more often people have to repair the things they’ve already bought, the less people can buy, which means the less demand there will be for new products, which means unemployment will go up, which means people will have even less money to buy more products to justify more jobs. This is a straight-forward domino effect straight towards collapse.

 

 

But the cure sounds as bad as the disease. If everyone made products that lasted and sold them for reasonable prices then many businesses would go bankrupt, and the ones that survived would never make enough capital to expand significantly.  This is a recipe for unemployment and ultimately… starvation.

However, unemployment is only a bad thing if the only reason people need jobs is to make as much money as possible because everything is expensive as possible and everything breaks. If people could survive for free (or next to free), then they wouldn’t need to work 40+ hours a week. We have the technology and skills to allow people to live for free if we would only use them.

Consider what you need to survive. You need a house, food, clothes, water, and electricity. How expensive is it to get those things? As it stands rent costs at least one-third of your wages. Food is grown in foreign countries, covered in toxic preservatives and shipped to foreign supermarkets that charge such high prices they can afford to have regular sales and still make money off of deeply discounted sale items. Your clothes are made in sweatshops in foreign countries and shipped to stores around the globe where their price tag is marked up thousands of times higher than they cost to produce. Utilities are largely run by private companies that charge as much money as they can while their executives live more luxuriously than any medieval king could ever dream of.  When you lay it out like that, there’s obvious room for improvement in this system.

There are ways we can make housing, clothing, food, and utilities drastically cheaper. If we do that, the economy won’t make as much profit, but people won’t need to work for (or save) as much money to survive. Plus, if they don’t have to spend money on housing, food, clothing, and utilities then they’ll have more money to spend on job-creating products.

I’ll make a few suggestions how to lower costs on these expenses, but I’m not trying to convince you those are the right ideas as much as I’m trying to convince you that everyone (especially politicians) should be thinking and talking about lowering the cost of survival to improve our quality of living and our chances of survival.

Here are a few suggestions to stabilize our economy and our lives:

 

Housing

Taxpayers pay a lot of money to the government through the course of their lives under the assumed condition that their government will use that money to improve their quality of life. Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and similar social services are all swamped by people who are too poor and sick to survive. Half the problems those social services address could be solved if people had free housing, even if that “house” was nothing more than a cramped efficiency apartment. If it was free and guaranteed then everyone will have a better chance of building a secure, healthy life…and career.

Governments can claim eminent domain over property, and we can build extremely cheap, strong, eco-friendly buildings with sandbags. America certainly has enough prisoners to put to work filling sandbags. Once these are built, there’s no need to charge citizens extortionate fees or taxes to live there. If poor people can live there freely and securely then the cost/benefit analysis of doing drugs and committing crime will plummet with their stress level.

This isn’t giving the poor a handout. The poor pay more in taxes in their lifetime than it would cost to build sustainable sandbag houses for every person in the world three times over in sin taxes alone. Even if that’s not precisely true, the point the remains.  Poor people pay taxes with the understanding that the government will use it to raise their quality of life. You can pay for houses for the poor with poor people’s own money if governments would just stop spending poor people’s taxes on such aggressive police and militaries who prey on civilians. And stop having the poor subsidies tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

I really want to beat this horse to death, because this is such a simple and obvious concept that it’s easy to take for granted, but it’s profoundly important. Governments exist to help the taxpayers who fund it. Nothing…nothing…nothing…nothing… in the world will help first-world taxpayers more today than having a free house. Setting up a system to provide everyone with a free house should have been one of the first things any government ever did. And with the technology we have today this is more possible than ever.

 

Food

There’s no need to get rid of super farms altogether or ban international food shipments. They serve a purpose, but there’s no need for the world to rely solely on them for its food supply. You can grow food anywhere. You just need a place to grow it and someone who knows how to make it grow. If you grow it right next to you then you don’t have to ship it anywhere but your kitchen before you consume it. If governments build free housing complexes they could incorporate gardens and small strips of farm/ranch land into the layout. It would be inefficient to try to grow all your food there, but any amount you could grow onsite you don’t have to pay to import. If you can grow 30% of your food onsite then you can reduce your living expenses by 30% while creating local agriculture jobs for skilled and unskilled workers. That’ll also reduce food-shipping-related pollution and resource-consumption by 30%.

But this method wouldn’t work in suburbia because suburbia is so inefficiently designed. That’s not a reason to disregard urban agriculture. That’s a reason to abandon the suburban city model.

 

Clothing

If we can’t clothe ourselves without forcing children to work in sweatshops then we should just walk around naked. But we don’t have to rely on sweatshops, and we don’t have to pay $90 for a shirt. There should be a global ban on importing sweatshop clothing. That doesn’t mean sweatshop workers should lose their jobs. That means factory workers should get paid a living wage and get to work under inhumane conditions. But that’s not going to happen as long as CEOs reserve the right to exploit their workers and have the incentive of being able to pocket as much of the company’s profits as they want. Cap executive pay and put a limit on how high the cost of products can be marked up. Make profit sharing mandatory. And finally, let an impartial, international health organization set health and safety standards for commercial merchandise.  The only “negative” consequence these changes have to cause is stopping executives from being able to afford to live in utter, shameful luxury. As long as business executives can’t pass their costs off onto their workers or customers then everyone else will enjoy a higher quality of living while still being able to afford clothes, shoes, and all the other products we buy.

 

Utilities

Technology exists for buildings to collect their own rainwater, process their own waste and generate their own electricity. If building standards required every building to be environmentally sustainable then there would be little need to pay for public utilities or their upkeep. Cities could still keep public utilities in a backup fashion instead of being the single point of failure that they are now. I’m not saying it’ll be easy to convert the world to using sustainable architecture/technology. I’m just saying, as long as we keep doing what we’re doing we should expect the same results.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Fixing the Economy

October 19, 2017

Politics Won’t Stop Being Evil Until Economics Stops Being Evil

By wise sloth

The American populace has become infamous for how divided it is on how it expects its government to operate. However, the country is united almost unanimously on the position that political change is needed. As the country devolves into near civil war over the fringe issues its politicians feed the people to squabble amongst each other over, it’s becoming more and more imperative to understand that practically any political change is unlikely to have any significant long-term effect on the quality of life in America until the standard economic model is revamped.

