Tag Archives: how to save the world

October 24, 2017

Concrete Modular Floating Islands Could Solve Poverty, Pollution, and Refugee Crises

By wise sloth

There are currently about 100 million people who are living homeless because they had to flee a war zone, and there are just as many homeless people living in “peaceful” countries. A billion people live on less than $2.50 per day, and two more billion people live below the poverty line because they don’t have access to resources or opportunities.

Despite the world spending over $100 billion dollars on humanitarian aid and trillions more on public infrastructure, poverty is only getting worse, because traditional cities separate people from sources of jobs, food, water, utilities, entertainment, and education. The current housing system is designed to make real-estate more expensive, the more conveniently located it is, which means the poorer you are, the more expensive, dangerous, discouraging, unhealthy and opportunity-less your life will be.

If every country pitched in to pool together $50 trillion, they could solve extreme poverty and refugee crises by building a self-sustainable apartment complex/office building in the shape of a ring, 100 miles in diameter, where every resident will have immediate access to food, water, shelter, jobs, and transportation. As long as predatory capitalists don’t take over the city and raise prices and lower wages to extortion levels, every resident would be able to live fear-free for life.

A project of this size would face many hurdles. One of the biggest would be, where to build it? One solution to that problem is to build it on water. This approach would be more expensive, but the benefits might outweigh the cost.

It wouldn’t take much engineering to build a floating city. Instead of building a huge, floating base and then putting a city on top of it, build hollow modules that connect together. Then, a big wave wouldn’t knock any houses or businesses over, because everyone would be living and working “underground.” The surface area could be used to grow food and raise animals.

All you need to make a floating house is a boat hull. You could cast them out of concrete. Engineers have been building hollow concrete boats and caissons for years.

The technology could be easily adapted to mass producing floating houses. Or you could make the hulls out of fiberglass or steel. It might be more expensive, but it would cost less to build a modular fiberglass bobber house than to build a shack in Honolulu or New York City.

Even the sturdiest buoy city would be capsized by a mega wave on the open ocean eventually, but instead of building a monolithic island in international waters, you could connect a line of modular floating homes along the coast of a relatively protected body of water, like the Caspian Sea or the Great Lakes.

If this mega structure were built in the Mediterranean Ocean, you could create a walkable path from Africa to Europe. Refugees wouldn’t use it to invade Europe because they would already have ocean-front property and everything they need to raise a family. You could use that path as a new trade route, and the new most popular tourist destination in the world.

We wouldn’t need to fight over one location for the project. The governments of the world could build one hundred module factories around the world and gradually build a chain around every protected body of water. Life might be so idyllic, the majority of humans will flee the mainland and leave it to Mother Nature.

I believe the environmental benefit of a floating civilization would outweigh the risks. Since all the food, water and utilities would be created in-house, less packaging and transportation would be needed to get the necessities of life from their point of creation to consumption. The modules could be equipped with traps that filter pollution out of the water, and the hulls of the boats would provide new artificial reefs for fish to eat from.

This idea is crazy for being outside the norm, but not because it’s unfeasible. The richest 1,200 people in the world have over $50 trillion sitting in their bank accounts not doing anything. That’s more than enough money to house every refugee and homeless person in the world off-land. Even if governments footed the entire bill themselves, the money they’d save in humanitarian aid and social services would pay for itself quickly. Plus, it would create jobs, lower unemployment, food scarcity and real estate costs.

Sadly, that’s why the governments of the world would never conspire to build this. If governments cared about their people, they wouldn’t have invested their tax dollars on building unsustainable habitats to begin with. The rich need the poor to live in constant fear and danger because that gives them the leverage to exploit the helpless. Our cities are designed to create scarcity because it lowers workers’ and consumers’ bargaining power, which allows businesses to raise prices and lower wages. Extreme poverty and refugee crises exist because the global economy is designed to oppress and exploit the poor.

It’s almost impossible to get rich without gouging your customers and/or employees. So most rich people would be acting contrary to their past behavior if they donated their fortune to building a self-sustainable floating refugee camp, but there are a lot of philanthropists out there with more money than they know what to do with. Hopefully, some of them find the motive to give back to the world they’ve taken so much from.

