That thing rich people do where they make money into more money

[~jet]

I don't think so. The poor are as every bit as capable as the wealthy to be evil and do evil things just as often. The difference is that people feel guilty about the poor while they love to hate the rich. As to looking around at evil fund managers etc. Like I said I have a unique perspective I see how both sides behave and one isn't better than the other. They only have different resources.

I'm forced to question your logic. The poor are largely disenfranchised, and the higher the GINI ratio they are subjected to, the more violent and/or ignorant they tend to me, and that increases crime. This does not make them intrinsically evil (though it doesn't prevent them from being evil any more than having money necessarily prevents someone from being good.) The issue here is that being evil makes it a HELL of a lot easier to get money. Therefor it makes it hell of a lot more likely that in a lineup of rich people, you will find more evil than good.

 

[Haven]

Reminds me of a book I read sometime ago Rich Dad Poor Dad.

 

[not sure]

I'm forced to question your logic. The poor are largely disenfranchised, and the higher the GINI ratio they are subjected to, the more violent and/or ignorant they tend to me, and that increases crime. This does not make them intrinsically evil (though it doesn't prevent them from being evil any more than having money necessarily prevents someone from being good.) The issue here is that being evil makes it a HELL of a lot easier to get money. Therefor it makes it hell of a lot more likely that in a lineup of rich people, you will find more evil than good.

Sounds like you are just making excuses for the evil actions of poor people in their pursuit of money to me. Even if you change the system and eliminate money you are going to be back in the same place. Cheats will always try to game whatever system is in place, fact of life, and eventually with persistence they will succeed. I've never denied that the system eventually becomes imbalanced, in terms of money or evil. I'm sure I said or implied it somewhere above. All systems eventually become imbalanced.

What I cannot accept is the idea that wealthy people are anymore intrinsically evil than the poor. Evil lives in all of us and the desire to survive also. I must say that I despise the argument that the wealthy are evil. There are real consequences to stereotyping people. I live them. Numerous friends have died because of the rich people are crooks mentality. Nothing they do can satisfy people. The very people they help are their murderers. Then on the nightly news you hear the wailing. Why? How am I going to feed my family now that they've killed Mr. or Ms. so and so? from the same people who hated him or her because of jealousy. It makes me sick. Want to know what it's like to be friendless try being a walking cheque book? Give up the cheque book? Will that buy some friends? I'm not so naive.

Focus on the issues and stop stereotyping people because as long as there is a struggle for survival people will do whatever they have to do to live. The reality is that, there isn't enough for everyone and when you eat you are depriving someone else. If not their life then it's yours. While you are at it, give up your pensions because you are robbing future generations to have that luxury. Yes, the world is a cold, hard, brutish place. Can we just focus on how to solve that and just cut out the name calling.

 

[~jet]

I have to look at the nature of crime at each level, not to mention causality.

GUY:A innovates and invents and entrepreneurs (if that can be a verb). He invested some of his free time to develop a process or item. He, through grit and effort, managed to sell the idea or product to an extend that allowed him a MODEST income... he could have left it at that and lived happily, but instead he hired people to him out, thus increasing their wealth at the same time that his new invention makes other people's lives easier, healthier, or safer, thus increasing their good fortune and wealth. He keeps a modest percentage of the difference and, due to the quickly spreading and growing nature of his contribution, he makes a disproportionate but not unearned share of wealth.

GUY:B, however, discovered that people are intrinsically trusting and gullible (at least in large enough numbers to exploit to his benefit.) He throws a shoddy paintjob on his car, lies to a potential customer, and sells it for more than it could possibly have sold for. Maybe he gets a job doing something similar to that... selling insurance, perhaps. While the concept of insurance is actually a good thing (we all get together and pool an emergency resource that is big enough to help in nearly any catastrophic case) but because it is a large pool of money (and thus power) it acts as a draw to those who value that above the general welfare. GUY:B routinely oversells products and under utilizes resources, thus incurring significant margins which he can either steal from or otherwise use to make him look particularly fruitful, albeit at the cost of those who honestly pay into the system. Eventually be becomes a guy like Helmsley who, after a lot of this, is in such a pinnacle position that his institutionalized abuses rake in tens of billions, one and a half of which he takes home, for himself, in a single 10-year period. After all, we all know that private jets and beachside mansions are their right, whereas the poor sops who need to rely on things like insurance to protect them when the storm hits, or the local power plant gives them cancer, or climate change causes their house to sink, their town to burn down, et cetera... well, they aren't deserving of any what they paid into, and have things like a case of treated acne at 13 years old used for recission, so that all the money they paid in is lost to them forever.