In order to understand why this is you have to first understand that America’s economic model is more accurately described as “predatory capitalism” as opposed to simply “capitalism.” Predatory capitalism is based on 2 fundamental operating principles:

 

1. Pay workers as little as possible within the limits of supply and demand.

2. Charge customers as much as possible for goods and services within the limits of supply and demand.

 

These two simple principles will cause ripple effects that will multiply themselves over time. The first and most obvious effect is the nation’s wealth will trickle upwards, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Once the rich become rich, they’ll be able to reinvest that wealth making them richer and allowing them to expand their control over the economy. Once the poor become poor, it will take longer for them to work their way out of poverty or compete with the rich to establish competitive businesses. The long-term effect of this is exactly what you see in America: major chains, owned by the rich, worked by the poor. It will be almost impossible for all those minimum wage workers to open their own “mom and pop” business much less competitive retail chains. This problem becomes even worse the more land the wealthy own as the poor will not be able to afford their own land to build their businesses on.

 

 

Once the rich become rich enough to have millions or billions of dollars of disposable income they will be able to use that money to influence politics through financing the careers of pro-monopoly politicians either directly, through campaign contributions, bribery, lobbying, campaigning against anti-monopoly politicians and funding anti-monopoly, anti-worker propaganda. Again, this is exactly what has happened in America.

Now that America has passed this tipping point where a few wealthy individuals control the majority of the wealth in America, there is little point in political reform. What if a third political party was elected to office? What if abortion were legalized? What if marijuana prohibition was ended? What if net neutrality was secured? What if stricter environmental protection laws were passed? What if the privatization of education was ended? The reality of life for the average American would remain unchanged. As long as the economic model that robs the poor and gives to the rich stays in place, poor people will still spend their lives working 3 jobs just to stay alive. They’ll still be crippled by mortgage and student loan debt for the majority of their lives and pass debt on to their children. And they’ll still be dependent on the major corporations for most of their food, clothing, shelter, and medicine.

As long as the poor have no wealth to leverage their interests, the rich will still retain the economic power to shape the political landscape according to their predatory agenda. The solution to this problem isn’t legislation guaranteeing profit sharing or fair prices. The rich could still simply purchase legislation to rewind progress.

The only way the poor will have the access to a fair share of the nation’s wealth is for business owners to willingly give their workers profit sharing, fair prices and, preferably, on-site housing at their place of work. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that this will happen in a predatory economy as business owners will be inclined to try to extort as much money as they can from their workers and customers in order to remain competitive against other ruthless companies.

Existing business owners need to be encouraged to treat the people within their sphere of influence with the dignity and respect due to every human being. Barring that, the poor need to pool their mental and physical resources to open and support businesses that don’t practice predatory capitalism. Barring that, the poor can always exercise the leverage of boycotting and striking, but this is unlikely to happen since the wealthy have already shaped the economic and political landscape so that it’s extremely difficult to unionize or avoid buying from corporations.

So the most productive course of action for the poor at this point is to start and support their own egalitarian businesses. Once they do that, they can begin accumulating their own wealth and thus leverage, reduce dependency on predatory businesses and enjoy a decent quality of life without being treated like slaves.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Fixing the Economy

October 19, 2017

Why Do So Many Small Businesses Fail?

By wise sloth

I keep seeing politicians come on the television and say they’re going to fix the economy, create jobs and raise wages. I’ve been listening to the same promises my entire adulthood while simultaneously staring at a fundamental flaw in the economy that no politician is talking about. If they do talk about it, it’s just long enough to acknowledge a problem exists before changing the conversation back to meaningless talking points.

The problem is that it’s really, really, really, really hard to start a small business. Over half of all small businesses fail within their first year. Politicians have said that much, but they never sink their teeth into why. People don’t fail at businesses because it’s so hard to provide someone else a product or service and then take their money from them. The hardest part about running a small business, the part that trips so many people up, is that the government will send you to jail and fine you into poverty if you can’t flawlessly navigate 10,000 miles of legal bureaucracy.

If you want to succeed in business, you basically need an associate’s degree in economics. If you don’t believe me, go get a tax number, file your small business name, write a business plan, and pick a piece of accounting software to help you organize your taxes. Most people won’t make it that far.

You may be shouting, ” But that’s how business works! If you can’t do that much, then you’re too stupid to be in business!” The thing about that is, it doesn’t have to be so hard to start a business. Our predecessors just went out of their way to make it that hard. I’m sure they had good intentions and reasons that sounded reasonable on paper, but the end result is they’ve created a very narrow bottleneck to owning/operating a small, private business that excludes the poor and uneducated.

 

 

I don’t know or care if there’s a conspiracy theory behind this or if it’s just the cumulative effect of millions of stupid decisions. I just care that the deck has been stacked against the poor and uneducated. If all humans are equal then all humans should have an equal chance at an education and owning their own business. Even if a human is stupid…why would we punish them for that? And if all they’re trying to do is sell oranges on the side of the road, why do we need to bring mind-bending bureaucracy into their life at all?

The reason why is because the American tax code assumes every transaction that can possibly be taxed must be tracked and taxed. I believe the I.R.S.’s philosophy does more harm than good, and I base that opinion on the fact that every night the news says the economy is terrible. The reason it’s terrible is because we’re doing something terribly wrong. Obviously, the economy has more problems than just this, but I suspect that as long as we keep assuming that every transaction which could possibly be taxed must be tracked and taxed then the economy will continue to be terrible, especially for the poorest, most uneducated human beings living on earth.

Other than “Tiger Mom,” I’ve never heard of a book on success or leadership that advocates micromanaging. In fact, everything I’ve ever read said it’s the most stifling, soul-destroying approach you can take to accomplish anything. So… if we apply that same principle to the tax code, it points to the conclusion that maybe we should lighten up there.

If people can make money, they’re going to spend it. It’s going to get caught in the tax net somewhere. If people just didn’t have to file anything or pay any taxes for small businesses that make less than $10,000 per year, then people will have the breathing room to establish their small businesses before leaping into the realm of completely retarded bureaucracy. That wouldn’t threaten big businesses’ effective monopolies. It would just give human beings some breathing room.

If the I.R.S. ever wanted to help the nation out a little more they could automatically assign everyone with a business tax id number and generic business license so nobody has to apply for anything when they start operating their small business. They just operate under the codes they were born with.