If compassion and foresight won’t compel the rich to mass-produce floating city modules, greed should. The first person to streamline the process will become the Donald Trump of the seas. After Trump runs America into the ground, building a new nation at sea might be his only hope of redemption. Granted, being the greedy sociopathic narcissist that he is, his city would probably be full of slaves serving masters. However, if he can establish and improve floating island technology, it would be worth it as proof of concept. Then better people can copy his architecture and build the humanitarian communities we’ve been waiting for.

As a compromise, an island-loving billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg, could build a modular island factory, produce a string of islands, and after all the agriculture jobs are filled, train new residents as computer programmers, give them jobs that generate a profit, and keep a portion until the cost of construction is repaid, then give the employee ownership of their module.

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

Talk About Saving the World
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Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Build a Better World, Fixing the Economy

October 24, 2017

Sustainable Monasteries Could Solve Poverty, Pollution, And Refugee Crises

By wise sloth

The most popular Youtube vlogger is Pewdiepie, a Swedish man-child who posts videos about playing video games and acting silly in his computer room. Pewdiepie currently posts about one blog each weak, which means, in the time between each of his posts, at least 1,900 civilians died horrible war-related deaths somewhere in the world, and that’s a very conservative estimate.

List of war-related deaths by country. At the top are Syria, South Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria

The civilians who survive these conflicts are only technically lucky. Over 22 million people are living in foreign countries right now because they’ve had to flee the apocalyptic death, destruction and destitution in their birth-land. That’s not counting the 65 million people who have fled their homes but haven’t left their country. This means there are about 100 million people who are homeless because they would die if they went home.

There are 65 million forcibly displace people worldwide including refugees, homeless, and stateless people

That number doesn’t count the 100 million people in the world who are just old-fashioned homeless, or the 1.3 billion people who have homes and jobs but are working themselves to death while starving in a shit-covered tin hut with no water, electricity or sanitation.

In conflict zones, it’s hard to get real numbers how many people are suffering, but we know that over 3 billion people live on under $2.50 per day. These statistics don’t highlight a few isolated travesties. Almost half the population of the world lives in extreme poverty, and there are still several billion more who make more than $2.50 per day and live below the poverty level.

Basically, if you have running water, air conditioning, heat, a bed, pornography and an education, you’re one of the most privileged people in the entire world. Drop to your knees and thank God if the worst problem in your life is that nobody loves you.

If you factor in all the money countries and nongovernment agencies spend on humanitarian aid each year, the cost easily eclipses $100 billion dollars each year. The world could afford to spend more money to fight poverty, but it spends over $2 trillion on the militaries which are displacing people. So taxpayers are spending more money on creating humanitarian crises than solving them.

We already spend trillions of dollars every year on infrastructure that is supposed to help people live functionally, but it hasn’t solved the problem because it addresses the problem in a roundabout way that creates more problems than it solves. All the roads, plumbing, and power lines haven’t saved the poor in Detroit or any other major city in the world.

This makes the problem seem unsolvable, but the solution is really very simple. All people need to be happy and healthy are food, clothing, shelter, water, electricity, jobs, transportation and access to markets. If you built a ring-shaped apartment complex with 100 million condos and offices, then dug a man-made river encircling the entire building and used that to water gardens and orchards, you could give the people living there agriculture jobs and a never-ending supply of food and water.

With those problems solved, some workers could specialize in other jobs, which they could reach by walking across the hallway in their apartment complex. Every business would be connected by one road that would never get congested. The bigger you make the diameter of the circular building, the more external markets it would have access to.

Basically, the complex would operate like a secular monastery the size of a major city. You could also think of it as a permanent, self-sustaining refugee camp. As long as the residents don’t have to pay rent, receive an equitable percentage of the profits their work produces, and aren’t overcharged for the goods and services the monastery sells, then everyone will always have everything they need, and nobody would live in destitution or fear thereof.

How would you pay for such a mega project, and who would build it?  It costs about $120 per square foot to build a traditional house, but if you built the refugee camp/monastery using earthbags, you could bring the construction cost down as low as $10 per square foot. Since all that dirt will need to be dug up anyway, you can use the dirt from digging the reservoir/water channel/moat around the complex.