GUY:C, meanwhile, can't get by on his 9 to 5 job anymore. Health insurance rates and housing prices and school loans leave nothing and, in spite of Reagan's insistence that he could, it turned out that using credit cards to make up the difference does more harm than good. His wife took a job sweeping floors at the local paper mill to help bring things back to normal for a while, but then she got sick. Turns out the chemicals they were releasing into the water are even more concentrated on the job site. GUY:C works his ass off, taking every bit of overtime that had been offered, but unfortunately one of the CEOs found out that labor costs less in Indonesia and that the fines they have to pay to the EPA (assuming the EPA hasn't been bought out yet by the Koch brothers) are less than the cost of running a clean business. So, while the plant hasn't closed yet, it's constantly under threat of closing, and the union has shattered. GUY:C can still get some hours, but overtime has turned into undertime and he's forced into a weeks' long layoff every month. The bills are racking up, his wife isn't getting any better, and their son has also lost his part time summer job, what with Walmart having moved in just on the other side of the town line. All the local places have shut down, being unable to compete with a half-subsidized foreign-slave-labor-reliant business such as that, and the local tax burden instead has to be held up by the workers more than before. GUY:C's neighbor on either side are enduring essentially the same pressures, while the couple across the street are both out of work, can't find any, and are being harassed by local code enforcement for trying to grow a few vegetables instead of a front-lawn. Stress is high, tempers are flaring, and those vegetables are looking mighty good, considering all you've been able to have lately is ramen and mac and cheese.

GUY:C is will probably commit a crime sometime in the near future. He might cheat on his taxes a bit, he might steal some food, he might get in a fistfight with his equally disenfranchised neighbor... and if worse comes to worst, he might take up a pitchfork and send the local magistrate to the guillotine and burn down both GUY:A and GUY:B's houses.

It is completely possible for wealth to be earned through honest behavior; but in a 'greed-is-good' and 'me-before-we' society, the more honest a person is, the more likely they are to be exploited by the dishonest, which skews the odds that he'll be kept down while the the abuser rises up.

If the last 30-35 years of American history (much less the roaring 20s), not to mention current events elsewhere across the world, don't demonstrate this for you, then try reading a little about the history of people like Meg Whitman, or Helmsley (sorry, forget his first name), or Carly Fiorina, or Mitt Romney. Look at the guys who run Wellpoint or Humana or Massey or CITI group or Bank of America or Monsanto, to say nothing of the Chamber of Commerce, Federal Reserve, Blackwater, and scammy military contractors. Compare their wealth to the destruction left in their wake. Compare their wealth to the wealth of those who've done good, instead. Seriously. Examine the ratios. It won't be pretty.

The more concentrated the wealth, the higher the odds of evil. It's not a necessity, just a likelihood bourn out both by math and all of recorded history. I will never argue that people should be barred from seeking wealth, nor will I suggest that wealth cannot be had via altruistic 'we-before-me' mechanisms... but our environment is slanted heavily against it.

 

[~jet]

Reminds me of a book I read sometime ago Rich Dad Poor Dad.

Read 'The Jungle' if you haven't already.

 

[not sure]

The more concentrated the wealth, the higher the odds of evil. It's not a necessity, just a likelihood bourn out both by math and all of recorded history. I will never argue that people should be barred from seeking wealth, nor will I suggest that wealth cannot be had via altruistic 'we-before-me' mechanisms... but our environment is slanted heavily against it.

