Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Using a fire hose to give water to thirsty people doesn’t work. Hosing down a few people with abundant cash doesn’t do the society any good, either.
The Bible needs an update: love of money has been far surpassed as the root of evil in our world by the simple possession of unearned money. Unearned wealth is that which has been inherited, conned, won at gambling in the great casino otherwise known as the stock market, conveyed by a grateful company for hanging out in the executive suite, or otherwise assembled by the manipulation of paper tokens and computer cursors. Great tsunamis of this bogus lucre are sloshing around the world in search of more lucre, devastating not only companies but whole economies, crushing the lives and hopes of ordinary people.
The damage is not just financial, it is psychological and social. People who come into great wealth without earning it, often rot out at the core. One reason is that they are perpetually surrounded by sycophants telling them how smart they are while promoting yet another scheme for ever more enrichment. The self-esteem of the super-rich becomes bloated even as their intellects and their ethics atrophy, and that’s just in the first generation. The sons and daughters of these inheritors tend to be several steps back down the evolutionary scale toward pond scum.
Paying people outlandishly more than they deserve — for being born, for running a bank, for backing a company, for doing a deal — has become a hallmark of industrial civilization, especially the United States. One result is inequality, the separation of the whole population into the 90 percent who earn money a little at a time with sweat or smarts, and the ten per cent who simply hold the bucket while the money rains down on them.
When someone wins the lottery or gets a job running Citibank, the firehose of incoming money often blows away restraint, common sense, and ethics. We in the 90% are restrained in our spending not only by prudence but by the iron limits of our incomes. When we want more money to spend we may borrow it if we can, or we may take a second job or try to start a business. Any surplus we accumulate becomes a source not only of financial comfort, but of pride.
The very rich, the newly rich, and especially the unjustifiably rich, are different. Drinking from a firehose, it turns out, does not quench thirst but intensifies it. When they have all the clothes and houses and yachts and jewellery they can buy, and still have an ocean of cash left over, the oligarchs unaccountably become consumed with the need for more. According to a recent report by the accounting firm Ernst and Young, the world’s millionaires are now looking for a place to park more than $55 trillion, an unfathomable number that they think will grow to $70 trillion in just three years.
In response to such need, wealth management has become a major global industry. Its mission is to take unearned money and create more unearned money. They do this, for example, by buying companies, loading the companies with debt, cashing out their assets, firing most of their people, and then walking away from the carcass. For detailed examples, consider the fate of Toys R Us, the Denver Post and many, many others.
Industrial society is paying a fearful price for allowing these firehoses of cash to destroy vital companies, institutions and values. They are on the brink of destroying the society that enables them, as any out-of-control parasite will do. This despite the fact — apparent in our own country’s recent history — that they are easily shut down by a properly functioning government.
Sensible regulation and confiscatory taxation of unearned wealth — both of which the United States used to do well, back in the 1940s and 50s — can throttle destructive firehoses down to a multitude of tame spigots available for the nourishment of the common good, money for things like repairing roads and building schools and assuring health care.
Such regulation and taxation are unthinkable today, as unthinkable as the fact that in their absence the entire civilization in coming apart.
Visualization of $1,000,000,000,000.00 http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_debt/us_debt.html
There are at present all sorts of online offers which claim to be privy to the insider secrets of the one-percenters. “Leave all your financial woes behind forever! Learn to make money the easy way, just like them!” Have to say I am tempted. Heck, given where the whole damned world’s now headed — courtesy of the miscreants of course, aka the one percenters, who believe in getting everything for nothing — what else can you do anymore besides helping yourself to as much of the spoils as you can while you can (assuming those schemes really work), all the better to prep yourself and/or enjoy yourself all you can before TSHTF?
Anyway, a few quotes from Confucius:
The Master said, “Wealth and high status are what all desire, but one ought to refuse them should they not be acquired in the proper way.” (Analects 4:5)
The Master said, “The superior man understands what is righteous; the little fellow understands what is profitable.” (Analects 4:16)
The Master said, “With coarse fare to dine on, plain water to drink and one’s bent arm to serve as a pillow when resting, happiness can still be found. Wealth and high status acquired through immoral means are to me as floating clouds.” (Analects 7:15)
Ji Shi (official of the state of Lu) had more wealth than the Duke of Zhou, yet Ran Qiu (a student of Confucius working for Ji Shi) helped him gather still more to augment his assets. Said the Master (to his other students), “Qiu is no student of mine. My young friends, you may beat the drums and assail him!” (Analects 11:16)
The so-called Greatest Generation, having just endured the depression and WW2, set the table for the consumption binge that would be the eventual undoing of America. Ronny Reagan served as master of ceremonies while his minion, David Stockman (now repentant) provided doctrinal backing with his Theory of Trickle-Down Economics – a theory not on par with Darwin’s Natural Selection or Einstein’s Relativity, but sufficient to turn the financial sector into the ‘financial industry’. Bubu Clinton didn’t help when he facilitated the repeal of Glass-Segal. Clinton himself was a boomer, and, as such, a direct beneficiary of the post-war binge (his sappy log-cabin upbringing legend notwithstanding).
As the financial industry grew into America’s Tower of Babble it metastasized into virtually every corner of society, renting asunder its sense of cultural cohesion. Division along racial, religious geographical, age, gender and economic lines became ever more acute as materialism and corporatism replaced patriotism and the nation-state construct.
Jargon, dialect, multi-lingualism and fake news transformed our common language into jibberish, and the little magic techno box rendered one-on-one communication a vestige of some quaint, half-forgotten era.
Looking back, it’s hard to imagine it unfolding any other way.
The so-called Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers slightly predate each of the two major social programs aimed at helping the poor and downtrodden: Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. No president or congress since has bothered to hatch or attempt such a program, which might be called social engineering (rather uncharitably) but at least used public funds where most needed to the benefit of many. Since the Reagan Administration, it’s shifted to a firehose economy aimed at redeploying public funds for two principle purposes: blowing up and/or killing foreigners (without apparent benefit but considerable blowback) and further enriching those who already need no help. It’s not over yet, despite ridiculous and building inequity.
Speaking of firehoses, substitute information for money and you have a good picture of our other irrational preoccupation, as though gathering and consuming ever more information leads to enhanced outcomes. Rather, it’s the right information and how it’s integrated in a thoughtful, restrained character that matters. Another thing lost about the time of the Reagan Administration.
I just have to say man .that was a beautiful post full of justifiable anger. I have lived in this place for 81 years so I know how things once were.And you could not be more right.I think we are seeing the end game of a system that was questionable at best. Do you think your post reached the ears of the powerful? No? me either.