It would take thousands, if not millions of people to build a structure the length of a small country, but earthbag construction is relatively simple. You could simply have the 100 million refugees do the work and then move into the home they built when they’re done. Then they would have a sense of ownership, pride and shared identity with their fellow coworkers/neighbors.

The richest 1,400 people in the world have $5.4 trillion dollars just sitting in their bank accounts, not doing anything. If each apartment unit in the earthbag megastructure is 500 square feet and costs $10 per square foot, you could build 1 billion, eighty-five million units with $5.4 trillion. This figure doesn’t take all the building costs into account, but to put this in perspective, it costs $1 billion per mile to dig an underground tunnel to reduce traffic congestion. You could build a mile of earthbag apartments with a road, gardens, utilities and an aqueduct for far less than $1 billion per mile, especially if you built it in the middle of Africa, Russia or China where property values are low.

We have the money to end extreme poverty in less than five years. We just need to stop spending it on constructing and repairing inefficient cities full of economic dead zones, and build a mega-home that fills all its residents’ basic needs.

The picture below has the aquifer in the center of the building instead of a moat around it, but it still illustrates my proposal.

1. Buy a field. 2. Build a circular sandbag monastery. 3. Build greenhouses. 4. Work and expand. 5. Replace suburbs and refugee camps with sustainable eco-ring monasteries

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

Talk About Saving the World
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1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Build a Better World, Fixing the Economy

October 21, 2017

Conservatives, Stop Talking About Overthrowing The Government

By wise sloth

A sheriff in Lubbock Texas recently made a surprising comment “predicting” there would be a civil war in America if Obama were reelected. Not long after that a couple of American soldiers got caught plotting to assassinate President Obama. It didn’t surprise me at all that either of these events happened, and it worries me that I was so unsurprised.

The extreme conservative right has been beating the civil war drum since 2008, and what started out as a slow clap has finally worked itself up to a fevered pitch, and I blame conservative shock jocks and Fox News pundits almost entirely for this. They’ve been acting like fire and brimstone evangelical preachers this whole time. It’s just taken them this long to play enough hymns and preach enough sermons to get the conservative base worked up like a church revival.

I don’t know why they’re doing it, but I can see what the end result is. They’re poking a bear with a stick, and by “bear” I mean “millions of people who already own A LOT of guns and resent authority.” And by, “poking with a stick,” I mean, “feeding sensationalized disinformation to…” it was only a matter of time before a self-proclaimed Republican somewhere in America acted on what people had been thinking after watching Fox News.

The thing about that is, yeah, the American government is completely broken. That’s been front page news since we were born, but civil war won’t fix that. All it will do is make America turn its gargantuan war machine on itself and shoot itself in the foot. No group of Tea Part militia men could possibly defeat the U.S. military no matter how many shotguns and rifles they owned.

If a rogue group of battle-hardened veterans started attacking politicians, the American government would have to declare martial law on all of its citizens, which would needlessly inconvenience and infuriate an already stressed out, anxious, and fearful population. The worst consequence of even a small scale violent rebellion in the United States would be shutting down travel and business. That would stop people from working, getting paid, or buying goods. If roads were shut down or became unsafe to travel on, then consumer goods would stop reaching markets. Once grocery shelves ran dry, very few Americans living in suburbs or cities would have any way of getting more food except to fight their neighbors for it, and since there are so many guns in America, that’s a recipe for total collapse of civil order. Anything remotely resembling civil war in the United States is a lose/lose situation for everyone except America’s enemies. Anyone doing any saber-rattling is either completely detached from reality or wants America to lose.

The ironic thing about all of this is that there’s a perfectly sane, nonviolent solution to all of these problems built right into right-wing, conservative values. Conservatives, you want government out of your lives. You want to set the laws where you live. You don’t like handouts. You believe in hard work, fiscal responsibility, and fair compensation. And between the lot of you, you’ve also got a ton of money.

You could channel all of those strengths into butting heads with a bankrupt government that’s going through the death throes of an unsustainable empire while being bled dry by welfare queens and an unnecessarily huge and epically wasteful military… but you expect the American government to collapse if another Democrat gets elected anyway. So why not just let the government you hate so much die a natural death? Then you can be the first in line to pick up the pieces instead of being the first to drag yourself out of the rubble you went out of your way to create.