If you look back at what I've said throughout you will see that I don't disagree with this. The system needs correction and it will over and over again. Just don't bring evil into it. It's survival. Most people aren't sociopaths. They are just doing the best they can. John Newton, the writer of Amazing Grace, regretted his part in the slave trade only after he became wealthy but he realized that he was driven by the need to survive. Once, you get there your new fear is how do I not fall back because there aren't many things more horrifying than poverty. Another, thing to realize is that the super rich also suffer from ignorance like the rest of us. We all think we know what it's like to walk in another man's shoes until we actually do so.

It seems to me we want the same outcome. I think as a civilization we've approached the problem the same way that one build's a machine so, naturally the system isn't humane. We've also made some false assumptions that served their purpose for a time but now seem to be reaching their limit.

Part of what attracts me to personality typing is this vague idea I have that we aren't making the best use of our individual talents to solve our problems. In part it's because we have very different values and approaches. If we could harness our potential perhaps we could build a better system. One of the things I admire about this forum is the empathy here. How do we build ethics and compassion into our systems? I don't have a clue how to do it but I think it must be done or we face utter collapse eventually.

This isn't quite tied in but the segregation of the classes really bother me. I will admit I am very prejudiced in this regard. It's a problem I readily admit. Anyway, what I'm really thinking is does it really matter if some are wealthier than others, or is it just that, ideally, no one should be poor?

 

[InvisibleJim]

Rich person = someone who earns more than they spend = more assets = more wealth = more assets and earnings

Ways to earn
1. Work
2. Invention
3. Steal

Poor person = someone who spends more than they earn = less assets = less wealth = society pays.

Ways to be poor
4. Greed
5. Lack of willingness to earn
6. Incapacity

Lets not talk about such a ludicrous idea as good and evil. Lets discuss something more important. Responsibility; if you are in the category 5... sorry, but you are simply irresponsible and you don't have a moral leg to stand on.

Support yourself by generating wealth support your community as a consequence; that is good not evil.

The community only 'does good' if it redistributes from the rich to support those who tick box 6.

 

[~jet]

Ways to be poor
4. Greed
5. Lack of willingness to earn
6. Incapacity

ADD: Lack of willingness to exploit others for personal gain
ADD: Cornered into it by hyperinflation of unavoidable institutionalized expenses such as property taxes, educational costs, health insurances, et cetera.

 

[InvisibleJim]

Ways to be poor
4. Greed
5. Lack of willingness to earn
6. Incapacity

ADD: Lack of willingness to exploit others for personal gain
ADD: Cornered into it by hyperinflation of unavoidable institutionalized expenses such as property taxes, educational costs, health insurances, et cetera.

1) Exploiting others is not a requirement to get off your arse and be productive. Mow a lawn, clean a toilet, negotiate trades. All the economy does is tell us that someone is willing to pay us to do something for an amount which we find acceptable to take and that they find acceptable to give us. The government intervenes for externalities (trade regulations, courts, etc.). No-one ever died as the result of good trade.

2) Good, we are in agreement that these expenses are unsustainable. Go earn some money and stop wasting money by demanding that people stop being productive so you can pay into the system and be responsible for those debts that have been racked up since you were born. Get your parents to get out and do it to. Doing so today means paying back less later.

Post Edit: Hyperinflation kills the wealth of everyone affected by a currency. The asset wealthy more than the asset poor because they receive relatively less compound interest. Note how by slashing interest rates that 'people earning and paying mortgages have never had it so good!' while pensions are screwed because their savings are worth squat. i.e. Currency devaluation incentivises more work being done.

 

[~jet]

Support yourself by generating wealth support your community as a consequence; that is good not evil.

Where that actually occurs, I agree. These days, however, you have WALMART who takes taxpayer money to pay for meager health benefits for its workers even as it destroys all local ma-and-pa competition (erasing more jobs than it creates, and fleecing the masses to pay for what it makes more than enough money on its own to pay for without cutting too deeply into the megawealth of its owners.

These days, we have Wellpoint and Humana and the other 5 insurer cartels who take people's money for decades while they're healthy and don't need their money back, and then cut them off the books the moment they get breast cancer, claiming things like an unreported case of acne 30 years prior, or labelling pregnancy as a 'pre-existing condition,' as excuse. I.e., theft on a massive scale.