If the I.R.S. ever wanted to help the nation out a little more they could automate their personal income tax system a little better. Maybe the smart folks at N.A.S.A. can help them. If N.A.S.A. can figure out how to land a cyborg on Mars remotely they can probably figure out a way to automate everyone’s yearly income taxes so we don’t all get sent calculus riddles by snail mail that we have to pay a seasonal accountant $300 to solve just so they can tell us a random amount we have to pay on top of that.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Flaws in the Economy

October 19, 2017

The Poor Aren’t Taking All Your Money. The Rich Are.

By wise sloth

It’s not uncommon in any country to hear people blame the miserable state of their economy on welfare recipients freeloading off the hard work of the middle and upper classes. While it’s true that welfare queens do exist, they’re not the fundamental problem with the economy. The fundamental problem with the economy is that business owners underpay their workers and overcharge their customers.

That one-two punch is enough to force middle-class workers to have to count their pennies to survive, and it bleeds blue-collar workers straight into nearly inescapable poverty. Surviving, much less saving, is made even more difficult by the fact that landlords have to overcharge for rent because banks (and government taxes) extort everyone who takes out a 30-year mortgage. The only way to get a job that pays enough to afford all the meaningless fees you have to pay to buy a house is to buy a degree from a university, but the cost of a degree is inflated so high that poor people can’t afford it. So they’re stuck working degrading, underpaying jobs for the rest of their lives. Those who can afford a degree are crippled with debt for half a lifetime.

These two factors are enough to force middle-class workers have to count their pennies to survive, and it bleeds the lowest class into nearly inescapable poverty. Surviving, much less saving, is made even more difficult by the fact that landlords have to overcharge for rent because banks and government taxes extort everyone who takes out a 30-year mortgage. The only way to get a job that pays enough to afford all the meaningless fees you have to pay to buy a house, is to buy a degree from a university, but the cost of a degree is inflated so high that poor people can’t afford it. So they’re stuck working degrading, underpaying jobs for the rest of their lives. Those who can afford a degree are crippled with debt for half a lifetime.

The only reason wages are so low and the cost of goods, loans, and education are so high is because the rich get rich by taking as much of everyone else’s money as they can while giving as little back as possible.  This hurts everyone, but it hurts the poor the worst. The reason poverty exists in the first place isn’t because poor people are lazy. They’re poor because business owners took all their money.

"So that's why I work so many hours, so you can collect welfar, wear pajamas in public and have an iphone." "False. You have to work so many hours so your boss can get rich."

It is true that a small minority of poor people scam the taxpayers and don’t want to work, but look at the alternative. Their only option in life is to work themselves to death in degrading jobs that don’t pay a living wage to begin with. Why wouldn’t they scam the system? Because it’s irresponsible? They can’t get ahead in life because the rich are scamming them out of all their money. They’re just doing to the system what the system did to them. I’m not saying that’s right, just that it’s inevitable.

Slashing welfare isn’t going to make the middle class richer or help the economy. It’s just going to create more misery and poverty. Increasing welfare isn’t going to help anyone either because business owners are just going to take the poor’s money anyway, and the poor still won’t be able to afford an education. Business owners and investors are going to continue getting richer, and everyone else is going to continue getting poorer (or at least working themselves to death treading water) as long as business owners and investors refuse to share their profits with their employees or charge reasonable prices for their goods and services. Raging against poor people for being lazy, greedy scum bags adds insult their injury and makes undeserving scapegoats out of them while the real robbers continue business as usual.

 

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Flaws in the Economy

October 19, 2017

Poverty Is The Root Of The World’s Problems, And Predatory Capitalism Is The Root Of Poverty

By wise sloth

The world’s problems are your problems. Even if you live in a safe, middle-class suburb, there are still forces creeping into your house that are slowly killing you and threatening the survival of your descendants. If you’re not teaching yourself about the world’s problems and trying to figure out your own solutions, then you’re just waiting to die.

This is serious. There’s a herd of metaphorical bears running straight towards you and your village. Making excuses for why it’s not your responsibility to give your impending demise your full attention is justifying suicide. If you’re not qualified to deal with bears, you need to become qualified, network with someone who is or find a workaround within your abilities.

The world’s problems are so big and complex, it’s dizzying to figure out where to even begin listing them. So I’ll give you some advice that will get you started and save some steps putting everything in perspective. The world’s problems have many seeds, but most of them wouldn’t have grown into towering banyan trees without being thoroughly watered with poverty. If you can fix poverty, then the other evils it creates and exacerbates will wither away.

The root cause of poverty is predatory capitalism. I say “predatory capitalism,” because “capitalism” is just private ownership of a business, which isn’t the issue. The problem is that America’s standard business model takes this concept to its most ruthless extreme. The economy is based on the premise that the purpose of businesses is to make as much profit as possible for the owner/s, which is accomplished primarily by paying workers as little, and charging customers as much, as supply and demand will allow.

This isn’t just a formula for poverty. It’s the formula for poverty. On paper, it looks deceptively innocuous, but it’s tearing the world apart. Below is a list of 14 apocalyptic problems that can be reduced from mountains to molehills by using an economic system that isn’t based on creating, sustaining and increasing economic inequality.

 

1: Starvation and obesity

Disney recently released a movie titled, “Tomorrowland,” in which a character asks, “How are there simultaneous epidemics of starvation and obesity?” The answer is poverty.

In a predatory economy, farms can’t give food away for free because they’d go bankrupt. Most farmers can’t even afford to sell their products at reasonable prices, because everything they have to buy to run their company and take care of their family, costs as much as possible. The largest corporations could lower their prices, but they beat their competition and established themselves as market leaders by caring more about profit than human life or happiness to begin with. If they ever stopped exploiting their customers and workers, they’d lose their market share to a competitor who will.

Corporations improve their competitiveness by growing food in third world countries using slave labor and then shipping their harvests back to first world markets where they can charge the highest price. This causes a false food shortage in third world countries, which raises the price higher than the local slaves can afford.

 

 

However, obesity isn’t an epidemic in first world countries like America because their citizens are living as extravagantly as French aristocracy, but because food companies further lower their operating costs and maximize profits by mixing their products with preservatives, flavoring, coloring, and filler. So instead of first world consumers getting the best nutrition from around the world at the cheapest price, they get the most unhealthy, processed junk food at the highest price.

Americans who make minimum wage can’t afford healthy, unmolested food. So they grow up eating boxes, bags, and cans of chemical mulch saturated in sugar, growth hormones and carcinogens, which sets them up for health problems later in life. There’s no conspiracy to commit chemical warfare on the civilian population. Businesses are just designed to make the most profit, and you make the most profit by selling the cheapest product at the highest price, regardless of the cost to human life.