And let’s be honest here for a minute. If the Chick-Fil-A protest was any indicator of how prepared you are to put your money where your mouth is or endure hard times, then armed rebellion is not an option for you. You will fail, but if you know one way or another, America is heading towards its next great depression, then the most important thing you can be doing right now… is preparing for a great depression.

During Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, he raised over $500 million from conservatives, and all of that money got flushed down the toilet when he lost. Imagine how big of a trailer park you could build with $500 million. You could build a trailer park the size of Pecos County, and since Donald Trump is on your side he could Trump it up. With or without trailer houses, you could build your own conservative Utopia surprisingly easily in this day and age. Then all the godless liberals can go to hell inconspicuously outside your walls while you wait for the rapture securely inside.

If you build your own cities then you’ll get to do things your way there. If you design your city to be sustainable then you won’t be dependent on your government. The fewer people are dependent on the government, the fewer people the government can depend on in return. You can assert and enjoy your independence by simply living independently, but that means moving off the grid and building new infrastructure.

You might not want to move off the grid though. You might feel like you paid for the grid with your tax dollars and therefore it’s owed to you. Well, as true as that may be, that grid is broken and unsustainable. It’s a cash sieve. It’s a white elephant. The smartest thing anyone can do is move out of the suburbs and into sustainably designed, self-sufficient communities. If everyone did that then it wouldn’t be a problem when the old system finally dies from eating its own tail. Then we could all just pick up the pieces without having to fight each other over scraps.

On a final note, I just have to ask, was Jesus a builder or a fighter? If you want the world to be a better place then build a better world. That option is still on the table. In fact, the more violent and destitute America becomes the more you’ll wish you had built a sustainable world when you had the chance. If you ever get to thinking that you can bomb your way to a better world, just ask any Iraqi how well that works.

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

Liberals and Conservatives
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Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Build a Better World, Liberals and Conservative Americans

October 20, 2017

A Novel Approach To Taxing The Rich

By wise sloth

The big argument against raising taxes on the rich is that the fewer taxes the rich pay, the more incentive they’ll have to work hard and create jobs, but if we tax the rich heavily, then they won’t be motivated to grow their businesses. This theory ignores a fundamental truth about capitalist economies: You become a millionaire by working hard, but there isn’t enough time, energy or opportunity in one person’s life to become a billionaire through hard work. The only way is by underpaying your workers and overcharging for your products or owning stock in companies that underpay their workers and overcharge their customers. So the only way to become a billionaire is to steal. The way you do that may be legal, but it’s still stealing.

 

 

One way to fix the economy is to put a 100% tax on individual’s income over $1billion. No human being needs more than $1billion, and if you made it impossible to make more than $1billion then you will eliminate the incentive for anyone to try. This won’t stop people from working harder. It will just stop people from exploiting their workers and their customers or cutting jobs to maximize profit.

Plus, you could use those billions of tax dollars you’ve liberated from the greedy to stimulate the economy by creating new businesses. If you want to create jobs and stimulate the economy… then create jobs. The government could sell on of every product. If the government used the money it requisitioned from the rich to start businesses, it could regulate those businesses and make sure its employees got paid a fair percentage of the profit their work generates. The government could guarantee its workers are treated with more dignity than McDonald’s. Plus, it could guarantee the quality and safety of its products, which this would stimulate competition with the rest of the private companies.

Best of all, if the government sold one of every product, then the extra profit those businesses generate could go directly to paying for public programs instead of paying for a CEO’s new yacht. If the government made enough money off the goods and products it sold, we could eliminate the need for many of the taxes and fees we pay. If nothing else, we could subsidize healthcare, give our teachers raises, or invest in free education.

If you believe America is a welfare state, then instead of giving money away to the poor, clear out every other floor of the projects and replace those apartments with offices and pay for it with the money the government takes back from the ultra-wealthy. Give everyone in the projects jobs right there. That will eliminate the excuse of not being able to find a job as well as the need for the poor to buy cars and gas to travel across town to demeaning jobs that pay demeaning wages.

Americans are raised on the idea that working like a slave without complaining and hoarding money are hallmarks of virtue, but some people don’t want to work like slaves nor do they want a lot of money. If the government opened businesses that didn’t set Asian sweatshop work quotas and paid their workers good wages with lifetime job security, a lot of individuals who would have otherwise turned to a life of crime to support their unambitious lifestyle would gravitate to part-time jobs where they would be happy and not bother anyone.