You have Hewlett Packard/Fiorina who fires 10s of thousands of Americans, hires 10s of thousands of Indians and Indonesians and, instead of lowering their product prices enough to still be affordable to those 10s of thousands suddenly without jobs, buys several 30 million dollar private jets with the difference, then makes front companies to complete the purchase when reporters find out.

You have Mitt Romney who specialized in cannibalizing local businesses, buying them, chopping them up, and selling off their assets for a profit, destroying thousands of jobs in the process. Again, the allied beneficiary being big business and their disproportionately wealthy CEOs (who went from a 40:1 income ratio with their workers (as if that wasn't already enough) back in the early 70s (pre-reagan) to 400+:1 today, after 30 years of reaganomics.)

Halliburton electrocutes soldiers, blocks the roads of their competitors, can't even pour concrete with any precision, but routinely gets no-bid contracts from their government insiders... then reincorporates in Dubai where they can legally destroy all of their records after a year. So they aren't even American anymore, and yet still manage to qualify for all this preferential treatment.

ExxonMobil may make a similar profit margin to other industries, but still managed to make the single largest profit amount in all of human history, and yet couldn't be bothered to pay the US any taxes at all.... somehow, though, they did manage to wriggle out of us 154 million in tax REFUNDS. Refunds on what, exactly? (this is in addition to all the subsidies us taxpayers are forced to give them.)

Monsanto genetically engineers plants so they can survive incredibly toxic substances that they also happen to produce, including a terminator gene that prevents seeds being produced, thus requiring growers to buy their product year after year at dramatically higher prices than saving seed. They get laws passed in places like Iraq and India that make seed-saving illegal, thus making already poor people have to pay their exorbitant rates... and if a season isn't 110% productive, they farmer goes into debt in a place where the only wealthy neighbor they have is the local loan-shark, seeking 500% returns. Suicide rates among these farmers have sextupled since Monsanto moved into town. Meanwhile, while they haven't boiled-frogged America for the same laws just yet, they have managed enough of a revolving door with congress to grant them permission to sue any farmer out of business whose private and natural crops just happen to accidentally (and inevitably) get cross-pollonated with a monsanto strain.

Massey couldn't provide proper ventilation, Microsoft and Electronic Arts put more effort into murdering their competition than into making a good (and thus competative) product. Major banks looked the other way even as they knew what Madoff was up to, and you get blokes like the Wisconsin governor who gives away enormous tax breaks to his buddies, whimpers about the resulting budget shortfall, and goes after the unionized worker to make up the difference... well, except for the two or three outfits that actually supported his campaign. In the same bill is a clause that will allow him to sell off publicly-owned utilities on a no-bid basis to whomever he wants, and that would be the Koch brothers (who already own more 'captive-audience' utilities than used to be legal not only in that state but across most of the country, being the 2nd largest corporation on U.S. soil.) They're also big into making people's front lawns and sink faucets explode due to natural gas frakking.

All of the above would still be wealthy and powerful if they operated in the interest of the community IN TANDEM with their own interests, and yet that has proven to be too much to ask. In every case they exploited and abused their communities from larger profit margins when the margins they and their predecessors had were more than fine enough to offer them more than sufficient wealth.

Do you ignore this out of ignorance or deceit?

 

[not sure]

Some of the largest shareholders are pension funds. Part of the relentless drive for increasing profit is to satisfy their need to maintain at least a 10% rate of return to keep the funds afloat. Exponential growth raising its ugly head again. The money made by CEOs dwarfs in comparison. Who is going to be first to give up their pension fund and take the risk of wretched old age. Insurance is based on the same ideas, borrowing from the future. If we stop this be prepared for a radical change in your lifestyle. Perhaps, more radical than anything the economic crisis has triggered so far.