 

https://youtu.be/_p-rU15SNRY

 

2: High health care costs

The law of supply and demand says the more people need something, the more they’re willing to pay for it, and predatory capitalism says to match your prices to your customer’s desperation level. So going to the hospital to fix the inevitable health problems caused by stress and poison is as expensive as possible because medical schools and medical supply companies charge doctors and hospitals extortionate prices. Doctors then pass the exploitative costs onto their customers while also increasing the final price even higher to further take advantage of their customers’ vulnerability.

To make matters worse, the American government’s solution to unaffordable medical costs is to force everyone to buy unaffordable insurance that doesn’t cover the cost of medical bills. For reasons I discuss later in this essay, Americans blame the problem on socialism, even though forcing people to buy useless insurance isn’t socialism. That’s predatory capitalism taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich in exchange for nothing.

 

3: Homelessness

The world has enough resources to house everyone. In America, there are already six times more empty houses than homeless people. The reason working class families can’t afford to buy abandoned property is because the government, in collusion with lending institutions, has inflated the price of real estate through convoluted mortgage laws.

At the same time, the rich are buying up more land than they need, creating false scarcity that further drives up prices and fuels a never-ending cycle of housing bubbles/bursts that teeter back and forth between excluding the poor from being able to afford homes and then decimating the equity of those who could.

Since landlords and businesses have to pay the same extortionate mortgages, they pass on the cost of extortion to their renters and customers. That’s why rent is so damn high. This isn’t just “how life is.” This is a predatory business model invented to take money from the poor and give it to the rich in exchange for nothing.

 

 

4: Lack of basic utilities

If everyone who works was guaranteed food, water, shelter, electricity, telecommunications, and transportation, then most of the fear and pain in the world would be eliminated. Then everyone could get on with their lives and only have to worry about the most important issues.

The reason utilities are scarce isn’t that we lack the resources. It’s because the people who own the world’s resources make them as prohibitively expensive as possible. Even when governments build and operate their own utilities, they have to buy the materials at inflated prices, limiting the services they can provide.

Public utilities are becoming a thing of the past anyway since private (and often foreign) companies have been bribing politicians into privatizing those services for decades. The companies taking over utilities claim they can provide a better product at a cheaper price, but the ultimate goal of business is to make profits, which is why you can always expect the cost of utilities to go up, and you’ll keep finding more meaningless fees on your bills.

 

5: Stress

The definition of stress is, “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.”

Nothing is more stressful than fearing for your life, and everything you need to survive costs money. So your safety is directly dependent on how much money you have, but almost every business overcharges as much as possible. You’ll even be charged for things you didn’t ask for, don’t want and disagree with. Your entire life will be spent fighting for survival against everyone you have to pay. This is a formula for perpetual stress. The solution isn’t to read more motivational books. Life isn’t stressful because you’re weak. It’s because the economy is designed to keep you trapped in perpetual danger.

 

6: Mental health issues

The human brain can only take so much stress before it cracks. Anyone living in permanent anxiety will experience mental health issues eventually. The more traumatic your childhood is, the quicker you’ll succumb to all the internal and external consequences of poverty, and the poorer you are, the more damaging your childhood will be.

Seeing a cheap mental health expert for one hour costs more than a minimum wage employee makes in an entire day, and that money is already earmarked for food, rent, utilities, transportation, repairs and government fees. So the people most at risk for mental health problems are least able to afford it.

If you become too mentally broken to work, then you’ll have to live on the streets and beg for food. The size of America’s mentally ill homeless population isn’t a regrettable byproduct of an otherwise great system. The system is designed to create that problem by keeping help as far out of reach as possible and then funneling anyone who can’t function without it onto the streets to beg, steal and die.

 

7: Drug abuse

It’s also not an accidental byproduct of an otherwise great system, that at least 87% of Americans have drunk alcohol, 10% have smoked marijuana, 16% have smoked cigarettes, and 13% are on antidepressants. The system is designed to make earning more money, and being able to afford a better life, as hard as possible. For the least academically inclined, it’s virtually impossible.

Paying high prices to consume poison so you can feel better in the moment is irresponsible because it limits your immediate potential and kills you prematurely. But if you know you’re going to earn slave wages for the rest of your life, and you’ll never be able to afford your dreams anyway, the cost/benefit analysis of ending your miserable existence in a blaze of euphoria starts to add up. America doesn’t have a drug abuse epidemic because so many people are weak. It’s a proportional response to how stressful and hopeless life is in a predatory capitalist economy.

 

8: Domestic violence

Financial problems are one of the most common causes of divorce, but worrying and fighting about money is a long, painful process. Normal people are anxious and angry because the economy turns life into a grueling, unrewarding rat race. It’s only a matter of time before that frustration comes out somewhere, and the people you’re most likely to take it out on are the ones you see most, which are the people you live with.

You’d think the divorce rate would be higher when everyone is constantly worrying about bankruptcy, compromising on spending, working beyond their physical and mental endurance, suffering from suburban sensory deprivation, and wrestling with the constant source of unfulfillment that comes from not being able to afford your dreams. Actually, the divorce rate would be higher, but poverty often traps dysfunctional couples together because they can’t afford to live on their own.

 

9: Violent crime

America’s violent crime stats are directly proportional to the stress and desperation created by the false scarcity of food, housing, and wages. African-American ghettos don’t have third-world-level violent crime rates and are prone to riots because African-Americans are genetically predisposed to act like wild, desperate animals. Their problem is they live in a third world economy surrounded by first world neighborhoods they can’t afford to escape to.

Predatory capitalism traps them in an environment in which there are more people competing for resources than there are to go around. When everyone has to fight to survive, it becomes responsible to learn how to fight, and your best chance of succeeding is to join a group of fighters. That’s life for anyone who lives in a ghetto, regardless of their skin color.

There isn’t a secret conspiracy among white Americans to oppress African Americans. The reason ghettos and violent crime epidemics exist anywhere in the world is because business owners are oppressing everyone while the poor are too busy hating and fighting each other to address the real cause of their problems.