Billionaires could just pay and treat their workers humanely, but they’re not going to. Poverty and crime aren’t their problems. If they won’t treat workers with respect and foresight, then the government needs to step in and do it.

 

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 Taxes

October 20, 2017

12 Things Wrong With America’s Tax System

By wise sloth

 

1: Americans can’t vote directly on what their taxes are spent on.

Few, if any, of the problems listed below would exist if Americans were able to vote directly on what they want their taxes spent on, but there are only a few minor times and places where Americans are allowed to do that. Despite the fact that Americans have no say in how their taxes are spent, they’ll be sent to jail at gunpoint if they don’t pay whatever amount the government demands of them. This is the definition of extortion, and it’s the opposite of freedom. If your political representatives don’t spend your taxes on what you want them to, then that constitutes taxation without representation.

 

2: Americans aren’t allowed to know what a lot of their taxes are spent on.

The White House, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, each branch of the military operate top secret facilities the average American isn’t allowed to know anything about. There are other agencies taxpayers don’t know exist. Taxpayers aren’t even allowed to know how much they’re spending on these programs, but if you don’t pay for them, you’ll go to jail.

 

 

3: Billions are spent spying on Americans, controlling them, and destroying their lives.

In 2013 Edward Snowden leaked information detailing how the U.S. government is using the NSA, in cooperation with the military, to spy on American citizens. The government responded to this by labeling him an enemy of the state and reminding the rest of America that whistle-blowing is punishable by death or life in prison.

Since September 11, 2001, the average police department is militarizing, but they’re not using their expensive resources to protect the people who pay them. They’re using their power to hunt civilians and dole out enough fines to fill their quotas to pay for more militarized gear. At the same time, the police are filling private, for-profit prisons with non-violent offenders.

The entire world knows America’s “War on Drugs” is a failure that creates more problems than it solves. Every expert and most laymen agree on this, but America won’t change its laws because there are too many industries with lobbyists that are making too much money off of it.

Americans not only have to put up with this constant intrusion into their lives, but they have to pay for it all, and they have no way to opt out.

 

 

4: Billions are spent funding industries that rely on selling their product to the government and are allowed to lobby the government for more funding.

Industries like the prison system, standardized testing companies, weapons manufacturers, military contract staffing agencies and mercenary groups are funded almost completely by taxpayer money. Those industries then take that money and use it to lobby politicians to buy more of their products and services. The healthcare industry’s lobbyists were able to go as far as to strong-arm the government into forcing every taxpayer to buy nearly-useless health insurance and be fined if they don’t, and law enforcement is complicit in fining and jailing anyone who doesn’t obey the insurance companies’ demands. The cost/benefit analysis of funding these industries doesn’t add up to the taxpayer. They’re not getting a positive return on their investment.

 

5: Billions are lost on subsidies for the rich.

Private businesses that sell their products and services directly to the public can also lobby politicians to give them taxpayer money. When the government gives away subsidies to big businesses, the taxpayer doesn’t get anything in return. In theory, they should get cheaper products, but the rich don’t get rich charging as little as possible. They get rich by selling the cheapest product for the highest price they can get away with.

 

 

6: Billions are lost to legal tax evasion.

The law frowns upon people putting their tax dollars in off-shore tax havens, but there are ways to legally do that. You can also legally take advantage of tax loopholes that allow you get out of paying the same rates as everyone else.

 

7: Billions are lost on pork barrel legislation:

When a government-funded industry becomes big enough to lobby politicians, they’re almost guaranteed to be able to fleece taxpayers indefinitely. For every business that relies solely on the government, there are hundreds more that will successfully lobby politicians to give them one-off payouts that benefit the business owners more than they benefit taxpayers.

 

 

8: Other countries can lobby the government to give them taxpayer money and representation in government.

America gives away at least $70 billion to foreign interests annually. Foreign governments and businesses can use this money to lobby American politicians to give them more money or vote on policies that benefit them regardless of whether or not it’s in the best interest of the American public.

 

9: The tax code is literally impossible to understand.

