Original text and editing by:
A G Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
When we’re all rich and live on our investments no one will have to work. There will be no poverty or slums. We’ll all have a PH.D. What a glorious vision it is! If hunter gatherers had envisioned the service economy 20,000 years ago the human race would have achieved its glorious end long before any of US were born. . . .
"A good slave works for food alone."
Volume V Issue 07:
The need for technical education was mentioned several times on C-SPAN's Washington Journal - 7/13/05. The discussion topic was NASA. Rep. Ken Calvert R-CA, said that China graduates more engineers in a month than we do in a year. He wants US to motivate students to pursue real enterprises. Encouraging young people to take up science and engineering is at cross purposes with service economy/ownership society theory and practice. MBAs have been downsizing engineers and productive enterprise in general since the mid 1980s to increase their salaries, profits and stock options. Now everyone wants to be in finance where the money is. The resulting disincentive to invent or produce any real thing will resolve itself due to market forces. When everyone, even the Chinese are financiers, no one will have to work to live. We'll all live on our investments. There will be no need or demand for science, engineering or production, when the glorious ownership society is completely realized. Detractors may say that the booming economy of corporate and financial profits are actually liabilities that burden the real economy of production and consumption. When we have successfully eliminated all production in favor of investment activity the nay sayers will be silenced. Gloom and doom will disappear from the service economy world as easily as the Chinese will be freed by dominant capitalism.
Later in the same program a Bushite congressman from Texas, Joe Barton, while religiously professing his faith in free enterprise, expressed his concern over China’s 18+ billion offer for Unocal. He said the Chinese corporation was backed by it’s government so it’s an unfair bid. In what parallel universe does his Washington exist? In our Washington we don’t worry about the government doing business. The corporations own and are the government and use the treasury and our tax dollars for whatever profits them. If the politicians don’t understand that, and apparently they don’t, then they’ll never understand why the trade imbalance means that the only way to get back the increasingly worthless dollars we spend on Chinese products is to borrow them or sell what remains of our productive infrastructure and capital assets. Either way puts US deeper in the hole. The taking of these plunders and moving the money to the Cayman Islands etc. are how American investors are looting our country. His and every politician’s answer is to chant the free market litany and ignore our community, that the financial parasites are destroying by selling it to the highest bidder for their individual short term gain. They believe the World Bank’s empire of financial [abstract] acquisition worked well in India and the rest of the world. Although they are in denial about Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and others, who are starting rebel against debt slavery and look to Cuba for guidance and support.
What the World Bank did, with some success, to India and the rest of the planet, isn’t working in China. In fact the Chinese are doing it to US. The half-wit congressman did have just enough sense to realize that, with the largest standing army in the world, a growing navy, air force, space program and nuclear warheads for their missiles, there’s little we can do about our growing dependence on China or their takeover of world trade and finance. But we rank and file slaves don’t have to worry about being sold to China. Our present masters will probably hang on to US long enough, despite their mismanagement, for US to starve to death. But it’s important that they be free to sell US out for short term gain even if it destroys US and them. We mustn’t think of interfering in free trade. The fact that it is [self] destructive to the community that seems to exist primarily for the profit of the clowns who own and operate it and on which all business and our lives are dependent, is not relevant. Only the sacred and most high principles of free market capitalism are to be recognized as meaningful. Our deaths are nothing. Let holy writ be served. What has been served for 5000+ years is the enrichment of a few at the expense of the many-- the community. Our individual desire to be among the rich elite helps to rationalize the disruption of economic equilibrium of production and consumption that makes them wealthy. As more of US succeed in financial [abstract] adventures, the load on real productive systems grows. The upper limit and impossible end of capitalism is realized when we’re all rich stockholders and no one produces any real product. In the meantime they’re cooking the books on the economic forecasts by counting the liability of [imaginary or abstract wealth] finance, the support of the rich, as an asset, by including it in the real GDP. Perhaps Bush can take a cue from Reagan and bankrupt the threatening foreign power with a new arms race. Oh, but the Chinese are loaning US back our money so we can continue to run our government, without taxing those who are getting richer by looting and selling out America . We’d need to get the Chinese’ permission, in the form of loan approvals, to destroy them economically with an arms race. And we still haven’t recovered from Reagan’s borrow and spend arms race that destroyed the Russian economy and crippled ours.
The Chinese deep water surface ships will surpass ours in size and number in ten years. American corporations have been selling them military technology that will give them parity with our own weapons systems. That from another Republican congressman in a committee hearing the same day. He accused the CATO rep, a staunch free market conservative who was defending the Unocal deal, of supporting corporate treason, though he used slightly less colorful language. The harangue resulted from the CATO fools assertion that there was no connection between the deal and China’s military build up. Of course the congressman paid obeisance to the free market deity but said China is an exception because they aren’t good guys like US. Again, I’m paraphrasing. When I see these clowns reinforcing each others faith and delusions, even as they attack each others credibility, while they only vaguely glimpse some small part of the ugly truth, I wonder if there’s really any hope. But listen to the tone of a growing number of Americans, who are questioning our national sanity as well as the loyalty of corporate parasites and the politicians and government they own. If the noise keeps growing it will become the mainstream. Then there will be hope.
We’re starting to wake up. I doubt the politicians, CEOs and rich stockholders ever will. They’ve been running their con so long, tens of generations in some cases, most of them grow up believing their own bullshit. Successful entrepreneurs will recite chapter and verse as part of the initiation process. And after all, it’s essentially the same fraud that has been perpetrated since the first warrior priest/king put a community to work for his own enrichment, instead of for our common well being. The essence of the scam is the abomination of human nature, in particular our social instinct, that support of the rich by communities has constituted all this time. That is how civilization has been ill-used. It’s not all right to have others work for your gain-- to produce your wealth. Do your own work! That is what individual endeavor is all about. Your individuality is lost, when someone else works for you. You fat cats are dependent on your employees, not the other way around as you’re want to believe. The freedom to own slaves is an oxymoron. You would better instead to free yourself from such delusions. See the self interest in contributing to the common effort to survive, in the minimization of pain and suffering instead of the maximization of personal profit. Fair? That’s trickier. To be fair to the rich is unfair to the rest of US. And what does fair, which describes a blue eyed blond English noble, have to do with anything anyway. The lady is fair. Therefore whatever she says is righteous and what you deserve, even when your being conned.
What is an idiot? The classical definition is one who is so consumed by his own inner workings, the id, that he is unaware of the reality of the world about. The obsession with individual or corporate profit, while denying, by refusing to admit awareness to one’s mind, the damage done to the community from which the profit is extracted, is an idiotic process. The rich stockholders and the CEOs and politicians they own are so consumed by the inner workings, the methods of achieving financial profits, that they are unaware of the reality of dissipation of economic energy. They are a group idiot. The loss to the community is due to disruption of the economic equilibrium of production and consumption. That is: profit on money or the work of others. If others (or money) labor for you, we are deprived of your work input. The economic equation can never be balanced unless everyone produces some real material thing. We can produce enough to support some useful services but their cost must be minimized to minimize economic dissipation. While a perfect balance isn’t necessary, there is yet a limit to the imbalance the human race can tolerate and still survive. When we’re all rich, there will be no one to work for US. If we produce nothing ourselves will we sell Chinese products back to them at a mark up? Yeah, the Chinese are perfect suckers. They’ll never catch on.
The more people who live by investment or non-materially productive service, the greater the cumulative effect of dissipation to the economy, which supports the lives of communities and the individuals who form them. A few very rich are supported by the community and live on the work done in the community by many of US. Many more in the middle hope to have others work for them and to be rich themselves. Both the rich and poor are a burden on the economy of production and consumption. We, the People of the Human Race have created the community and our economy to support our survival. To allow its dissipation, for the profit of a few, is a threat to our lives. The welfare of the rich parasites is much more costly than the crumbs thrown to the poor. But much of the last two paragraphs is about why our fools paradise never could have worked in the long run. What’s very important is how the idiot politicians, economists and CEOs are making the long run shorter. If you don’t know what I mean by that, I suggest you reread this and past issues until you do!
I know that much of my cultural analysis is so tightly packed that it can appear to some to be rambling. Believe me, all the points I mention are connected, even though in a somewhat chaotic matrix, rather than a single straight line. It is the imaginary, non-linear elements of the system and especially the attempt to exploit them, that are our problem. While the economy is made to appear confusing or incomprehensible, it is made up of simple transactions. It’s better understood as a unostentatious algebraic equation. But the con artists who profit the most from the efforts of the community, obscure their looting with a pseudo calculus of derivatives and flawed integration. The best way to understand the big lie is to note that you can’t make something from nothing. Perpetual motion defies the Laws of Thermodynamics. There must be equilibrium between production and consumption to sustain any economy. Usury, i.e. finance, and any service useful or not, takes material goods but burdens the community with their production. Making money with money is the most abstract practice and therefore the most dissipative to economy. You can’t make something from nothing. To be rich you must subvert the purpose of community, the common good, for your own selfish purposes. You can’t do enough work yourself to be rich.
Some of you see this and understand the danger unbridled greed is posing to our community. That is: to US all. Some glimpse the truth here and there but also listen to the arguments of deceivers who only wish to preserve their own privilege at the expense of the community. You want to be fair. But in the case of the wealthy elite and their uppermost minions, that’s like being fair to a tick that’s sucking your blood. We can’t afford to be fair to parasites who take the greatest share of the production of the community, depriving more and more of US each day of what we need to live. The poor we can afford. They aren’t allowed much. But the rich and their corporations are sucking US dry. You know, we could easily solve the problem. If everyone who had n times more that average wealth was required to give n people enough to bring them up to average, the equation would be much more balanced than it is today. If this direct, though unfairly maligned and ridiculed, method were enforced by appropriate property and estate taxes, the economy would be that much closer to equilibrium. If the overall system remained unchanged they’d have it all back in a month anyway. If then they gave it back again the merry-go-round might go on indefinitely without faltering from imbalance. Too absurd? A less direct but more practical and acceptable first step is to de-privatize finance and have the community perform the most dissipative services by and for ourselves on a non-profit basis. It might even be sustainable if we enforced redistribution and maintained it by doing our own work at home in America for decent wages. The more subtle evils of our system will have to await elimination until these urgent threats to survival posed by finance and the high cost of medicine due to insurance and pharmaceutical profits are neutralized. First things first.
If you wish to help, contact me:
agkaiser@yahoo.com
Greg Kaiser
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