 

[~jet]

Any system, co-opted, designed, and run by the rich intrinsically benefits solely the rich at the expense of a community that is kept just barely wealthy enough to fuel the rich whilst not wealthy enough to dare stand up for themselves in lieu of losing their marginal source of income and well-being. It was true in the middle ages right up until the plague created a ginormous deficit in labor (thus making the exploiters the desperate party for a while), it was true in the roaring 20s until it caused the great depression, and it has been true ever since Reagan implemented 'trickle-on' economics. Why this recession has come as a surprise to anyone is beyond me... as is this insistence that its okay to abuse the masses for your personal gain.

 

[InvisibleJim]

Where that actually occurs, I agree. These days, however, you have WALMART who takes taxpayer money to pay for meager health benefits for its workers even as it destroys all local ma-and-pa competition (erasing more jobs than it creates, and fleecing the masses to pay for what it makes more than enough money on its own to pay for without cutting too deeply into the megawealth of its owners.

These days, we have Wellpoint and Humana and the other 5 insurer cartels who take people's money for decades while they're healthy and don't need their money back, and then cut them off the books the moment they get breast cancer, claiming things like an unreported case of acne 30 years prior, or labelling pregnancy as a 'pre-existing condition,' as excuse. I.e., theft on a massive scale.

You have Hewlett Packard/Fiorina who fires 10s of thousands of Americans, hires 10s of thousands of Indians and Indonesians and, instead of lowering their product prices enough to still be affordable to those 10s of thousands suddenly without jobs, buys several 30 million dollar private jets with the difference, then makes front companies to complete the purchase when reporters find out.

You have Mitt Romney who specialized in cannibalizing local businesses, buying them, chopping them up, and selling off their assets for a profit, destroying thousands of jobs in the process. Again, the allied beneficiary being big business and their disproportionately wealthy CEOs (who went from a 40:1 income ratio with their workers (as if that wasn't already enough) back in the early 70s (pre-reagan) to 400+:1 today, after 30 years of reaganomics.)

Halliburton electrocutes soldiers, blocks the roads of their competitors, can't even pour concrete with any precision, but routinely gets no-bid contracts from their government insiders... then reincorporates in Dubai where they can legally destroy all of their records after a year. So they aren't even American anymore, and yet still manage to qualify for all this preferential treatment.

ExxonMobil may make a similar profit margin to other industries, but still managed to make the single largest profit amount in all of human history, and yet couldn't be bothered to pay the US any taxes at all.... somehow, though, they did manage to wriggle out of us 154 million in tax REFUNDS. Refunds on what, exactly? (this is in addition to all the subsidies us taxpayers are forced to give them.)

Monsanto genetically engineers plants so they can survive incredibly toxic substances that they also happen to produce, including a terminator gene that prevents seeds being produced, thus requiring growers to buy their product year after year at dramatically higher prices than saving seed. They get laws passed in places like Iraq and India that make seed-saving illegal, thus making already poor people have to pay their exorbitant rates... and if a season isn't 110% productive, they farmer goes into debt in a place where the only wealthy neighbor they have is the local loan-shark, seeking 500% returns. Suicide rates among these farmers have sextupled since Monsanto moved into town. Meanwhile, while they haven't boiled-frogged America for the same laws just yet, they have managed enough of a revolving door with congress to grant them permission to sue any farmer out of business whose private and natural crops just happen to accidentally (and inevitably) get cross-pollonated with a monsanto strain.

Massey couldn't provide proper ventilation, Microsoft and Electronic Arts put more effort into murdering their competition than into making a good (and thus competative) product. Major banks looked the other way even as they knew what Madoff was up to, and you get blokes like the Wisconsin governor who gives away enormous tax breaks to his buddies, whimpers about the resulting budget shortfall, and goes after the unionized worker to make up the difference... well, except for the two or three outfits that actually supported his campaign. In the same bill is a clause that will allow him to sell off publicly-owned utilities on a no-bid basis to whomever he wants, and that would be the Koch brothers (who already own more 'captive-audience' utilities than used to be legal not only in that state but across most of the country, being the 2nd largest corporation on U.S. soil.) They're also big into making people's front lawns and sink faucets explode due to natural gas frakking.

All of the above would still be wealthy and powerful if they operated in the interest of the community IN TANDEM with their own interests, and yet that has proven to be too much to ask. In every case they exploited and abused their communities from larger profit margins when the margins they and their predecessors had were more than fine enough to offer them more than sufficient wealth.