The federal tax code is so big, the IRS doesn’t even know how big it is, but it estimates it to be about 7,400 pages long. This doesn’t include state and county taxes. It’s so difficult to calculate how much you owe in taxes, people spend $7 billion annually to hire tax experts to calculate how much they owe. Even those experts are only trained in niche sectors of the tax code. Nobody understands it completely.

 

 

10: Small businesses are choked by convoluted taxes.

Working class citizens are frustrated by the fact that they don’t know how much taxes they have to pay or why, but as long as they cough up enough money to stay out of jail, their lives can go on as normal. Small business owners’ livelihood depends on their ability to navigate the labyrinth of tax codes that apply to them. If your business is small enough, it’s possible to file your taxes yourself, but if you’re not good at math, you won’t be able to open a lemonade stand. This is a huge part of why half of all small businesses fail. However, if you were born rich, you can pay someone to manage all of that for you.

 

 

11: Regressive taxes oppress the poor.

Some people would say America has a progressive tax system, because the more money you make, the more you have to pay in taxes. But consider that if you make $1,000 per month, the government will take a little over $100 out of each paycheck. If you only make $1,000 per month, you almost certainly don’t have any savings. So you’re paying 10% of your total net worth in taxes every month.

Millionaires who pay 40% of their income to taxes annually will complain that they’re taxed too high, but they can still afford to eat steak and lobster dinners, buy their own home and pay for their kids to go to college. The consequence of poor people paying 10% of their net worth to taxes every month is the difference between eating fresh food or boxed food, fixing your car or walking, seeing a dentist or buying Ibuprofen.

The 10% the poor pay in federal taxes don’t include sales taxes, property taxes, auto taxes, county taxes and state taxes. When you add it all up, taxes cripple the poor more than they help them. Once they run out of money, they may be able to qualify for some kind of welfare, but it’s not enough for them to have a decent quality of life. With or without government assistance, the poor still live in constant fear of starvation and homelessness. This regressive tax code amounts to institutionalized economic oppression.

 

12: Billions are wasted on corrupt, ineffective social programs that treat the symptoms of poverty, not the causes.

Millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted every year on ludicrous bureaucratic expenses like requiring a military veteran who lost his legs to submit forms every year stating he still doesn’t have any legs. It doesn’t take many internet searches to find more examples of government waste.

America spends over $1,066 billion on Medicare, welfare, and other social services each year, but poverty, fear, and misery still exist. Doubling the money spent on these programs wouldn’t solve the problem because this money is spent addressing the symptoms of poverty, not the cause.

No matter what you do, you’ll still have to pay for taxes, food, clothing, utilities, and housing. There is no finish line in the rat race. There’s no point where you can stop working and live your life free from the bill collector. You’ll always be forced to pay landlords, banks, grocers, utility companies and the IRS, and everyone is charging their customers as much as possible. Giving the poor handouts to pay banks and big businesses ultimately amounts to redistributing the nation’s wealth to the rich.

 

 

Conclusion

Taxes keep citizens mildly safe from criminals and terrorists. Taxes also build roads, schools and other services that help people fulfill their potential, but we all live in a predatory economy that is designed to bankrupt the poor, and there’s no safety net. Once the rich succeed at taking all your money, you have to sleep on the streets, which is illegal in many cities. Until you reach rock bottom, you have to live in fear of running out of money. That fear drives the poor to work as much as possible without complaining, and they’ll never be free to stop working long enough to join a successful protest. Even if they could, the police will beat them and send them to jail.

Given the choice, no rational person would agree to this social contract. This raises the question, what’s the alternative? The answer to that question is deceptively simple. In order for a person to be secure, free and happy, they need the basic necessities of life: food, water, shelter, and education.

If it costs $86,100 to build an apartment unit, the government could build an apartment for all 318 million taxpayers for $274 billion, which is well within America’s budget. This would eliminate homelessness and the gut-wrenching fear that comes from barely being able to afford rent.

It would only cost $30 billion to feed the entire world. If the American military spent 5.4% of its $664 billion budget, it could feed everyone on the planet. At the very least, it could feed every American very well. Then no American would ever have to live in fear of starvation again.

For another $100-$200 billion, every American could have free utilities and education, especially if the government isn’t paying inflated prices to private utility companies and schools.