 

https://youtu.be/ZI4XmfHk5mU

 

10: Mainstream ignorance

No matter what country you live in, you’re surrounded by idiots. You know this. They stress you out every day at work, and at night you see them on the news fighting tooth and nail to destroy everything good in your country. If you’re not grabbing your head and screaming, “Why is everyone so stupid!?” then you’re not paying attention.

Why do you have to be surrounded by idiots? Poverty. That’s why. We could have already built the ultimate, free, global online school that could provide unrestricted access to all the world’s knowledge and skills. The internet is slowly providing free online education, but since everything is as expensive as possible, and there’s no profit in charity, humanity can’t afford to create the ultimate educational tool.

Even in affluent America, students can’t afford to attend universities because predatory capitalism dictates the more your customer needs your product, the more you should charge. Universities are copying the housing and healthcare industries and taking this philosophy farther than the market can bear. They’re charging students beyond their means, which is creating an education bubble, which is making college so expensive the cost/benefit analysis of enrolling doesn’t necessarily add up anymore. Predatory capitalism has created a system where it doesn’t pay to get a college education. This is putting a glass ceiling on the intelligence level of the entire world.

 

 

Going to school isn’t the only way to learn about the world though. There are media companies in every city producing information for mass consumption, but they can’t give content away for free without selling advertisements, which is a form of misinformation.

 

 

The price media outlets can charge advertisers is directly proportional to the size of their audience. In order to attract the widest audience possible, businesses have to deliver the most popular content. Thanks to the oppressive nature of the economy, most people are uneducated, scared, stressed-out slaves with cabin fever, who are longing for escape. This sets them up to want to consume media that satisfies their base instinctual desires for excitement, hope, love, popularity, wealth, and power.

Even news agencies, which supposedly follow a code of integrity, drown out useful information with content that’s more entertaining than educational. The six most successful media companies have bought out most of the world’s independent news agencies and syndicated the same distracting brain candy to every city.

Since the most sociopathic business practices make the most money, it was only a matter of time before a sociopath built a global news organization that intentionally sells lies, fear, and blame to gullible consumers. The more intellectually vulnerable people are misled, the dumber they act and the more they oppose useful reform, which creates a vicious cycle for perpetuating ignorance.

The reason you’re surrounded by idiots is because 90% of the world population are victims of economic oppression. I doubt there’s secret conspiracy to dumb down the population to make them easier to control. It was just a convenient and inevitable byproduct of every business’s single-minded pursuit of money.

 

11: Religious extremism

There’s a well-established correlation between poverty and religious belief. The poorer you are, the more likely you are to be uneducated and feel stressed, hopeless, alone, unfulfilled and meaningless. Religion offers a solution to all the problems created by poverty. It promises if you believe a story and follow some rules, you’ll be rewarded after death.

Religion is the perfect consumer product. It costs nothing to produce, and your customers will pay you for years without getting anything in return. They’ll do your advertising for you and defend your brand to the death even in the face of overwhelming proof your product is a sham. If your religion teaches hard work and sacrifice are virtuous, and idleness and self-interest are evil, then your followers will make the perfect employees for you or any business lucky enough to hire them.

Not everyone who believes in religion becomes a terrorist, but there’s a well-documented correlation between poverty and religious extremism. If you want to start a death cult that will kill people and steal their resources for you, believing they’re serving the greater good, then all you need to do is promise them that joining your organization will solve all the problems in their lives created by predatory capitalism. Then, indoctrinate them with time-tested brainwashing techniques to base their identity and self-worth on their status in your pyramid-shaped organization. Finally, criminalize dissent and make it as hard as possible to leave. This is what ISIS and the U.S. military do, and if you copy their model, you can achieve the same success.

 

12: Corruption and systemic political failure

Corruption was inevitable the moment money was created. Since money is power, those with the most money have the most power regardless of who sits on the throne of government. Business owners don’t need to sit on the throne themselves or rely on the judgment of others to pass laws that allow them to exploit their workers and customers to death. Modern democracy has created a streamlined path to corruption. Since politicians have to accept donations to fund their election campaigns, they’re beholden to their investors. When the majority of politician’s careers are funded by the same businesses, lone-wolf politicians can’t stand up to all the corporate representatives. That’s why you can’t expect to see hope and change from young, charismatic politicians: because the investors they represent value profits more than human life.

 

 

13: Perpetual war

Once you have enough representatives to control how a nation’s wealth is used, you can use its tax revenue to bribe foreign politicians into letting you pillage their resources. If they won’t play ball, you can depose them with military force, guaranteeing you won’t have to compete for global market share with worker-friendly politicians or foreign businesses.

Predatory capitalism also guarantees perpetual war simply because war is profitable. The military-industrial complex needs taxpayers to buy its weapons in order to remain profitable. So it behooves them to invest in campaign financing so they can lobby politicians to stay in perpetual war.

 

 

Even without a secret conspiracy by corporations to manipulate militaries into fighting for them, our economic system is still a recipe for conflict. As a general truth, survival requires resources, and when resources are scarce in a local community, they become as valuable as life itself, and people will kill their neighbors to keep what they’ve got and take from the weak. When a country’s resources become scarce, it will act the same way, and the goal of predatory capitalism is to consume resources as fast as possible.

Since the world’s wealth is being funneled to a few families instead of being distributed to everyone, the nations with the least infrastructure are left in abject poverty and thus chaos, which creates a power vacuum to be filled by the strongest local warlord, which is convenient for big corporations, because warlords prevent small businesses from growing into global competitors, and warlords are happy to sell their nation’s resources to foreign companies for pennies on the dollar.

 

14: Environmental apocalypse

As apocalyptic as all these problems are, the worst consequence of predatory capitalism is the destruction of the very eco-system keeping the entire human species alive. In order for companies to make profits, they need to make as many products as quickly as possible, which means they need to consume raw resources as quickly, and spend as little money on health and safety, as possible. It would be an understatement to call this a recipe for environmental destruction. Predatory capitalism makes pollution a moral imperative, which is why big businesses are so desperate to convince the population global warming is a hoax. Saving the planet would negatively affect their profit margin.

The solution to this problem isn’t to guilt-trip consumers into buying eco-friendly products. That’s like forcing people to become cannibals and then convincing them to fight cannibalism by only eating each other’s legs. The problem isn’t the victim. The problem is predatory capitalism’s addiction to economic growth. That’s the herd of bears coming to eat you and your tribe. Solve that problem or you’re effectively committing suicide while being complicit in genocide.