Do you ignore this out of ignorance or deceit?

You are moaning about companies which are publicly traded by pension funds; banks and of course individuals of the US and other countries. Moreover the investments banks and pension funds make are funded by private individuals. My advice, if you don't like people owning their homes, having capital investments and you really believe that all of these things magically appeared without people inventing them and people agreeing to trade with them then sure, become a communist revolutionary and we'll start pulling out statistics on how successful 'the great leap forward' was for China in the 50s.

Otherwise, do what Mr. Walmart did and reinvent Walmart with a twist and become a billionairre providing services for over 100 million Americans every week and jobs for over 1.5 million workers and associates mostly in America just by being more efficient than his competitors. Despite the massive profits of walmart it only makes a 4% profit every year. A new business can manage 100%+ plus until it saturates the market. Should we shut down new businesses for being 'excessively profitable!'. I'm not American, these are just facts.

If insurance companies refuse to honour their agreements then you can take them to court - failing to read the small print is naive; I don't care much for consumer rights in the US, I'm not a US consumer but we have a financial services watchdog in the UK that deals with this strictly.

My advice, as I've said to another individual is that if people really don't want outsourcing (why it's been happening from Europe to America for 500 years) you'll find that you can set up a company promising not to outsource and take that market from outsourcing companies.

Yes, asset stripping lost businesses is not the devil; someone else will spring up to recreate that business if there is a market for it. Those people in that business have the knowledge to do so instantaneously whether the asset stripper likes it - or not.

Basically, you're opinion is a crock of shit because you are willing to complain about businesses doing what they do best: Making profit for their owners - just as it is the responsibility of government to ensure that businesses earn ethically and pay taxes appropriately while you haven't put your money where your mouth is and show them how to do it better and to take their market share by offering an alternative product.

Stop the luddite delusions and learn to generate wealth to pay for schools, hospitals and the things that the community needs and campaign to ensure that the government does its job by taxing ethically. Worse than that; stop trying to rob investors (pensioners, members of your community and innovators) of their money just because of your individual greed and your excuse that success = evil because you aren't as successful as you might like to be.

 

[not sure]

Ok then. I don't agree with you, [MENTION=3019]~jet[/MENTION] but what do you suggest as an alternative?

 

[InvisibleJim]

 

[~jet]

I want to see people get rich by inventing/selling solar and wind power... by inventing software that makes people's lives easier... by developing crop dispersion techniques that dramatically reduce the need for pesticides... by investing in and building hydroponic skyscrapers for all the major cities of the world... by developing nanomachines that can hunt down and kill cancer one cell at a time and disperse topical treatments (thus dramatically reducing cost and increasing effectiveness of medicine) ...by developing better education, by investing in the betterment and technological leapfrogging of the third world... by mining asteroids instead of mountains... by storing electricity inside ceramics... by ending the use of hydrocarbons as a fuel source... et cetera.

Rather than, you know, by cheating millions out of their hard earned pensions and healthcare premiums, starting pointless wars, spreading toxins and poisons, cutting back on safeguards, engineering captive-audience traps where the buyer essentially has no choice in the matter, placing bets on bets on bets on bets of the financial failures of industries they can directly manipulation through hedge funds, and so on and so forth. This is where the majority of modern 'wealth' is tied up right now, and the problem is getting worse.

What do you call wealth, anyways? As an innovator and laborer, I'm doing unusually well at about 76k/yr... but I can't afford to live within an hour's commute of work. The only ones who can are the lobbyists and insurance salesmen whose jobs are essentially institutionalized system gaming and information manipulation. They're making, 200-400k a year (according to D.C. metro statistics). Personally, I'd consider that to be WEALTHY. I don't know what I'd do with 200k a year, much less 400k.

Their bosses, though... they are making millions a year on the low end (helmsley, through fiscal mass-rape, took home 1.5 billion for only 10 years 'work,' and in that whole time did no one any good except himself, the board, and major shareholders, but did do incredible harm to millions.)