For about $500 billion per year, every American could be housed, fed and cared for. This would eliminate the need for social security and welfare, which Americans currently pay more than twice that amount for. It would also eliminate the desperation that drives so many people to use drugs and commit violent crimes.

You don’t need to raise taxes to accomplish this, you just need to stop spending taxes on things that don’t benefit taxpayers. Instead, use the money people already pay to help them directly. If that sounds radical, then that just proves how dystopian America’s tax system has become. We’ve strayed so far from reality that sanity looks crazy.

 

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 Taxes

October 20, 2017

What America’s Class And Tax Systems Really Look Like

By wise sloth

A friend sent me a Youtube video and asked for my opinion on it. I had so much to say about it that I wrote a blog about it. The video argues that America’s progressive tax system rewards the lazy and punishes the rich. If you don’t want to watch the five-minute video, I’ve summarized it in a one-page comic below.

 

 

The lowest class is lazy and ungrateful. The Middle class is doing the bare minimum, and the upper class works constantly and is happy.

 

In case the message in the video isn’t clear, the producers at PragerU.com made at least two more, Do The Rich Pay Their Fair Share? and The War on Work, reiterating the point: Poor people just aren’t trying hard enough, and rich people are hard workers who have to feed the leeches. PragerU probably isn’t run by capitalist conspirators who are knowingly creating misleading propaganda to placate the masses into accepting a life of indignity, fear, and toil. There are millions of other Americans who have the same perception of reality and want to spread the truth as they see it.

Recently a story went viral after a twenty-six-year-old woman lost her job for writing a blog called, “An Open Letter To My CEO” about how little money she made and how hard it was/is to survive. Then a twenty-nine-year-old wrote a response that went viral. She basically told the first girl to suck it up, work harder and stop expecting handouts. She’d probably tell me the same thing if she read the open letter to my CEO I wrote five years ago.

Nobody wants to give handouts to lazy people who don’t want to work. Saying that poor people are just poor because they’re not working hard enough is a warped perception of reality at best and a straw man argument at worst. Below is a comic that more accurately reflects America’s class and tax system:

 

Comic about the upper class exploiting everyone else

 

The poor are not America’s enemy, they’re its victims. The ultra-rich aren’t heroes. They’re the creators and sustainers of economic oppression. They’re going to continue to make economic inequality worse as long as they have all the money and thus all the power, and they’re going to hold onto their money and power as long as Americans justify and glorify their own slavery.

The economic revolution America needs has to happen in the minds of Americans. They need to understand how the economy is stacked against them and start pointing fingers at the real source of the problem.

 

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 Taxes

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 14, 2017

4 Reasons Terrorism Doesn’t Work And 4 Alternatives That Do

By wise sloth

4 REASONS TERRORISM DOESN’T WORK

1: Governments already kill more of their own citizens than you can.

Every country locks its own civilians in prisons for nonviolent, victimless crimes where, with few exceptions, they’re raped and beaten until they’re thrown out in the streets with felony convictions that ruin the rest of their lives. Every country sells tobacco, alcohol, and toxic food to their civilians. They also enforce laws that prevent the poor from being able to afford the medicine they’ll need to save their lives after getting sick from the poisonous food they bought at the grocery store. To make life even scarier and more impossible, most governments set the minimum wage below the poverty level.

It would take an army to kill as many civilians as those countries let die every year. It would be illogical to expect terrorism to hold any leverage over countries that make a full-time job out of terrorizing and slaughtering their own population.

2: You will be killed in retaliation to justify war spending.

Attacking a world superpower is tantamount to personal and ideological suicide. When you attack a superpower, it will attack back. Period. There’s no question about that. Even if a terrorist kills him/herself in their attack, the superpower will still need to attack somebody in retaliation. So they’ll invest billions of dollars into killing you, not because they even care about your ideology but because you went out of your way to give them an excuse to kill someone for money.

3: Everyone you know and love will be killed in retaliation.

And since the largest, most powerful militaries in the world are riddled with bureaucracy, inefficiency, and un-accountability they’re probably going to end up imprisoning and bombing more of your innocent neighbors than your actual associates. If/when/before that happens, you really have to take a step back and ask yourself what terrorism really accomplishes. It just sets in motion a domino effect of murder and mayhem until there’s nobody left to be angry at. The only people who really win are the bullet and bomb merchants.

If you truly have an ideology worth spreading, the worst thing you could possibly do is kill a bunch of innocent civilians. All that’s going to accomplish is getting you and a significant number of like-minded individuals killed, and your ideas are going to die with you.

4: You will make the world hate and reject your ideology.

You’re not going to die as a glorious martyr either. You’re going to be demonized, and your ideology is going to be demonized right along with you. Even if your ideology isn’t demonic, you’ll have made it demonic in the public eye.

Bad Luck Brian Meme: "Kills innocent civilians for the glory of his religion. Now everybody hates his religion."

Some terrorists kill themselves and other people because they believe they’ve been pushed up against the wall. Terrorists say they were forced to use violence as a last resort against overwhelming odds. That’s the line we hear, anyway, but when have the police ever raided a terrorist’s bomb-shack and found a door-length list hanging on the wall of every other method the terrorists had tried before finally resorting to violence? Never. Terrorism isn’t the last resort of courageous men. It’s the first idea of uncreative fools. Here are a few ideas that have worked for other people, which you and your organization should consider trying before resorting to violence:

4 ALTERNATIVES TO TERRORISM THAT DO WORK

1: Bribery

Maybe you have a righteous ideology that you want your government to adopt. Killing innocent people will obligate politicians to reject your ideology. However, history shows that nothing motivates politicians better than money. Instead of funding terrorist training camps, just fund a politician’s political campaign. Even if your ideology doesn’t make any sense and is blatantly in the disinterest of the common citizen, you can still get a politician to sign legislation that will force your ideology onto others. Why do you think America cares so much about Israel? It’s not because America loves Jews. It’s because American politicians love Jewish campaign donations and business connections.

2: Outreach

The Catholic church tried to spread Christianity by the sword. Now the Crusades are remembered by believers and non-believers alike as a prime historical example of FAIL. However, Christianity still spread all the way around the globe because the Christians changed their tactics. They sent missionaries to foreign lands to set up schools, hospitals, orphanages and poor houses. The locals didn’t (usually) fight off the missionaries. The locals came to them. Then, once the locals were lured inside the church the Christians pulled a bait-and-switch and pushed their manifesto on them. Hundreds of years later, Africans, Hawaiians, Maoris, Alaskans, Native Americans and countless other ethnic groups are still worshiping the God who stole their land and erased their culture.

3. Propaganda

You don’t have to kill your enemy to defeat them. Ultimately, what’s your enemy? Your enemy is the ideas in people’s minds. Defeat the ideas and you convert your enemies into your allies. Then you win twice.

If your ideology isn’t sound enough to convince people to adopt without violence then you need to seriously consider whether your ideology is worth spreading at all. If your ideology can convert people without violence then why use violence?

If you have an ideology worth killing/dying for then you must have a giant manifesto detailing your cause, right? If you don’t, then you have to ask yourself what you’re killing/dying for. How do you spread an idea? You put it into a book and then circulate copies of that book. Your money would be better spent on ink than bullets. You don’t even have to be subtle about the fact that you’re spreading propaganda with a bait-and-switch agenda. Just make it cute and funny. If you want to get into people’s minds then DO get into their books and television; DON’T kill them.

4. Regrouping and rebuilding

Joseph Smith had an ideology he wanted to spread. He was killed for his beliefs, and his followers were brutally persecuted by Christians. Afterwards, his followers didn’t start burning churches and attacking government buildings. They moved out into the country and built a new nation based on their ideals. Unfortunately for them, the United States forced them to accept annexation as a state instead of being able to start their own country, but even after that happened they still didn’t start burning churches and blowing up government buildings. They set up schools in places Christians had already done the groundwork of wiping out the local culture. They sent missionaries door to door all over the world to spread their manifesto and convert people’s minds by talking to them, and they’ve had far more success that way than violence could have ever achieved. They haven’t taken over the world yet, but that’s no reason to start killing people. Point in fact, at the time of writing this a Mormon is running for president of the country that wouldn’t let Utah be its own country. Regardless of whether Utah is a state or a country, it’s still a stronghold of the Latter-day Saints, and it became that way through hard work, not violence.

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

Talk About Saving the World
Be Better People
 Build a Better World
Buy a Better World

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Be Better People, Military Philosophy

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