I’m less interested in convincing you to accept my theories than I am in inspiring you to do your own research and come up with your own. If you want to know my theory, the simplest solution is to require governments to spend tax revenue on feeding and sheltering all of its citizens before they’re allowed to spend taxes on anything else. This will solve people’s immediate problems, give them the freedom not to have to work/consume, and eliminate the leverage businesses use to exploit everyone at every corner. If governments won’t do that, citizens need to organize to create private sustainable communities to shelter themselves from poverty.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Poverty

October 19, 2017

Why Do Poor People Play The Lottery?

By wise sloth

 

 

The odds of winning the lottery are so low that buying a lottery ticket is arguably pointless. Therefore, many people believe that buying a lottery ticket is tantamount to paying an “idiot tax.” There’s a lot of truth to that point of view, but the cynicism of that point of view overlooks a very profound and very real truth about life in predatory capitalist economies such as the United States of America.

This truth stems from the fact that, in America, if you can’t afford a $30,00+ university degree or you’re not smart enough to pass all the exams or write all the essays required to earn a university degree then the glass ceiling of higher education prevents you from making a living wage…ever. Granted, there are still some options available to people who aren’t wealthy or smart enough to go to college. You can still join the military or go to trade schools, but the reality of the world we live in is that there are still some people who aren’t cut out for even that. Even if they were able to jump through the hoops it takes to get a decent paying job, our economy stills pays workers as little as possible while charging customers as much as possible while marketers do everything they can to convince everyone to buy as much as possible whether they need those advertised goods/services or not or whether they can afford those goods/services or not. Between the oppression of low wages and high prices, the reality of our economy is that millions of people will never be able to make a living wage.

Here’s the thing about that. If you’re a middle-class citizen who was able to buy your way up through the glass ceiling of higher education, then buying lottery tickets is objectively a dumb idea. You make enough money to be able to save for a comfortable retirement or to be able to start your own business despite America’s restrictive small business laws. This means the cost/benefit analysis of spending money on the lottery doesn’t add up for you.

However, the cost/benefit analysis of buying lottery tickets is not the same for an upward mobile middle-class citizen as it is for a lower class wage slave. People who have to work their entire lives for barely enough money to survive and/or don’t have the intellectual intelligence to navigate the oppressive bureaucratic obstacles to starting their own business have little to no chance of ever fighting their way out of poverty. For these people, there is no hope of saving their money and making a better life for themselves. Even if they do save all of their money and deny themselves any of the frivolous joys that the rich enjoy every day, they still won’t be able to save enough money to enjoy the good life of the rich and famous. The best they can hope for is to save enough money to cover a tenth of the medical bills they’ll inevitably rack up in old age. Even after a lifetime of back-breaking hard work they won’t be able to save enough money to cover the cost of a decent retirement home. In other words, they have no hope in life… period.

 

 

The lowest class workers may not be smart enough to earn a college degree, but they’re smart enough to see that no matter how hard they work and no matter how much of their minimum wage paycheck they save they’ll never be able to live a life of full human dignity. So, given the hopelessness of their prospects in life, the cost/benefit analysis of buying lottery tickets actually does truly add up.

The poorest of the poor never had any chance of having a good life no matter how much they saved because they were never going to make a living wage to begin with, and all the money they do make is inevitably going to be stolen by insurance companies, banks, utilities, taxes, cell phone bills, rent and all the other expenses that come from living in a predatory capitalist economy. So, given that the poorest of the poor never had a chance of saving enough money to make a good life for themselves, the 1-in-a-billion chance of having a good life from winning the lottery is higher than the 1-in-0 chance of having a good life from working hard and saving their money.

That’s why poor people spend their money on the lottery. it’s less because they’re stupid and more because the predatory economy that they live and toil under is stupid.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Poverty

October 19, 2017

How Predatory Capitalism Warps The Way We Define Maturity

By wise sloth

Dictionary.com defines “capitalism” as:

  1. “an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.”

 

In and of itself, there’s nothing sinister about individuals or groups being able to own means of production. It becomes deathly sinister for workers and customers though when business owners underpay their workers and overcharge their customers… because that’s how poverty is created.

When a Capitalist economy goes full predatory, it hurts people in ways that can be measured by empirical quality of life statistics, but it also hurts people in more subtle, psychological ways, such as warping their perception of maturity.

 

Dictionary.com defines “maturity” as:

  1. complete in natural growth or development, as plant and animal forms: a mature rose bush.
  2. ripe, as fruit, or fully aged, as cheese or wine.
  3. fully developed in body or mind, as a person: a mature woman.
  4. pertaining to or characteristic of full development: a mature appearance; fruit with a mature softness.
  5. completed, perfected, or elaborated in full by the mind: mature plans.

 

We know when a piece of fruit is mature, and we know when a human body is mature, but when is a human mind mature? That’s a philosophical question that humans have been arguing about since the dawn of civilization, and every culture has institutionalized their own opinions about what knowledge and ideas a mature person should have in their head. But there’s one prerequisite to maturity that all cultures hold: the ability to survive and thrive in the local environment.

The skills it takes to survive change depending on the challenges of your local environment. For example, it would take different skills to survive and thrive in Alaska, Hawaii, Australia, Vietnam or New York City. If a “responsible” person moved from one environment to a place where their skills are inapplicable, the locals would watch that person struggle with the smallest responsibilities, and would likely view that person as immature. The locals would certainly look down on members of their own community who couldn’t master the environment they were raised in.

This concept is easy to observe when looking at primitive hunter/gatherer societies living in harsh natural environments. It becomes murkier when the environment is a modern, service-based economy that you grew up in and have taken for granted your entire life.

In the modern world, the average worker doesn’t need to know how to build their own shelter or live off the land. Most people work at jobs in buildings where they make and sell goods or services. They get paid for their work with money, which can be used to buy anything, and in fact, is the only medium of exchange most businesses accept. In order to put a roof over your head, clothes on your back or food in your belly, you need money. Money is survival, comfort, security, freedom, and power. Since one’s ability to survive and thrive in a capitalist economy depends on having money, that means for people living in that environment, responsibility is inextricably tied to making and keeping money. The more predatory the economy is, the truer this is.

Growing up in an economy where surviving and thriving depends on making money, it’s natural for children to view people who have money as responsible and people who don’t as irresponsible. Children who never learn the causes of economic inequality tend to grow up into adults who worship the rich and despise the poor.

 

 

This is a warped perception of reality, because the way most millionaires and all billionaires get rich, is by paying their workers the lowest wage that supply and demand and the law will allow while selling the cheapest goods and services at the highest price supply and demand and the law will allow. Then they pocket the difference. The poorest of the poor may have made bad decisions in their lives, but when the cost of living is higher than (or even slightly below) your income, you’re stuck struggling to keep your head above water most of your life or until the inevitable hospital bill finally robs you of everything you’ve saved.

There are those who would argue that there are ample options available to the poor to help them lift themselves out of poverty, and therefore anyone who doesn’t take those opportunities, are just irresponsible. While it’s true some poor people pass up on opportunities, the fact of the matter is most high paying jobs require a college degree. More often than not, employers care more about their applicants’ degrees and certificates than their actual job skills or work experience. Since a college degree costs as much as possible, the only way to get a college degree is to be born to rich parents or go into half a lifetime of debt. Since the poorest, unskilled workers can’t afford to live a decent life, let alone a college degree, they’re shut out of most of the jobs that pay a living wage. To add insult to injury, uncredentialed employees who work 60 hours a week to provide for their family have to live with the stigma of not being mature or responsible enough to graduate college, while the children of rich parents can party their way through four years of college, barely pass and still be viewed as more responsible and have more doors open to them.

The glass ceiling of the college degree cleanly separates society into two castes of people, and the easier it is to divide society into deserving and undeserving classes, the easier it is to justify and accept exploiting the underclass. When a caste system becomes so ingrained in a culture, the under-class will even celebrate and defend it themselves. You can see this happening in almost any office building in America every day, and it’s not entirely illogical, just short-sighted.

Since survival depends on making money and making money depends on getting a job, the people who are the best at keeping jobs have an evolutionary advantage over people who can’t hold down a job. Therefore, the ability to keep a job is a hallmark of responsibility and maturity. And the best way to keep a job is to do your tasks correctly, go above and beyond the call of duty, follow all of your employer’s rules flawlessly and treat your employers with gracious respect. Since these are the skills employees need in order to survive, they’re responsible and mature behaviors.

 

 

These rules would be completely reasonable, but in a predatory capitalist economy, employees are already worked as hard, as fast and as long as possible with as few breaks and as little mercy as the law allows. That’s how hard poor people have to work to prove to their peers and bosses that they’re responsible, and they’re held to that level of accountability every single day. When that becomes the norm, and workers start holding their peers accountable to slave standards, they effectively police their own slavery. If those are the values they live by all day at work, those are the values they pass down to children.

Predatory businesses don’t just ask employees for their time and energy. They often take their employees dignity. Employees are often expected to wear humiliating uniforms, endure offensive treatment by customers and bosses, perform degrading tasks and address higher paid employees with higher titles and signs of respect. They’re expected to erase their personality while at work and act like soulless robots who love their job. Since these are the behaviors necessary to keeping a job and thus keeping an income, these behaviors are responsible and mature.

This means that being yourself and standing up for yourself is irresponsible. Quitting your job and pursuing your passion is seen as childish and naïve, and choosing not to have a full-time job is looked down on as absolutely crazy. Many young people have a hard time adapting to this dignity-less environment when they enter the workforce, but if they live in it long enough, they often come to accept and even embrace it.

 

 

Cultures always reflect their environment, and oppressive economic environments tend to create oppressive cultures with oppressive values. That’s exactly what’s happening in most of the world right now. While it may technically be responsible to beg, bow, scrape, fight and play the game to survive, that’s only because the economic environment was shaped by people who profit from exploitation. If our environment wasn’t designed to make life so hard and hopeless, responsibility would be defined by higher standards. We all have a responsibility to survive, but we also have a responsibility to our children and humanity in general. We’re not fulfilling our responsibility to our children by passing down instructions on how to be the ideal slave. We owe them a more humane economic environment, and until we deliver that, none of us are mature.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Poverty

October 19, 2017

The Fundamental Problem With The Economy

By wise sloth

The problem with the economy is simple. Workers are paid minimum wage to work as long and as hard as possible. At the same time, goods and services are priced as high, and are made as cheaply, as possible. This simple formula creates two outcomes that are very easy to calculate.

One: It costs more to live than most employees can earn working forty hours per week.

Two: Most of society’s money flows up to business owners’ bank accounts.

The upward flowing money doesn’t trickle back down to the poor because the rich hoard it and/or spend it on expensive possessions. What little money does trickle down to low-wage employees, gets spent immediately on extortion-priced food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, and repairs.

The more money the rich exploit from the poor, the less money the majority of consumers have to spend. The less shoppers spend, the fewer jobs are needed to fill the customers’ demands. The higher the unemployment rate, the greater demand for jobs there is. The higher the competition for jobs is, the less pay, fewer benefits and longer hours applicants will agree to, in exchange for a job. The more businesses exploit their employees’ desperation, the more profit the owner can keep, and thus, the better the economy looks on paper.

When CEOs are getting rich, it looks like the economy is doing great, but ultimately, it means life sucks as much as possible for as many people as possible. That’s the fundamental problem with the economy.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Flaws in the Economy

October 19, 2017

The Cost/Benefit Analysis Of Economic Oppression

By wise sloth

The benefits of economic oppression are obvious, and they can be summed up in three words: comfort, freedom, and legacy. The wealthiest people in the world can enjoy whatever comforts they can imagine. At the snap of a finger, they can have things poorer people would have to work their entire lives for.

The rich are the only people who are truly free. Nobody has the leverage to tell them what to do for nine hours per day. So they’re free to work however, whenever, and wherever they want. They’re free to travel wherever, whenever and however they want. Barring going on a shooting spree in a shopping mall, they’re free to break most laws. Even if they get arrested, they can hire a team of attorneys to bend the law so they’ll either be found innocent or charged a fee that represents such a tiny percentage of their wealth, the legal consequences are inconsequential to them.

 

 

The 1% have more money than they could spend in their lives, and most of that money is sitting in investment vehicles that will continue to make money after they’re dead. So as long as their descendants aren’t completely irresponsible, they can live comfortable, free lives indefinitely. If all you have to do to have that kind of life and legacy is sign a piece of paper approving the exploitation of workers you’ll never meet, I doubt many people would pass up the opportunity. Getting rich through extortion looks temptingly consequence-free, but it has hidden costs.

 

 

Consider the kings and serfs from the Middle Ages. Royalty squandered their wealth and lived more comfortably than their serfs could ever imagine, and yet the serfs of today live more comfortably than the kings of antiquity could have imagined. The reason we live so much more comfortably is because of technological progress, which is the result of billions of people all over the world applying their time and education to scientific study. The more people who collaborate on research, the faster it generates results.

If instead of forcing everyone to devote the bulk of their lives to menial work for just enough money to survive, we devoted our resources to give as many people as much education and free time as possible, we could speed up humanity’s technological development exponentially. If we didn’t have our priorities so backward, we could easily be living on the moon before Generation X dies of old age. If we had never oppressed anyone in the history of mankind, we would have been building android factories on Mars a hundred years ago.

Even though the rich may be freer than their employees and customers, their freedom comes at an unnecessary cost. A wealthy person can walk through an inner city ghetto safely, but they’d need to hire paramilitary escorts. Their family is free to sleep soundly without fear of burglars, but that’s only because they have million dollar security systems and security guards. The rich can bypass all the cumbersome and demeaning security measures at airports by flying in their own planes, but they never stop to really ask themselves, “Why do we need security measures in airports at all? Why do we need locks on our doors? Why do we need bodyguards?”

 

 

We need security because there are billions of stupid and/or desperate people in the world. The reason the world isn’t filled with billions of intelligent, content, philosophers is because the leaders of the world have designed the system to exploit the majority of the world’s population. If we dedicated our resources to helping people instead of oppressing them, we wouldn’t need to lock our doors or carry guns or have metal detectors at airports and schools. We probably wouldn’t even need armies because everybody would have enough resources to survive and thus wouldn’t need to fight each other.

Until that day comes, freedom will always be so expensive that only the wealthy will be able to afford it, and it will always be an unnecessary expense for the rich because they created it by exploiting those with less financial leverage than them. It would be so easy for rich people to leave their children a Utopian world. All they need to do is treat everyone as equal human beings. The only cost to them would be not being able to hoard more money than they could ever possibly spend.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Flaws in the Economy

October 19, 2017

The Downside Of Economic Growth

By wise sloth

Economic growth increases some people’s chances of getting a job or a raise, but it doesn’t mean everything is getting better. Quite the opposite, economic growth isn’t bringing the world closer to Utopia. It’s making life unbearable for the poorest of the poor and bringing the entire human race closer to extinction.

In order to understand why economic growth is so perilous, you have to understand what makes the economy rise and fall. Thousands of mind-bending books have been written on that subject, and understanding the economy has become more complicated with the invention of the stock market, futures, short sales, trade sanctions, treaties, and taxes.

Ultimately, economic growth mainly boils down to how much money people spend, and this concept is easy enough to see with your own eyes. The more customers buy goods and services, the more money businesses have to pay employees, hire new employees, expand/improve their business and ultimately sell more goods and services. The less money people spend, the less money businesses have to invest. If their profits are too low, they’ll eventually have to fire some, or all, of their employees. The more businesses go bankrupt, the more “the workforce” turns into “the unemployed.”

 

 

That’s basically common sense, and on the surface, it sounds reasonable. The problem lies in how businesses increase profits and what they do with those profits. Business is war, and war is hell. In this economic climate, the most ruthless companies rise to the top, because in order to be the most competitive, they have to underpay employees, gouge customers, lower health standards for workers and customers, eliminate employee benefits, create meaningless and hidden fees, manipulate stock prices, outsource jobs to countries where slavery is less ambiguous, manipulate customer’s minds through disingenuous marketing and exploit tax loopholes and tax havens.

Every blue-chip company does this, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. This is the standard business model for the entire economy. The most successful companies just do it better than anyone else. The “health” of blue-chip stocks is one of the ways we measure the “health” of the American economy, but when companies grow using a slash-and-burn business model, it doesn’t mean life is getting better for most people. It means those companies are bankrupting their less oppressive competitors and creating more jobs in their financially crippling, bureaucratic hell. That’s not taking us closer to a better world. That’s taking us closer to a dystopian novel.

To make matters worse, when the economy is making record-breaking profits, it means businesses are selling an unprecedentedly high number of goods and services. This means our factories and highways are working faster than ever to convert all of the world’s natural resources into consumer garbage destined to become toxic landfills.

If you want to know what the future of the world looks like, go to the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Businesses took the quintessential example of paradise and paved it over with urban sprawl until there wasn’t any room left to build. Now half the beaches are too toxic to swim in, and many have turned into homeless camps that the government bulldozes every few years to keep up appearances.

The cost of buying or renting property in Oahu is astronomical, even in the slums. It takes an hour to drive twenty miles in any direction. Meth use is epidemic among the poor. Brown-skinned workers toil in the tropical heat and humidity harvesting pineapples for barely enough money to survive, while across the island, millionaires get blowjobs from high-priced call girls in penthouses. This is not the world you want to live in, but every day we’re laying more concrete in every direction, solidifying our future in that world.

When the entire world has been converted into strip malls and suburbs, blue-chip companies will have secured every human being as guaranteed customers for life, because in suburbia your only access to food, water, clothing, shelter, education, and amusement are predatory businesses. When every city looks the same, you can run as far as you want; you’ll still end up somewhere identical to where you started. You’ll still work for the exact same companies and have to buy the same cheap, toxic products.

Even if you like eating at McDonald’s and working for Max Lumburg at Initech, you’re still left with the problem that everyone’s employers are converting the world’s natural resources into trash as quickly as possible. I doubt we’ll reach the point where every square inch of usable land in the world is covered in grimy suburban sprawl because we’ll have burned through our resources before the system has a chance to reach its inevitable end.

 

 

If I had to bet money on whether or not suburbia will succeed at consuming the world’s resources to apocalyptic proportions, I would bet that it will, because the more economic growth there is, the more money predatory business owners are able to spend influencing public opinion and government policies. The bigger the marketing industry grows, the more Orwellian our world will become. The more influence companies have over politicians, the more they can design the laws to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else.

The richest men in the world already have practically unlimited access to political power. So at this point, it’s not about the rich gaining power; they’ve already got it. Now they’re just tightening their grip, and the greater economic inequality grows, and the more time they have to mold the law, the more guaranteed their financial security and growth will be. The more guaranteed “economic growth” is, the more guaranteed the suburbanization, and thus, destruction, of the entire world is.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

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