Prior to Reagan and following the last banker-started economy-destroying depression that required wealth-moderation measures to fix, tax rates on what, in today's dollars would have been ~OVER~ 3.5million in take-home personal income per year was taxed between 70 something and 90 something percent. Depends on when you check. Keep in mind, thats only on the portion over 3.5 relative million dollars... the tax rate is much more modest below that rate... but as we all know, 3.5million was never enough for a honest human being to survive on. That same era, however, was America's single most golden, wealthy, self-sufficient, and demonstrably wholesome. Prior to that people were being shot in wisconsin for demanding a couple days off a week to rest, people were falling into meat grinders and their families were left to starve, and bankers like J.P. Morgan manipulated the market so that he could buy up the carcasses of smaller companies for a song after the stock market crashed. This is a cycle now being ramped back up once again. Accidents will always happen, but incidents such as the Exxon Valdez, the gulf spill, the massey mine, and halliburton fatalities were all traced back to willful negligence fueled by EXCESSIVE self-interest and greed for those reaping the rewards at the top of the pile. Even though these people are worth billions and making millions more every year, a few hundred thousand was too much to ask to prevent the deaths of workers on myriad occasions.

Worse, though, is that what you accuse people of in being poor is something that is largely forced upon them by unnecessary circumstances by these same people and institutions and corporations. A financially satisfied and secure public is one that can afford to take a stand against injustice and abuse... a financially strapped public will either take it on the chin or cower in the corner until all else fails and violence is their own remaining recourse.

 

[~jet]

Seriously; how often and how identically does history have to repeat itself for you to learn your lesson from this?

 

[Solongo]

I find it amazing how much negativity there is regarding money, money is not something to be scared of and is not something "evil".

I agree. Money is very neutral exchange of energy. Morality and money does not mix well. But we mix them anyways. I think truly rich people ( not talking about wannabe rich people) see money as a by product of an activity they like to participate in.

 

[InvisibleJim]

Seriously; how often and how identically does history have to repeat itself for you to learn your lesson from this?

As ever, no logic, lots of diatribe, vitriol and rhetoric. I work in energy, in a small company which doesn't flay rabbits for $$$'s; I earn less than you and I'm a highly educated individual and I'm going to let you into a secret.

These horrible, evil individuals continually reinvest to deliver you the resources you want at low low bargain prices you demand and you hate their wealth and dependence upon them. They don't do it because they hate you but because they have a fair and acceptable opportunity. When prices go up their value increases to the market and the people who invest get more return to encourage them to invest to decrease the cost of these resources. Consider... There is a major worldwide crisis regarding food price inflation at the moment. How do you lower the cost of food? Invest in new food production facilities. How do you do that? The market has raised the price of food, the companies hand out bigger dividends they attract more investment and expand their operations. Result: An increased supply of food to meet the demands of the marketplace.

I want to see people get rich by inventing/selling solar and wind power... by inventing software that makes people's lives easier... by developing crop dispersion techniques that dramatically reduce the need for pesticides... by investing in and building hydroponic skyscrapers for all the major cities of the world... by developing nanomachines that can hunt down and kill cancer one cell at a time and disperse topical treatments (thus dramatically reducing cost and increasing effectiveness of medicine) ...by developing better education, by investing in the betterment and technological leapfrogging of the third world... by mining asteroids instead of mountains... by storing electricity inside ceramics... by ending the use of hydrocarbons as a fuel source... et cetera.

What you have suggested either costs more than what is currently available or they haven't been invented yet. Cost vs. Utility is king in a free market.

Nope, I'm really not responsible for the failed policies of US governments, voted in by the US people either.

My other piece of advice. If you aren't earning enough then either raise your prices or work more efficiently to generate more income or you will be competed out of the marketplace for example in affording housing in your area if it is desirable. Don't like the cost of rent? Maybe you should have bought a house before the going got tough. Otherwise you have to compensate someone who invested to provide you that house. Sorry, but I do find it absurd that you are pleading poverty at a time when many people are having difficulty finding work when you could elevate that by moving 15 minutes further away by commute or regenerating a less desirable area.

 

[~jet]

here you go:

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm