Money Quotations

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©2008-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

A deficit is a tax compounded with interest for late payment.
~ Anonymous

Everyone is a socialist when his house is on fire.
~ Anonymous

When plunder becomes a way of life, for a group of men, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.
~ Frédéric Bastiat (born: 1801-06-29 died: 1850-12-24 at age: 49) The Law 1850

That is as succinct a description of the Republicans as any I have ever read.

[Dr. Edward Livingstone Trudeau] well said, “There is a rich man’s tuberculosis and a poor man’s tuberculosis. The rich man recovers and the poor man dies.” This succinctly expresses the close embrace of economics and pathology.
~ Dr. Norman Bethune (born: 1890-03-04 died: 1939-11-12 at age: 49)

Ownership has been separated from control; and this separation has removed many of the checks which formerly operated to curb the misuse of wealth and power.
~ Louis Brandeis (born: 1856-11-13 died: 1941-10-05 at age: 84)

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

All progress is based on a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
~ Samuel Butler (born: 1835-12-04 died: 1902-06-18 at age: 66)

Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden.
~ Orson Scott Card (born: 1951-08-24 age: 60)

The American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
~ George Carlin (born: 1937-05-12 died: 2008-06-22 at age: 71)

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
~ Noam Chomsky (born: 1928-12-07 age: 83)

One of the dirty little secrets of today’s international order is that the rest of the globe could topple the United States from its hegemonic status whenever they so choose with a concerted abandonment of the dollar standard. This is America’s preeminent, inescapable Achilles Heel for now and the foreseeable future.
~ W. Clark

Monsanto — through acquisitions and cut-throat business practices — has cornered 90% of the soy, 65% of the corn, and 70% of the cotton market, and has a rapidly growing presence in the fruit and vegetable market, all without government anti-trust officials raising an eyebrow.
~ Adam Claus of Credo

Even the invisible hand does not want to pick beans.
~ Stephen Colbert (born: 1964-05-13 age: 47)

Get a copy of Kevin Trudeau’s book on Natural Cures absolutely free. Must have a credit card to order.
~ TV commercial

Obviously this is some sort of scam, possibly there is a $20 S&H charge. If the book is truly free they don’t need your credit card number. Yet these crooks operate openly. We let slide all manner of dishonesty and deception in TV ads.

Comfortable, older, rich people fight change. This has always been so.
~ Guy Dauncey (born: 1948 age: 63)

Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to his room (top story but one), and cried very much. He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable.
~ Charles Dickens (born: 1812-02-07 died: 1870-06-09 at age: 58) David Copperfield

A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
~ Everett Dirksen (born: 1896-01-04 died: 1969-09-07 at age: 73)

The are several well-trodden steps to financial hell. First a country spends far more than it takes in taxes, usually to pay some war.
~ Niall Ferguson (born: 1964-04-18 age: 47) The Ascent of Money

The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges.
~ Anatole France (born: 1844-04-16 died: 1924-10-12 at age: 80)

Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith (born: 1908-10-15 died: 1908-10-15 at age: 0) Recession Economics

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith (born: 1908-10-15 died: 2006-04-29 at age: 97)

What was it that awakened us to the dangers of this fatal rivalry? A rivalry propelled by forces within and between the two countries? On the decisive forces, everyone must be allowed to make his own selection. Mine number five: They were Khrushchev, Cuba, the Vietnam War, the growing divisions within the communist world, and the persistent unwillingness of the human mind to accept persuasion that is in conflict with evidence. All who exercise power find this latter obstinacy by far the most annoying tendency with which they have to contend.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith (born: 1908-10-15 died: 1908-10-15 at age: 0) Age of Uncertainty: the Fatal Competition

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (born: 1869-10-02 died: 1948-01-30 at age: 78)

You have to keep this con even after you take his money. He can’t know you took him.
~ Hency Gondorff (born: 1925-01-26 died: 2008-09-26 at age: 83) in The Sting played by Paul Newman

An even greater con is where the mark is fully aware he is being conned, but goes along with it anyway, e.g. casinos, churches, the stock market and women with sugar daddies.

If the need is great enough, (e.g. drowning) or the cost small enough (e.g. a light) then we are all Communists.
~ David Graeber (born: 1961-02-12 age: 51) anthropologist

If they’re [the banks are] too big to fail, they’re too big. In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil — so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.
~ Alan Greenspan (born: 1926-03-06 age: 85)

In nature, when a cell gets too big, it voluntarily splits in two. When a bee hive gets too big it voluntarily spits in two. Banks don’t have the sense to split without encouragement.

One of the lessons is that if you want to grow your economy towards the creative direction of the 21st century, a big banking sector, even if it is successful, is, in fact, bad news.
~ Ragnar Grimsson (born: 1943-05-14 age: 68) president of Iceland.

The reason is the banking industry sucks up all the mathematicians and computer scientists, depriving the innovative industries of their expertise.

If you factor in the cost of the military to protect our petroleum assets in the middle east, gasoline costs us $7 a gallon. We have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
~ Gary Hart (born: 1936-11-28 age: 75) of The Last Word TV show on MSNBC 2010-11-21

What an arrogant imperialistic American! He refers to the oil in the middle east as belonging to the USA. I suppose it does now in a sense, stolen, now that Obama had the big auction to sell off all of Iraq’s oil reserves to American and European oil companies on the very day he announced the pullout.

At a certain level, our modern consumer society is built on a truth and a lie. The truth is that if you’re living below Maslow’s Threshold of safety and security, a little bit of stuff can make a huge change in your mental and emotional states, and the quality of your life. If you’re outside alone at night, naked and cold, your’re miserable,. If somebody brings you inside, gives you clothes to wear, a warm blanket, a fire to sit by, warm food to eat, and a comfortable bed to sleep in, then you move from unhappy to happy pretty fast.

The lie is the siren song of our culture. “If that much stuff will generate that much instant happiness” the lie goes, “then ten times as much stuff will make you ten times happier. A hundred times as much stuff will make you a hundred times happier. A thousand times as much stuff will make you a thousand times happier. And it follows that Bill Gates lives in a state of perpetual bliss!”
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60)  Threshold: the Crisis of Western Culture page 14

Conservatives view taxes as a confiscation of wealth: the government is taking my money. For liberals taxes are the price of admission to civilised society — It’s our money. Liberals view taxes as the reasonable and appropriate way to fund an investment in society and the future. From the liberal point of view, if somebody doesn’t want to pay taxes, they’re a freeloader.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60)  Cracking the Code page 95.

Who do the conservatives imagine should pay for all those wars they are so fond of, the nuclear missiles, all the police, the prisons, the water, the sewers, the roads, the border patrols…?

Many conservatives don’t hold as a primary value the ideas of living in a society in which everyone has choices. They believe in a dominator model — that some people should be the deciders and that others should do what the deciders say. Conservatives who are members of the religious right in particular tend to believe that men are the deciders and the women should abide by their decisions.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60)  Cracking the Code page 151.

The Gulf states, China, Russia, France and Japan intend to bring an end to conducting oil deals in US dollars, switching instead to a basket of currencies, including a new Gulf state currency, by 2018.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60)

Heretofore the USA has enjoyed a huge advantage over other countries through bullying other countries into conducting all their petroleum transactions in US dollars. The following benefits will end with the demise of the US petrodollar:

• US banks get fees every time other countries exchange local currencies to or from US dollars for petroleum purchases or sales.
• When the US prints a trillion dollars of new money, instead of causing rampant inflation, other countries quickly sweep these dollars up for use as petrodollars.
• Petrodollars give the USA a way to effectively tax people in foreign countries. When Americans print money, they get to spend the money, and the value of all the foreign petrodollar holdings drop. Foreign petrodollar holders are effectively paying a US wealth tax.

These three factors have given the US economy a free ride. Without a strong manufacturing sector and with dwindling natural resources, it will not be able to remain a superpower once the rest of the world abandons the American petrodollar. That is why the USA invaded Iraq when it went off the petrodollar in 1990 and today threatens Iran for the same reason.

Writing more than two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson argued for a tax on accumulated wealth [aka an estate tax or an IRS (Internal Revenue Service) death tax as the Republican call it] because he knew that if [great] wealth were passed down from one generation to the next, those lucky inheritors would turn into new aristocrats.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60)  Cracking the Code page 129.

We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.
~ Leona Helmsley (born: 1920-07-04 died: 2007-08-20 at age: 87)

She was sentenced in 1992 to four years in prison and fined $7.1 million for tax evasion. She was correct, except she was not big enough to get way without paying taxes.

If China were to have even a 10% grain shortfall, it would have to buy up 25% of the world export grain market to compensate. Think what that would do to grain prices!
~ Thomas Homer-Dixon (born: 1956 age: 55) in Energy and Climate Change: A Sustainable Future?

Around the world people are dying, ecosystems are crumbling, and economies face ruin because of climate change, and all Bush and the oil industry can think of is how to maximise their profits and continue business as usual.
~ Paul Horsman , Greenpeace spokesperson

A debt of service is due from every man to his country proportional to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)

I sincerely believe… that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83) to John Taylor, 1816

If the people ever allow the banks to issue their currency, the banks and corporations which will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered..
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)

Banks don’t literally print money, but they create trillions of dollars by lending money they don’t actually have.

The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)

There is an artificial aristocracy, founded on birth and privilege, without virtue or talents… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendency.
~ Thomas Jefferson (born: 1743-04-13 died: 1826-07-04 at age: 83)

Jefferson’s plan was for estate taxes or what Republicans call “death taxes”. This will help create a level playing field, rather than one where a few rich families dominated the country by generations of accumulated wealth purely from investment. After you are dead is the least painful time to pay your taxes.

The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyment and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
~ John Maynard Keynes (born: 1883-06-05 died: 1946-04-21 at age: 62)

If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
~ Karen Kuvaas , (born: 1947-06-17 age: 64) Mayor of Narvik, Norway, whose city was badly ripped off by Wall Street subprime mortgage loan scams.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
~ David Herbert Lawrence (born: 1885-09-11 died: 1930-03-02 at age: 44)

The legal system doesn’t work. Or more accurately, it doesn’t work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don’t think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.
~ Lawrence Lessig (born: 1961-06-03 age: 50) Free Culture 2004

I want to know why there is always so much money for war and so little for human condition. If we launch a war on Iraq, the world will find $7 billion, $8 billion, $10 billion, a month for bombing, but there’s always a huge shortage of funds required to fight AIDS (Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome), malaria, tuberculosis.
~ Stephen Lewis (born: 1937-11-11 age: 74)

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
~ Abraham Lincoln (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1865-04-15 at age: 56)

Lincoln might be puzzled at how his prediction came about, with groups of financial corporations hijacking the government with its flow of tax income, setting up legal cons to extract still more money from the people, and dismantling the manufacturing and agricultural sectors.

Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.
~ John Locke (born: 1632-08-29 died: 1704-10-28 at age: 72) 1795-04-20

This the Republican philosophy baldly stated. They see the role of government is to help the wealthy hang onto their wealth, (or increase it), period.

Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.
~ John Locke (born: 1632-08-29 died: 1704-10-28 at age: 72)

Advertising has a beneficial function. It defines ideals of how products should work. When the ads first come out, the products behave nothing like the way they are advertised. However, the ads create the expectation of how the products should work. To satisfy the consumer demand created by advertising, eventually the providers evolve their products to meet the expectations.
~ James Loewen (born: 1954-03-26 age: 57)

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible, to maintain their control over governments, by controlling money and its issuance.
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85)

How little has changed!

There is an evil which ought to be guarded against, in the indefinite accumulation of property, from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by… corporations. The power of all corporations aught to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.
~ James Madison (born: 1751-03-16 died: 1836-06-28 at age: 85) 1817

Similarly, estate (death) taxes are a good thing because they prevent a landed nobility class. Further, if you have to pay taxes, the least painful time is when you are dead, or when you have just received an inheritance windfall.

In 1979 the top 1% of Americans got 8% of the economic pie. In 2008 it grew to 23%.
~ Bill Maher (born: 1956-01-20 age: 56)

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
~ Herman Melville (born: 1819-08-01 died: 1891-09-28 at age: 72)

Men do not desire to be rich, only to be richer than other men.
~ John Stuart Mill (born: 1806-05-20 died: 1873-05-08 at age: 66)

Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
~ Arthur Miller (born: 1915-10-17 died: 2005-02-10 at age: 89)

War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
~ Ludwig von Mise (born: 1881-09-29 died: 1973-10-10 at age: 92)

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
~ Edward R. Murrow (born: 1908-04-25 died: 1965-04-27 at age: 57)

In 1998 only $40 billion US was needed to bring basic health, education, clear water, sanitation, to the world’s poorest citizens. Gates alone could afford that and still have $11 billion left; he owns more than the 100 million poorest American citizen combined.
~ United Nations United Nations Human Development Report 1998-09-09

What do you think a stimulus is? It’s spending — that’s the whole point! Seriously.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)

Greed is good.
~ Kevin O’Leary (born: 1954-07-09 age: 57)

This is the capitalist philosophy in a nutshell. Take from those who have little. Overconsume. Value nothing but money and power. From his picture, it looks as if O’Leary will probably die young of cardiac trouble from overeating. This the opposite of pretty well every religious and rational philosophy. It its an utter dead end, both for its adherents and for the planet they destroy in the process. O’Leary is like a child who thinks Dungeons & Dragons is the meaning of life.

The world’s 300 richest people are worth more than the world’s poorest 3,000,000,000. Between 1983 and 1997, 85.5% of the increase in America’s wealth was captured by the richest 1%. Overall US income rocketed — of which 80% of Americans saw 0%.
~ Greg Palast (born: 1952 age: 59)

Expenditure rises to meet income.
~ C. Northcote Parkinson (born: 1909-07-30 died: 1993-03-09 at age: 83)

Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.
~ C. Northcote Parkinson (born: 1909-07-30 died: 1993-03-09 at age: 83)

This sounds logical, but if you look at what actually happens, he should have said, “Make the people sovereign and the rich will use the machinery of government to dispossess the poor.” Northcode underestimated the power of money to persuade people to vote against their own interests.

When you were a child your parents taught you not to take money from strangers and not to take money from your friends. Who does that leave? Known enemies!
~ Sondra Ray

644 years ago, the Chinese made pottery that not only lasted to this day, it is considered the epitome of the art. Yet a kettle made today in China, and sold under a Western brand name, is a piece of junk likely to last less than 6 months. American capitalism that seeks to force people to buy a new kettle every six months has corrupted the Chinese. It is anti-environmental and hence evil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A buyer perceives a transaction to be fair when the seller has invested substantial time, effort or money into creating the object sold. Perception of fairness has little to do with the utility of the object. For example, a buyer will be outraged at paying $10 a bottle for water after an earthquake, even though it will save his child’s life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A corporation is a conspiracy to make money without any other concern.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A corporation keeps the investors from ever meeting the workers or customers. The result is corporations usually deceive, cheat and exploit their customers as much as they can get away with. This is not the way human group activity has usually worked over the last 200,000 years. A co-op better mirrors this natural group organisation where the investors are either the customers or the workers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A major problem with capitalism is the way it creates inequality. A corporation will happily subvert the democracy of a third world nation by bribing its leaders to betray the interests of their own people. It is one more way that capitalism makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A Parable

There was once an extended family who lived in large mansion. Unfortunately, a nasty stomach bug, campylobacter, laid half of them low. They were too sick to work, and they lived in a country that did not pay you anything unless you worked. This dragged on. More of the family got sicker and sicker. The savings were gone. They were vaguely aware that sickness could be cured with ciprofloxacin, a fairly expensive prescription drug, but they felt they had no choice but to economise by foregoing the antibiotic. The next door neighbour boy was 5 years old. He brought over some soup his mother had made. He asked them, “If you bought the medicine, couldn’t you more than pay that back in one day being able to work again?” “You don’t understand how bad our situation is, silly child.”

This parable is about the refusal of Americans to take action on job creation.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A person living in a nomadic society has to carry all his possessions on his back. To him, the western habit of making one’s life goal the accumulation of possessions looks crazy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A queen bee gets a bigger share of the honey than an ordinary worker, but she is expected to use that extra nutrition for the benefit of the colony, not for her personal pleasure. In human society, those who receive a 10,000+ times bigger share than usual are expected to waste it on conspicuous consumption that has no purpose other than ostentation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

A recession is purely a psychological problem. There just as much food, minerals, labour and resources as in boom times. It is just that everyone loses faith in the mad economic game and simultaneously pull in their horns, causing a collapse in productivity. No other animal suffers from an analogous foolishness of self-created shortages. Governments should cut spending and save in boom times so they will have a fund to spend lavishly in the next recession to prime the pump. However, they tend to do the exact opposite which exaggerates the swings.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

According to a Harvard study, far more Americans die every month, month after month, from lack of health insurance than died on 9/11. Yet Michael Steele, head of the Republican party, assures Americans there is no need to take any action.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

According to Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money there are about $9 trillion US dollars in circulation. That is about $117,000 per family. Clearly some people have considerably more than that, which is why there are so many with considerably less.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Accumulating money is a pastime/game that only humans play. They play it so compulsively, it often completely distracts them from matters of survival.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Advertisements are made of two kinds of statements: lies and hypnotic inductions. Inductions consist of meaningless word salads or vague statements that are true but pointless.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Advertisers are telling ever more preposterous lies. For example, Quaker claims they “hand pick” their oats. They seem to think, so long as the lie is sufficiently outlandish, it is does not count as a lie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Advertisers have discovered that female models who gloat as if to say “I’m beautiful and you’re not.” are most effective at selling female beauty products.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Advertisers have discovered that male models who sneak glimpses in a mirror as if to say “Boy do I look good!” are most effective at selling male grooming products.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Advertisers use the weasel words up to the way magicians use the phrase abracadabra to make a promise disappear, e.g. Chevrolet guarantees its power train up to 100,000 miles. Lose up to 20 pounds in 20 days. Save up to $500 a year on your electric bill. Garnier face cream makes you look up to 5 years younger. Bayer weedkiller kills lawn weeds up to 6 months. It sounds like a promise, but it guarantees nothing at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Advertisers, like other hypnotists, try to boggle the rational mind with nonsense. Watch for statements of this form: “Your dog loves playing fetch, so you should buy him new Meaties dog food.“ There is no connection at all between the two statements. The advertiser starts with an obviously true statement then ties it to the sales pitch as if the first necessarily implied the second. They hope you will be too discombobulated to notice there is no connection.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

After watching the insurance companies and big pharma corrupt politicians, fund astroturf organisations and spread the most outrageous lies, I can’t imagine why any American would entrust them with their health care.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Again and again we have seen investors who panic and stampede lose their shirts. They are as stupid as buffaloes panicked into jumping off cliffs by the native American hunters. They fall for the same tricks over and over again. Nobody ever made money doing what everyone else is doing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Alan Greenspan confessed that he made a major error in trusting banks and investment houses did not need regulation because he assumed greed would ensure they looked after their own long-term self interest. What he did not understand was that the CEO (Chief Executive Officer)s were not looking out for the shareholders, but themselves. Long term sustainability did not matter. They could well leave their posts in a year or two. Plundering a company of its assets and leaving it bankrupt became the goal.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Allowing the police to smash the tents of homeless people and confiscate their backpacks does not help in the least toward finding these people suitable shelter. All it does is provide the police with victims on which to vent their sadistic impulses who have no way to fight back.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Allstate auto insurance understands a fundamental principle of psychology: people would rather be rewarded for safe driving than penalised for having an accident, even though the schemes amount to the same number of dollars coming out of the same pockets either way. Politicians could learn from them in how to sell measures to encourage efficient usage of fuels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Almost every Canadian is rich enough to enjoy the luxury of having several pairs of scissors, several bottles of eye drops, numerous pens, multiple bottles of glass cleaner and other similar objects that like to hide in obscure places in your home. ~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Almost nothing in a TV commercial is literally true. When the commercials are entertaining, we grant corporations licence to lie and dissemble.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Altria/Philip Morris/Kraft lied to their customers that tobacco was safe. They bribed all manner of people to perpetuate the lie. So it seems prudent to me to presume that all Altria/Philip Morris/Kraft products are hazardous to your health until proven otherwise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

America and China have formed such a tight financial partnership that Niall Ferguson, the author of   The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World , refers to them as Chimerica. China does all the lending, America all the borrowing. China produces the goods, and America consumes them. China does the saving and America the shopping. It is only a matter of time until China pulls the plug on America.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

America is so addicted to conspicuous consumption that its has borrowed to the hilt, outsourced its manufacturing and sold off its corporations and real estate to foreigners. Images that come to mind:

• Someone who has lost his fortune, trying to fool everyone including himself by keeping up appearances with reckless borrowing.
• A drug addict selling her blood for heroin.
• The spent husk of a bee after a spider [the military contractors] has sucked it dry.
• Tent caterpillars stripping bare the tree that sustains them.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

America monitors and regulates its casinos much more carefully than its banks.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are criminally insane. They slash spending on medical care and education for themselves, while they refuse to cut even a penny from the pointless, illegal and extravagant Afghan and Iraq wars.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are desperate for jobs, and they are willing to do almost anything in the name of creating jobs, except the things that work.

Things that do work include:

• Give people without jobs enough money to live so they won’t lose their homes. If you refuse, you will get a Flint Michigan with blocks and blocks of boarded up homes, and boarded up businesses. If you do offer support, the recipients will spend every penny locally stimulating local businesses and causing them to hire. The non-partisan budget office considers this the most efficient technique.
• Pay businesses to hire people. It can be in the form of a partial subsidy (or a full subsidy for a worker who has been difficult to place). When a business can produce goods and services more cheaply, because of subsidised labour costs, it can afford to go into weaker markets. Their activity stimulates more activity. And/or punish businesses for laying off or failing to hire. These subsidised workers often move on to better paying jobs, opening them up for inexperienced workers. In my role as an employer in Canada, I helped perhaps a dozen people re-enter the workplace through such a program.
• Spend on infrastructure. It directly creates jobs. When you are done you have roads, bridges sewers, water mains… that will serve commerce and make it business more profitable for decades to come.
• Discourage outsourcing. Pay companies to keep jobs at home or to bring back ones they have already outsourced.

What does not work?

• Start yet another war. Wars are extremely expensive relative to the number of jobs created. Much of the consumption/stimulus is overseas. When you are done, you have nothing to show for your money but giant holes in the ground.
• Give $700 billion to the top 2% of rich people. Despite the recession, the rich have never had it better. They are scooping fabulous luxuries like $20,000 watches from Tiffany’s. They will not spend their money on hiring people unless they have customers lined up for whatever those workers would produce. If the middle class are broke, there are no customers. So the rich just fritter away their money on imported luxuries which does bugger all to create jobs. The non-partisan budget office considers this the worst technique suggested to them for evaluation.
• Give across the board tax cuts. That money will be used in a million different ways, only some of which will create jobs. Consider that travel, buying imported goods, saving, investing overseas and paying off the mortgage are all quite sensible ways of spending a windfall, but none of them generate any jobs.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are having a major unemployment crisis. The essential problem is corporations have exported the jobs overseas. A country can’t have prosperity unless it manufactures something that other countries want. The corporations bribed the politicians to set up the law to encourage job export. The result is the corporations are rich since they pay only subsistence or below wages, but the ordinary people are hurting badly. Americans are an impatient people, so they are turning to the Republicans to solve the problem, the ones who largely created it. They are not patient enough to stay any course until it provides results. This will leave them stuck until they demand en masse that their politicians pressure the corporations to bring the jobs home. Even then, it will take many more years for the situation to improve. I see this quagmire as fitting karma for starting two illegal first strike wars and for general greed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are having a terrible time with their economy. The problem is, oddly, Christianity. Christians are hopelessly optimistic, gullible people who will believe what any charlatan tells them so long as it sounds pleasant. They have almost no interest in whether it is actually true. They have been trained in this sheep-like submission to crooks since birth. So they are vulnerable to politicians who lie to them that they can have their cake and eat it too — massive tax cuts, especially to the billionaires, no cuts in spending and pay down the debt. Honest politicians tell them they must pay higher taxes and accept across the board spending cuts to avoid the public debt dragging the whole country into bankruptcy. Christians turf these depressing but honest politicians out office. They prefer fairy tales.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are so patriotic they refuse to notice they are paying twice what anyone else does for health care while they enjoy the worst health in the developed world, with the worst infant mortality, even when Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, tells them the facts. They have an almost religious attachment to being ripped off. It is a Good Thing™ Americans long ago adopted indoor plumbing or they would also be claiming outhouses were superior to flush toilets.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are the richest people in the world, yet they are in a debt crisis. What went wrong?

• They blew trillions of dollars on two protracted pointless wars. They have nothing to show for all that expenditure but blown-out schools, hospitals and homes, hardly the way to win hearts and minds.
• They let the banks run amok. Then, when the failed, they bailed them out, without even slapping any wrists. The executives ran off with multi-million dollars bonuses and no regulation to stop them from doing it all over again.
• They let the rich exploit loopholes, subsidies and tax breaks so that they paid far less than their fair share, while they slurped up far more than their fair share of government benefits.
• John Roberts, head of the supreme court, handed control of the government from the people to the corporations with his ruling that corporations, foreign countries and rich people could anonymously donate as much as they wanted to political campaigns. The corporations want the government to fail, the people to become serfs and the corporation to take on the role of medieval nobility.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans are under the delusion that endless economic growth is both possible and desirable. Mathematicians will tell you that continuous growth impossible on a finite planet. We have already reached the limits to growth. As the population continues to expand, and resources dwindle, we have no choice but to do more with less. Instead of trying to stimulate mindless consumption to get out of the recession, we should be focussing on how to live more comfortably with less energy and less resources. That is the way of the future.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans believe the best way to alleviate pain is to administer the patient large amounts of money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans can rejoice. Their manufacturing is returning from China as the end of oil escalates the price of the oil to transport goods from China to the USA. I am glad to see the decline of globalisation:

• Globalisation meant one part of the world could unfairly exploit another.
• Globalisation meant grinding wages down below subsistence.
• Globalisation meant dismantling all safety and environmental protection legislation.
• Globalisation could make a come back with computer-controlled cargo sailing ships or ships powered by alternative energy.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans cross themselves at the thought of socialised public health care, but they cling tenaciously to the notion of socialised roads. They insist they be paid for out of general revenue, unlike other nations that fund them with gas taxes or usage fees. They want those who cannot afford cars to subsidise those that can. This is socialism, American style, where the poor subsidise the rich.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans have an informal scheme for ranking the value of a life. You get points for having more years of expected remaining life. You get points for having education. You get massive numbers of points for having money. You lose points for having health problems, a disability, dark skin or a drug addiction. So the value of the life of an elderly disabled homeless person is negative. This is why Republicans are so violently opposed to universal health care. They don’t want to waste resources on lives that they consider worthless. To the Republican, it is even more important to ensure unworthies don’t get health care than it is to ensure they get it for themselves.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans have foolishly accepted the Republican notion that an unstable wealth gap is a natural and wonderful feature of the universe, in other words the rich are superior to everyone else, so it is right and proper they should get richer just for being rich and the poor should get poorer, just for being poor. Republicans also believe the gap has to be encouraged to grow by giving the rich loopholes by which they may avoid taxes altogether. This has lead to a stratified society where the elites never see or talk to everyone else. They live in their own rarefied, privileged world similar to medieval nobility. They have forgotten what happened to the French nobles in 1789 shortly after an out-of-touch queen suggested those without bread should eat cake.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans keep tripping over their own egos. For example, the Russians launched Sputnik when American believed Russians could not even build a working fridge. Later the American sang little jingles about how anything the Japanese manufactured was junk. Of course the Japanese skunked the American with much higher quality cars, cameras, TVs, stereos, computers than the Americans made. Today, the Americans jeer at the Chinese who have taken away nearly all their manufacturing, most of their money, and the lead in electric cars, solar and wind power. Americans jeer at the Europeans who have learned to build livable cities and social systems that give people leisure and pleasing, safe surroundings. Americans lead in nothing but military bullying. Yet they foolishly pretend that makes them better than everyone else at everything. They have behaved so arrogantly, the world will applaud their ultimate collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans much be the densest people on earth. The Republicans have blocked every measure Obama has attempted to increase jobs, and instead of blaming the Republicans, Americans blame Obama.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans must be the most gullible people on earth. Week after week they shovel money to televangelists who make outlandish promises and never deliver. Advertisers have even managed to convince the right wing that owning a health insurance policy increases mortality.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Americans pride themselves on equality — that everyone has equal chance at wealth. The Gini index measures how inequitably wealth is distributed in a country. As you might expect, Brazil is at the top in inequality, followed by Mexico followed, by the USA. Oddly, China, India and pretty well any other countries have more equality and a more level playing field that the USA. The USA is aiming for a society modeled on Brazil. If wealthy truly think they would prefer Brazil’s system, they really should try living there for a year or so before dragging the USA into the same cess pit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

An executive who makes $10,000.00 USD a day overseas workers in the third world he pays $0.07 USD a day. He suffers under the delusion that his share of the pie is not nearly big enough, and the most virtuous thing he could do is “cut costs” by reducing the pay of his workers and adding it to his own. The problem with capitalism is it infects the minds of anyone involved with it with bizarre delusions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

An honest government might be happy to see the crookedest third of banks and stock brokers fail. People who were cheated by the banks should get their mortgages forgiven. Banks will continue to perpetrate fraud until fraud is made unprofitable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Any activity that is in essence gambling contributes nothing to the general good. It produces nothing. It is merely a way to con the naïve into handing over their money and getting nothing in return. This includes casinos, the stock market and the church. You can’t build an economy on it any more than you can build one on taking in each others laundry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Any economic system where there is a net flow of wealth from the poor to the rich is unstable and unsustainable. Republicans refuse to acknowledge this. The early Christians and early Muslims understood. That is why Christians banned usury and Muslims introduced the Zakāt, an annual wealth redistribution mechanism. The converse, a net flow of wealth from the rich to the poor, no matter what you think of the fairness or wisdom of it, is not only stable, it is self-limiting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Any mathematician will tell you that the notion of endless growth on a finite planet is utterly impossible. Economics is based on a delusion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Anyone who makes over $100 per hour is incapable of deciding what constitutes a reasonable minimum wage.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Are these elderly Tea Party members calling for more corporate power and less oversight totally ignorant of history? Don’t the know anything about life in the time of Dickens or Carnegie? Are they completely ignorant of how American corporations are even today enslaving people in the third world where there is little government oversight. Have they never seen Roger and Me about how General Motors so callously treated its workers. Did they read nothing about how unscrupulous banks collapsed the US economy with sub prime mortgage scams? Are they unaware of how corporations have raped the earth? Have they never heard the song 16 Tons?
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

As automation becomes more adept, the value of labour will decline. This will require a revolution in thinking about economics. Labour will become superfluous. People will have to acquire goods simply as a right much the way they picked them for the taking when they were hunter gatherers. The accumulation of objects will be seen as absurd as a bag lady’s compulsion to collect string.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

As the oil runs out, the green revolution (agriculture based on fossil fuels for tractors, fertilisers and pesticides) will end. The price of food will soar. The rich man will be the one with land and knowledge to grow food organically.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

As the price of oil rises, locally grown food becomes cheaper than food flown in. There is a tipping point and suddenly locally grown food becomes the economic mainstream. People looking ahead will buy up local farmland.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

As the price of oil rises, the cost of transportation rises. It no longer makes sense to ship logs to China to shape into toilet seats, then ship them back. It no longer makes sense to grow food on one side of the earth and ship it to the other. Generally it will be cheapest to manufacture close to the source of raw materials. We will also see general custom manufacturing businesses in malls. They will be able to manufacture/tailor your clothes, furniture, housewares… from inventories of generic, undyed, raw materials. Because of this, globalisation is a dead end, and is already reversing, bringing jobs back home.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Assume your monthly expenses are $2000 a month. Imagine if you put 40% of that, namely $800 of that, your rent, on your credit card, month after month. How long would it be before your bank gave you a call that you were over your limit and they wanted the outstanding balance paid forthwith and that they were bumping up your interest rate by 2% since you were no longer a preferred customer. That is what the USA is doing, borrowing 40% of its expenditures each year. What could you do personally to get out of a pickle like that? You have to either earn an additional $900 a month, or cut your expenses by $900 or most likely some combination of both. You need $100 to pay down your balance, not just freeze it. A country in such a predicament has to cut expenditures, or raise more revenue by closing tax loopholes, prosecuting tax deadbeats or raising taxes. The key is to prioritise so the country keeps the necessities for life and gives up the things it can live without, e.g. optional wars, pork, no-bid contracts, subsidies for healthy industries or corruption.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

At my age of 63, money, beyond that needed for food and rent, would be almost useless. What does matter is health and youthful vigour. It is so odd that people chase money in ways they know destroys their health.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

At the end of WWII (World War II), Europeans reverted to using cartons of cigarettes and stockings as currency. When Communism collapsed in Russia, the Russians reverted to using bottles of vodka. People would not take money as payment. It should then be obvious that a currency with inherent value, such as gold coins, will remain stable even during economic collapse. At the very least, it must be backed by something of value such as real estate, commodities or labour.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Automation and computers increase productivity. You’d think that would mean everyone could work fewer hours a week, and everyone would be more prosperous. What has happened instead is the elite have garnered all the benefits, and fired people no longer needed. This creates massive unemployment and depressed wages. Ironically, some people have to work three times as many hours as before just to provide the necessities. This causes even more wealth to flow from the former middle class to the elites. To add insult to injury, the elites have bribed politicians to give them massive tax breaks, tax loopholes, and even tax subsidies. The politicians then started withdrawing services from the middle class to further make the rich richer and the poor poorer. People fail to see the unemployment problem as a wealth inequality problem.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Automation brings both gain and pain. In the American system, the gain goes to the employer and the pain goes to the employees who are laid off. If the fruits were more equitably shared, automation could go much more smoothly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Awed by the bounty of the “unseen hand”, Americans have turned capitalism into a fundamentalist religion. Anyone who questions the utter perfection of American capitalism as it stands is labeled a commie, and driven to the edges of society for his unforgivable heresy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Back in 1947, Remington discovered its 700 series rifles could sometimes be fired simply by clicking off the safety. A fix would have cost Remington 5.5¢ per gun. They decided it cost too much, and has been selling the defective design to this day. This is the insanity that the corporate single-minded pursuit of profit leads to. The US constitution has been interpreted to mean the government may not order product recalls or even mandate gun safety standards. The good news is, as a result of all this lunacy, gun nuts are killing themselves off.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Bank of America made $1.6 billion, GE made $5.1 billion, CitiBank made $6.6 billion and Verizon made $8.4 billion. To thank these corporations for campaign contributions, politicians created loopholes to allow these corporations to pay zero taxes. Actually it is worse. They got money back — Verizon got $1.3 billion, GE got$3.2 billion, and Citibank got $476 billion. And Republicans have the gall to bleat the tax rates for these corporations are cripplingly high. source.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Banks charge Americans a$18 billion a year in ATM (Automated Teller Machine) fees. Not that long ago you could withdraw money free, using a teller which costs the bank many times more than an ATM.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Bayer used to advertise that its aspirin did not “depress the heart”. None of its competitors’ products did either, but that wording dissembled, implying that the competition had a problem. Sprayway Adhesive advertises that it “contains no CFCs” No sprays do. They have been illegal since the 1970s. This is just magician-style distraction away from the toxic ingredients, sometimes called greenwashing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Because the west has been ascendant for 500 years, many in the west have come to see their privilege as either divine favour or evidence of inherent superiority. They believe nothing needs to be done to perpetuate their position. Americans have stopped manufacturing, have stopped investing in education, have let the infrastructure that supports business decay, have rebuilt their economy on non-productive bank-gambling in futures and derivatives, and handed over the bulk of their wealth to the super rich to fritter on luxuries. Yet they still expect to remain automatically on top. In the 1970s Americans earned 20 times as much as the Chinese. Today is the gap has narrowed to 5 times. At that rate, China should reach parity by 2019.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Bechtel coerced the government of Bolivia to sign a contract forcing all citizens to buy all their water from Bechtel, even the poorest at exorbitant prices. Further they insisted on payment for water collected in rain barrels even though the had nothing to do with providing it. If were in charge of the universe, the executives and shareholders of Bechtel would be all be locked in a room to thirst to death. They would be killing each other and drinking the blood.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Before we had money, we used to distribute the food based on hunger and who had done the work. The idea of an income distribution inequity of a billion to one would have seemed utterly preposterous. Who has need a billion times greater than another? Who does work a billion times greater than another?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Behold the awesome power of advertising to persuade people to pay money for Coca Cola Zero, even though it is considerably less appetising than plain tap water.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Belt tightening should share the pain equally. This means that in absolute dollar terms, the rich should bear a bigger burden. Republicans lick the boots of the wealthy. Their plan is to take most from those who have least to provide new luxuries for their masters.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Ben Stein and a talking squirrel flog a credit score service called freescore.com. From the name, you might naturally presume the service is free. Nope. Once I catch a company trying to deceive me, they lose my trust. Surely, they will also cheat me in ways I cannot detect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Between 1950 and 1995 the American federal government funded between 50 and 70% of the country’s research and development. What are the chances the USA would be a world technology leader today had the government not interfered like that?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Not all things that are absolutely necessary are highly profitable. That’s the job of government.

Between 2007 and 2008 the price of shipping a container from China to New York jumped from $3000 to $8000 USD. Rising oil prices are the primary cause. As cheap fossil fuel energy runs out, we will see reverse globalisation. Manufacturing of goods and growing of food will have to happen closer and closer to home, simply because it will be prohibitively expensive to ship it from abroad. We will see a reversal of the outsourcing trend, except for virtual goods like computer programming and movies that don’t require shipping.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Billionaires imagine they are indispensable and hence worthy of infinite pampering because they employ people. If all the billionaires disappeared overnight, the need for goods would be just as strong. We would fulfill it just as we did before there were billionaires.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

bin Laden in his wildest dreams could not have done as much damage to the USA economy as the Republicans with their plot to destroy America’s credit rating. They are doing this for a dual motive, to blame Obama and hence make him lose the next election, and to bankrupt the American democracy allowing private corporations to take over.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Brand labeling is key to properly functioning capitalism. If consumers can’t avoid companies with a poor reputation in favour of those with a good one, the incentive to produce good quality goods and services is lost. Similarly, consumers should have the right to know if a product was organically grown, contains genetically modified material or was irradiated. To avoid allergies and for good nutrition, they need to know food ingredients. They need to know the degree of cruelty to animals in producing the product. They need to know the degree of exploitation of people in the third world etc. Customers should have the right to discriminate in any way they choose in their purchases.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Bribing politicians is a highly leveraged investment. Even billionaires and foreign states hand out only a million at a time to influence a multi-trillion economy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Bush got America in deep financial trouble with two expensive optional wars (that have nothing to show for the trillions poured into the ground) and massive tax cuts for the rich that the country could not afford (which resulted in lost jobs, not job creation as Republicans claimed.) Obama is in a bind. If he cuts spending, he will make unemployment worse. If he increases spending to try to create jobs, he makes the debt worse. The rich are doing extremely well right now, and the bottom half are suffering badly. The obvious solution is to cut the tax loopholes, subsidies and tax cuts to the rich and use a proportion of that income on infrastructure that will increase jobs and increase prosperity generally. The problem is the wealthy have bought the Republican party to serve only their interests of the rich, to hell with the good of the country.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Business has only one concern — short term profit. It has no concept of long-term sustainability. Therefore business should not be making any decisions affecting environmental sustainability.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Businesses like high unemployment. It makes employees docile and willing to work for low wages. It lets them select only the best workers. That it the true cause of high unemployment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

By 2016, China’s economy will be larger that the USA’s. It could come even sooner if the Tea Party gets its way and they drag out the recession, keep employment low, and do all manner of other things to screw the economy and blame Obama.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Canadians firmly believe that all Canadians are entitled to unlimited top notch medical care, whether they can afford it or not. Canadians somewhat less firmly believe that no Canadian should be allowed to starve to death. However, Canadians are quite happy to see the poor go without shelter, unless the mercury drops substantially below freezing. This is odd, given that housing the homeless would cost a minute fraction of the cost of universal medical care. Politicians confess that the cost of housing the homeless would be considerably less than the costs of homelessness (e.g. extra policing, emergency room use). The reason for the reluctance to end homelessness is not about money, it is because is most Canadians despise the homeless and want to see them suffer. It is similar to racist attitudes in the USA.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalism craves scarcity, since it causes prices to rise. Humanity craves sustained abundance. The two will always be at loggerheads.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalism is a value system, the precise opposite of the one Jesus taught. Oddly, millions of Americans claim to subscribe to both systems. Capitalism requires the staff of a company to maximise profit to matter how badly that hurts customers, employees or third parties. It is a blanket excuse for selfishness.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalism presumes there are no limits to production growth. It believes, so long as you can find a market for the goods, they can always be produced. Biology points out this is only true for the short term. The earth has a quite finite ability to produce goods. Capitalism must evolve to handle sustained zero growth or it will fail. Every civilisation of the past eventually collapsed because they wore out their welcome with nature. They exhausted the soils, destroyed the water-conserving forests, or poisoned the water.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalism requires competition. When you don’t have it, the government must regulate the monopolies to prevent them from gouging and cheating the public. The health insurance companies have effectively eliminated competition by mergers and acquisitions. According to the American Medical Association, in 94% of America there is no longer a competitive market. The insurance companies have bribed American politicians to prevent them from introducing either regulation or competition from a public option. The insurance companies have a sweet deal, keeping $2 for every $1 they pass on to the doctors, and are willing to tell any lie, bribe, threaten, anything to keep things as they are. What is so astounding is the way they have bamboozled so many Americans into helping them fight the competition needed for capitalism to function.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalism, as an ethical system, belongs in the same category as Satanism, because it teaches that the ultimate virtue is to take as much as possible from others while giving as little as possible in return. Compassion for others is considered a weakness.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalism, like all economic systems, has its limitations. What is peculiar is that so many people imagine that if capitalism is incapable of delivering something, e.g. a new antibiotic, a low cost AIDS treatment, universal health care, alternative energy or cruelty-free fur, meats and eggs… then they have no alternative but to go without it. It is as though they see seeking something though auxiliary means would be a sort of monetary adultery, breaking vows of holy matrimony and monogamous fidelity to capitalism. The true believers can’t imagine augmenting or modifying capitalism, only abandoning it entirely.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalist ethics require you to make the most money no matter what it takes. It particular it requires giving other as little as possible for their money. The opposite is endeavouring to give others more than they paid for. This ethic is considered hopelessly old fashioned, except when trying con someone into working overtime for you without pay.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalists are neo-Darwinists who imagine humans prevail over other species by ruthlessly culling the weak and poor. They fail to notice that individual humans are puny animals. The secret of their success is intelligent co-operation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Capitalists gloat with an inflated opinion of themselves. They imagine they are hundreds of thousands of times more worthy than ordinary mortals. Their proof is in the extravagant compensation they receive. However, this disproportionate compensation is just an imperfection of the money system. It is similar to the way a chef can take a grossly disproportionate share of the food and get away with it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Casinos post the odds on their slot machines. Everybody knows the machine is stacked against them. They lose money. This you would think would help cement the notion the odds are stacked against them. But instead the loons imagine losing is a sign the slot machine must at any moment change its nature and start beneficently giving out money. This might come from a childish “bowel movement” theory of how slot machines work. When they become too full of money, they evacuate. Their behaviour on the next pull is completely independent of anything that has happened before. I am not joking about this. I once examined a slot machine in a casino. A man came running at me furious. “Get away from that machine. It is mine. It is full of my money.” He imagined it would burst at any moment from being too full and return all the money plus interest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Caterpillar, the maker of heavy machinery, locked out its workers and said they could go back to work only if they agreed to their wages being cut in half. Imagine what would happen if your income were cut in half without notice. You would lose your house. You would have to immediately move to accommodation costing half what you pay now. But then you say, times are tough, what else could poor Caterpillar do? Wait a minute! The CEO of Caterpillar takes home $20 million a year. Business is booming at Caterpillar. They are making $1 billion a quarter. They have no excuse. If Caterpillar is not forced to back down, or alternatively, put completely out of business, many other corporations will pull the same stunt. I am not ever likely to buy a bulldozer, so a personal boycott would not make much sense, but I can do my small part in smacking this arrogant bully senseless.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Classical economic theory, such as Alan Greenspan subscribes to, presumes that corporations are run to maximise the long term profit for their shareholders, selfishly without regard to any other consideration. This is only a rough approximation. CEOs and top executives run the companies to maximise their personal income. Since they won’t necessarily be with the company that long, they optimise for the short term, to the point of driving the company into bankruptcy so long as they can parachute out with millions. A classic example would be John Thain who ruined Merrill Lynch for his personal gain.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Commerce works only because two people disagree on the utility of an object. The object must be more useful to the buyer than to the seller, or the sale will never take place. Consider that to Leonard Cohen a warehouse full of CD (Compact Disk)s are useless (other than to sell), but to a fan, each CD represents a magical experience.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Competition is what makes capitalism work. That is why corporations use mergers and acquisitions to eliminate it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Con man Kevin Trudeau does an infomercial for YourWishIsYourCommand.com, where he preposterously promises all your dreams will come true if you send him ten easy payments of $30.00 USD . To cap off his sales pitch he claims everyone who does not send him the money is a loser, because they blame others for their troubles. That is not true. They simply have the common sense to spot a scam when they see one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Conservative politicians imagine they can save money by slashing public health care programs. Yes, such cuts get the expenditures off the government books and the taxpayer may save $1000 in public insurance fees, but he then has to buy those services from the private sector for $2000. The taxpayer is a net $1000 worse off, while the politician takes a bow for his brilliance.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Conservatives assert greed is good. What they mean is those who have wealth have no duty to share what they have managed to take from others by hook or by crook. This is similar telling robbers not to have any remorse for their crimes. Greed does not provide the society with any benefit, unless viewed from the point of view of the wealthiest 2% who get ever fatter from the widening of the wealth gap, a very narrow definition of good. But the big objection to greed, is it is not sustainable. A culture of greed rapidly destroys the earth. It has no concern for future generations, just the next quarter profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Conservatives love to complain about the “welfare gravy train”. Welfare is $500 CAD a month here in socialist BC Canada. Rents start at $800 CAD a month. People on welfare live on Ramen noodles, wieners and pet food. How is this life a gravy train? unless you mean eating Gravy Train dog food. What is the alternative? — throwing people onto the street to eat out of dumpsters (which is now illegal).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Consider the following types of theft:

• A mugger steals a purse.
• An oil exec gouges his customers.
• A preacher cons his flock into donating money “for God” and uses it to rent hookers.
• A CEO tricks investors into buying his worthless stock.
• An Israeli Jew confiscates the land of a Palestinian.

When a poor man steals from a rich man, we insist he give back the wealth. When a rich man steals from a poor man, we don’t. Further, if the poor man tries to snatch back what was stolen from him, we treat him as the thief.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Consider the richest men in America. What do they have in common? Do they work harder than others? Surely no harder than my friend Leo who has three jobs at minimum wage to provide for his children. The main thing they have in common is an utter lack of conscience. They are the most ruthless of men. They are willing to cheat, enslave, extort, kill, rape the planet, poison its waters… Given that, I find it odd that so many people admire the wealthy and aspire to be like them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

CornSugar.com put out a deceptive TV ad where they claim that corn sugar and cane sugar are the same thing, sugar is sugar, the body cannot tell the difference. This is a bald lie. Corn sugar aka dextrose or high fructose corn syrup is a simple sugar called glucose C₆H₁₂O₆. Cane sugar is a complex sugar called sucroseC₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ . The sucrose molecule has twice as many atoms. Glucose races into the bloodstream ready to go. Sucrose has to be broken down into glucose first, so it is absorbed more slowly. Fructose C₆H₁₂O₆ is an isomer of glucose — the same atoms arranged slightly differently. It behaves in the body similarly to glucose. High glucose/fructose diets are implicated in all manner of health problems including diabetes and obesity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporate power has completely corrupted America, all the way to the White House. Even Obama lied to the American people that the General Motors and Chrysler bailout was an investment and that they would get their money back. Corrupt politicians shoveled bail out money at failing investment banks and AIG (American International Group) , allowing executives to give themselves multimillion dollar bonuses, supposedly for wisely shepherding the finances of their companies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporate TV serves the advertisers. Public TV serves the viewers. The function of corporate TV content is to lull the viewer’s mind to a thought-free relaxed state to maximise receptivity to advertising.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

corporation: a device for increasing the wealth gap, for making the rich richer and poor poorer. People who run a company and do the work to make a company a success hand over all the profits in perpetuity to the wealthy people whose money long ago got the enterprise started, even though success depends completely on those who do the work. The system is so pervasive that the unfairness of it does not register.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations are conspiracies that pursue money at the exclusion of any moral value. Over the generations, the corporations compete for ever greater skill in skullduggery and dishonesty. Because of this, it seems inevitable that over time the word corporation will come to mean “criminal conspiracy” and Corporatewill come to mean “foolish“, “morally blind” and unsustainable. Even now, corporations freely break the law whenever doing so is more profitable than following it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations are like children. They will play by almost any imaginable rules/regulations so long as they have a fair chance of winning/making a profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations behave much like drug addicts. Neither care about the safety or well being of others. Both are totally focused on acquiring but a single thing. Both sacrifice their own long term interest for immediate gratification. Both maintain a phony front to help them take advantage of others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations cheat us so commonly, that we accept it without protest. Common cheats include:

• Filling boxes less than half full, such as Tim Horton cocoa.
• Quoting the monthly price for something some service like Telus Internet access or Shaw phone service only to discover it is just an introductory rate. The true rate is never mentioned.
• Quoting the price for something and discovering you must pay an exorbitant shipping and handling fee.
• Offering a money back guarantee only to discover you must pay shipping both ways and a trial fee even if the product is hopelessly incompetent.
• Offering an exercise machine or back machine for only $20 to discover this is just a 30 day rental and does not include a stiff shipping and handling fee.
• Products that simply don’t work at all, e.g. a Revlon nail file that falls apart on first use.

Corporations are masters at dissembling. There is always some way you can interpret their statements as true, though the statements are invariably deliberately misleading.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations feed the public junk food, junk ideas and junk science because somebody in the corporation computed it would improve the next quarter profit. This is how drug addicts think — concerned only for short term pleasure, damn the consequences.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations have bribed politicians into allowing them to outsource thousands of jobs offshore. The remaining jobs are low-end jobs like pizza delivery boy that can’t be outsourced. An economy cannot for long be sustained on borrowing and consumption. If America does not want to become a third world nation, it will have to start again producing the goods and services it needs and producing goods and services that other countries want.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations have only one goal — make as much money as possible. Even their long term survival is subservient. To do this, they use their financial muscle to legally and illegally bribe politicians to lower pay, lower environmental standards, lower labour working condition standards, lower safety standards, lower anti-trust regulation… Because corporations are so powerful, the people must kick them in the teeth as hard as they can if they want to keep them in check. There is no need to feel squeamish about this. Corporations are not living creatures.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations mindlessly seek profit. They trample the environment, but that is just a side effect. If we consumers arranged things so that corporations made more profit when they behaved responsibly, they would be model citizens. It is thus up to us to avoid buying products and services that damage the environment. We are in control, but suffer under the illusion that corporations desperately want to harm the environment to spite us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Corporations pursue profit so single-mindedly that they will happily kill billions of people as a side effect. That is what’s happening with corporate opposition to taking action on climate change.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Countries suffered from extreme boom and bust cycles until economist John Maynard Keynes discovered that in prosperous times you must pay down the debt and in recessions you must run deficits to create jobs. Republicans don’t understand basic economics. They want to do the reverse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Cunning, rich Republicans duped ordinary Americans into repealing the estate tax paid only by the richest man in every 300, by labeling it an “IRS death tax” and convincing them it applied to every American rich and poor. Why take the tax burden off the richest citizens and put it on the shoulders of those much less capable of bearing it? Why take taxes off the dead and put them on the living? When you are dead is the least painful time to pay taxes. Similarly for the heirs, the best time in your life to pay tax without it being onerous is just after a windfall.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Democratic vs Republican tax cut pie slice size

Republicans want massive tax cuts for the rich, even though it will increase the deficit by $700 billion every year into the future and speed the day when America goes bankrupt, which some might argue is a Good Thing™.

Tax cuts are like borrowing money to buy a big pie for a picnic. Then you cut it up in varying size pieces and hand them out to the guests. Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the richer/fatter you are, the bigger slice of pie you need/deserve. The difference is the Republicans think the super rich need really big pieces, where the Democrat think they deserve only really big pieces. It may not be immediately obvious, but this is a wealth transfer scheme from the poor to the rich, supposedly an anathema to Republicans. However, Republicans only oppose government-aided wealth transfer from rich to poor, not the reverse.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Despite the ruling of Justice Roberts, corporations are not people. They have no morals, feelings, or conscience. When you find yourself imparting such properties to corporations, you are being seduced by the commercials. The should have only the aggregate rights of the combined owners, not extra power for corporate owners.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Did you ever wonder why some people, even when they are tens of millions of dollars in debt, still manage to live like royalty? This is because what is really going on the same status pecking order as in other animals. Lower ranking animals defer to the alpha animals handing over food and other resources, receiving nothing in return.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

• Early Americans vilified the Indians to excuse themselves for stealing their lands.
• Later, Americans vilified the blacks to excuse themselves for enslaving them and stealing their labour.
• Later still, Nazis vilified Jews so they could steal their wealth.
• Today, Americans vilify Arab to excuse themselves for stealing their oil.

By now, most of us are sick of excuses.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Economic theory says governments should raise taxes and pay off the deficit in good times, and lower taxes and increase spending in bad. However, they invariably do the exact opposite.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Economics fails because it presumes all people act rationally and in their enlightened self-interest. It neeeds the addition of psychology to temper the public mania, overoptimistic booms and excessively fearful and pessimistic recessions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Economists and politicians aim for constant economic growth. They ignore the fact the planet cannot even sustain the current level of economic activity, much less infinite growth. Further, they mindlessly champion harmful and frivolous activities. Polluting, cleaning up oil spills, manufacturing throwaway fashions, funerals, clear cutting forests, cancer treatment are all considered equally valuable as growing food and preventing disease. We need a saner economic measure of planetary well being.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Economists are all as batty as Moonies. They subscribe to what amounts to a religion. They talk about the unseen hand, reverently, and advise against in any way interfering with it as if it were an angry deity. This is merely the effect of stabilising feedback loops, fortunately present in capitalist systems — nothing to worship. Economists believe that the goal of existence is endless growth. Any scientist, mathematician, physicist or biologist will tell you this is flat out impossible. It ignores the realities of a finite planet, with finite resources and finite sinks for waste. Economics is a suicide cult.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Economists have an odd view of what is desirable. To them, the purpose of life is to increase economic activity, any activity, even including things like more vandalism repairs, more funerals, more pollution, more soil erosion, more deforestation, conspicuous consumption, more hospital care, inefficiency, waste… I call this locust mentality. Economists refuse to notice how their frantic efforts to stimulate short-term economic activity destroy the very substrate the enables sustained economic activity. They refuse to look even a decade into the future about how their actions harm economic activity, much less the environment or human welfare.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Electronic banking fees are like a paint store charging extra for white.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Employment is a bit like a game of musical chairs. There are more people than there are jobs. No matter how hard everyone struggles, some people inevitably go without jobs. Republicans tell us that the penalty for losing this game should be freezing or starving to death. I think they are mad.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even the most reputable companies like Tim Horton’s deceive and steal from their customers by packing containers less than half full. This is not necessary for settling as they claim, since some companies give 100% full measure.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even though competition is what makes capitalism work so well, capitalists use mergers, acquisitions and predatory tactics to destroy the competition. To discourage competition, printer manufacturers design every printer to use its own unique, incompatible ink cartridge.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Even though large amounts of inherited wealth harm if not ruin the beneficiaries, men still sacrifice all to accumulate huge fortunes with which to warp their children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Ever since 1983 we have been burning oil faster than we have been discovering it. Today oil companies are shutting down exploration attempts because it is no longer cost effective. Even an elementary student can tell you that you can’t keep going business as usual indefinitely, no matter how much the economy, or Prime Minister Harper, commands it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Ever since governments invented borrowing by selling bonds during the Renaissance, they have gone bankrupt by either consecutive deficits or by printing too much money. We do these things today pretending we do not know the inevitable consequences.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Every country chooses how wide a wealth gap it wants. Countries that favour the wealthy to become ever more powerful and rich necessarily force those on the bottom to live in without food, shelter and medicine. Republicans claim the opposite is true. Yet consider the fate of those on the bottom in wide wealth gap countries like the USA, Russia, India and Brazil versus the fate of those in narrow wealth gap countries like Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. In the 1950s the USA was a narrow gap country and primarily under Reagan and Bush-41 became a wide gap country.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Every time I see a commercial for a product or candidate I don’t like, I find myself detesting them all the more. Advertisers have to be careful they don’t energise a group of people keen on their product/candidate’s destruction. For example, if a candidate puts out a political ad designed to appeal to bigots, it may anger tolerant people, who deepen their distaste every time they view another ad, even if the follow on ad is not bigoted.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Every time you see a lavish cathedral, mosque, monument or office building, it means somebody decided this giant bit of ego-tinsel was more important than any other use for the money, including saving lives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Everybody knows the difference between mandatory and optional spending. You have to pay the rent, buy the groceries, get a toothache attended to and pay for the heat. Optionally, you can buy some champagne, a sports car, a cottage by a lake…, depending on how much money you have left over after dealing with the mandatory spending. Governments are the same way. They have to keep the roads paved, the water running, the sewers flowing, the dikes in repair, firemen putting out fires, police catching criminals, the food inspected… Optionally, governments can wage wars, explore space, support opera, offer subsidies to profitable industries such as oil, enact historical pageants… The Republicans don’t understand the difference. They imagine resource wars are mandatory, as are bonuses paid to the rich to reward them for being rich while they consider seeing that everyone is housed and fed, and the country’s infrastructure is in repair to be frivolous expenditures, first to go on the chopping block. Republicans try to fool the people into chopping expenditures that benefit the general population and expand expenditures that benefit only rich Republicans regardless whether they are mandatory.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Everybody knows you put fertiliser on the roots of trees, not the topmost leaves. Economies work the same way. Republicans have conned Americans into attempting the reverse with their coddle the rich, trickle down, piss-on-you, economics despite ample evidence they do not work.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Everyone forgets that money and capitalism are games, in same sense that Monopoly is a game. The rules of all three are designed to make those who gain a slight edge escalate their wealth dramatically without corresponding effort. Successful players are so vain they think this peculiar characteristic of the game measures their true worth as a human being and the value of their efforts. They smugly imagine they are tens of thousands of times more valuable to society than others. If the games had slightly different rules, the games might tend to dampen swings in wealth, accentuate them, keep the poor in the game, squeeze the poor out or even kill off the super winners to give others a chance to play the high stakes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Expecting corporations to solve environmental or social problems is as silly as expecting video games to. That is not what they are for. Corporations are machines for making money and nothing more. Any apparently altruistic behaviour is actually them caving to pressure from law enforcement or from the potential customer base. Rather, they create major environmental and social problems in their single-minded pursuit of profit. They don’t care if their products are useful or harmful, only that they sell. They have no conscience. They have no compunction about lying or stealing other than as it affects profit negatively or positively. They have no concept of the big picture or even their own long term survival. We worry about the computers we create running amok and taking over the world. Its too late, the corporations have already done it. The best way to understand corporations is to watch Walt Disney’s cartoon — The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Exxon Mobile uses an incredibly narrow-minded decision-making process. To decide what do to about global warming they compute that lying to the public about global warming and opposing all measures to ameliorate it will help them make more profit selling oil and gas in the next quarter. In their view, that global warming leads to mass extinction of most of life on earth is irrelevant. That procrastinating measures to save earth until it is too late is similarly irrelevant. Even the long term bankruptcy of Exxon is irrelevant. All that matters is the next quarter profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Foolish politicians try to convince the populace the economy is doing great when it clearly is not. The public will happily forgive them for trying unsuccessfully to remedy the situation, but not for insulting them by telling them they can’t tell a recession when they see one. The public won’t forgive deadbeat politicians who excuse their failure by pretending there is nothing to do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For all practical purposes, governments have handed over their money printing plates to the banks and say “Have at it”. It is a kickback to the banks who lavish donations on the politicians who write the laws to let them do that. It amounts to legalised counterfeiting. Just like ordinary counterfeiting, the counterfeiters benefit and everyone else pays for the theft in the form of inflation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For most of man’s history, unequal distribution of wealth was not that big a problem. A bully can’t very well generate fabulous wealth and power exploiting only a small band of people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

For sentimental reasons, Americans have refused to use subtle colours in their money, one of the most effective anti-counterfeit measures. This leaves them vulnerable to a massive supernote counterfeit scheme, hosted by a hostile foreign country, that could take down the entire economy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Four out of five purchasing decisions in American families are made by children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Free trade is not always the best strategy:

• From an energy-conservation, greenhouse gas point of view, it is always best to manufacture goods as close as possible to where they are used.
• If other countries put up tariffs to your exports, you cut your own throat if you refuse to extract tariffs on imports from their countries.
• Fledgling industries have no chance without protective tariffs. Toyota would never have become a major automaker without 50 years of protectionist help from the Japanese government.
• Industries in the third world have no chance to compete on a free trade basis with behemoths like the China and the USA.
• On a security basis, every country should maintain the ability to grow subsistence food and manufacture basic goods should the supply from abroad be cut off.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

freecreditscore.com charges $15 a month to look up your credit rating. What is wrong with this picture?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Futurists like Buckminster Fuller imagined automation and computers would enable us all to live like millionaires. He did not count on the unmitigated greed of the business owners. Automation and computerisation increase productivity. The business owners grab all the benefits and foist all the pain on the workers. Instead of having it easier, workers became worse and worse off while the business owners accumulated far more wealth than it was possible to spend. To add insult to injury the business owners used that wealth and power to bribe politicians to enact loopholes to reduce their taxes and to increase the taxes of the workers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

General Electric, like most US corporations, pays no federal income tax at all. For them, the tax rate is negative 60%. They receive a tax benefit equal to 60% of their net profit. How could this outrageously sweet deal come about, especially with GE being so profitable and simultaneously laying off Americans? The John Roberts supreme court, with the Citizens United decision, made it legal for corporations to bribe politicians with unlimited amounts of campaign contributions to create such loopholes for them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Gift giving has the side effect of raising the status of the giver and lowering the status of the receiver if the receiver is poorer than the giver. Ironically, gift giving has the opposite side effect of lowering the status of the giver and raising the status of the receiver if the receiver is richer than the giver. This works even for welfare and disability pensions. The case workers can’t help but feel vastly superior, and start treating the people they are serving like dirt. To avoid these side effects, we could use a guaranteed annual income that everybody gets without a means test. It is taxable income, so the wealthy people who don’t need it, effectively give it back in the form of taxes. It gets rid of the bureaucracy that decides who is worthy of receiving help. There is no stigma since everybody gets the benefit. There is no disincentive to find work, or start a home business since 100% of the benefit continues even if you work part or full time or run your own not-very-profitable business.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Given that before an election, politicians always tell the public what they want to hear, how do you decide whom to vote for? Look at the special interests funding each party. That is the biggest predictor of after-election behaviour. For example, in the USA, the Republican party is beholden to big oil, big business, the arms industry, the gun lobby, CEO s, the prison industry and the religious right. The Democratic party is beholden to labour, the poor, immigrants, minorities, gays and small businesses. In Canada, the Conservative party is beholden to big oil, the arms industry and bigots. The Liberal party is beholden to the banks and immigrants. The NDP (New Democratic Party) is beholden to labour and environmentalists. Decide which special interest is most in alignment with your own values and interests.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Given that numbered companies are invariably used for illegal or deceptive purposes, it is a wonder the government still facilitates them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Given that the road to mega-wealth involves so much immoral and illegal activity, it is surprising that wealth is so admired. Even wealthy gangsters are lionised.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Globalisation and free trade is on the way out for four reasons:

1. Transportation costs are rising. Between 2007 and 2008 the price of shipping a container from China to New York jumped from $3000 to $8000 USD.
2. Environmentally, globalisation creates too much green house gas to ship goods all over the planet.
3. All that shipping spreads diseases and invasive species.
4. All that shipping makes smuggling for terrorism duck simple.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Globalisation tries to pretend the same goods from different countries are equivalent. Obviously wine from France is not equivalent to wine from Mexico, chocolate from Belgium is not equivalent to chocolate from China, produce from the other side of the globe, is not the same as food grown locally. Further, as the cost of oil rises, the cost of transportation rises, we will have to rebuild the infrastructure that let us grow most of our food and manufacture most of what we need locally.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Google named their smart phone Droid to suggest the mystique of androids. But the phone has nothing at all in common with androids. The name is a fraud, but the public bought in anyway.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Google would be just another obscure search engine were they not permitted to patent the obvious idea that when you show search results, you should first show the ones that other people consider important measured by the number of links there are to them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Government borrowing to pay current expenses and fobbing the debt off on future generations is not that different from selling off your children as sex slaves so that you can afford opium.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Governments fire people to save money to use for stimulus packages to give billions to businesses (aka financial contributors), who might conceivably use some of that money to hire people. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to keep people on the payroll, perhaps reducing the work week or pay slightly?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Governments try to stimulate the economy by inflating the money supply. This does not work because they usually give the money to their friends who have contributed to them, namely the banks, corporations and wealthy people. For this to work, they must spend the money, either directly or by giving it to the middle and lower classes who are guaranteed to spend it immediately.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

GreenerMoney.com advertises a “absolutely free” book of tips on how to save money by making your life greener (more environmentally friendly). This sounds too good to be true. It is. In the fine print, you discover accepting the book signs you up for a $30.00 USD an issue magazine subscription.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Harper’s reluctance to tax US corporations operating in Canada does not make sense. A US company can deduct the taxes it pays to Canada. It makes no difference to them if they pay the tax to Canada or to the USA.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Have you ever noticed that TV commercials almost never mention the competition by name. Instead, companies like Scott Trade, or United Van Lines, make up a preposterously inept fictitious competitor to mock. It is a straw man. None of the competition are anything like that.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Have you ever noticed the more money a crook steals, the less likely he is to be prosecuted, and if he is prosecuted, the less likely he is do time, and if he does time, the more luxurious the prison? The justice system seems to be sending a message to criminals, “If you are going to steal, steal big, and let us have a cut.” The same principle applies to avoiding penalty by killing people in large numbers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Herman Cain and Rick Perry are American Republican politicians trying to sell a flat tax. They even admit it will raise tax for the middle and reduce it drastically for the super rich. They even admit it will make the deficit worse. They claim taking money from the middle class and giving it to the rich will make everyone richer. It will stimulate the rich to hire. This is an outright lie. How do you know?

• The rich have never been richer or the poor poorer, and the rich are not hiring.
• Who is more likely to earn money cutting lawns, a rich kid with $1 million in the bank or a middle class kid? Rich people don’t need to work. The more money you give them, the less need to work they have.
• The middle class did best back in the 50s and 60s where the wealth gap was at its narrowest.
• Common sense says you are better off it some rich bastard does not filch money out of your pocket.

Why does anyone in their right mind salute? Is it just people who hate calculating their tax? Are they just desperate for something different? If so, someone might offer either free tax preparation or reimbursement for it.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Hotels.ca, in their ads, makes the outlandish claim they have hotels in outer space. Why do they tell obvious lies like that? I think it is so they can more easily claim they were just kidding about the less obvious lies in the ad.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How do you make large amounts of money?

• Trick people into giving you large amounts of money for something that cost you only a little to produce.
• Knock off the competition.
• Take advantage of the weak.
• Make false claims for what you sell.
• Exploit a public unrenewable resource.
• Fob problem of cleaning up the production pollution on others.
• Make shoddy products that need to be frequently repurchased.

If had done these things, I would be quite ashamed, and would do my utmost to hide the fact I was wealthy. Other people obviously have quite a different way of looking at it. They see wealth as some sort of lustre.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How long will it be before we recognise that addiction to wealth can be just as destructive to relationships as addiction to alcohol?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How much would it cost you every month if you had to put your kids in private school, hire a security firm to guard your house, hire a private fire fighting service, hire inspectors to check that your food was not contaminated with pesticides or E Coli, hire a paving firm to keep the road in front of your house in good repair, pay tolls to use for-profit roads, get your water from a private water company, hire mercenaries to protect your country, hire someone to scan everyone on the plane you fly on, if you own a company, to send all your employees to school to be trained… The Republican is a freeloader who demands he get all this without paying any taxes for it. This deadbeat wants to sponge off others forcing the least wealthy to pay his fair share of these and thousands of other services provided by the governments we elect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

How Supermarkets Cheat You

Here are some techniques supermarkets use to cheat you:

• Mark an item on the shelf with a lower price, but scan it at a higher one at the checkout.
• Mark items 5 for $5 on the shelf. You buy two, to discover the individual price is $2.50, not $1.00 each.
• Scrambled the tags for the item under a related items on the shelf, so that it looks like an item is cheaper than it really is.
• Mark items that come in many flavours 5 for $5. You pick one box of each flavour. At the checkout you discover only strawberry is on sale. The others are $2.50 each.
• When you get home and open the box, you discover 80% of it is air.
• The box says made in Canada. You are suspicious because dates don’t grow in Canada. It turns out the agricultural products from around the world if packed in Canada count as made in Canada.
• The flyer offers spectacular saving on some item. You are there when the doors open. They are already sold out. After this happens repeatedly, you come to realise they only had a couple of items for sale. They are using a loss leader lure.

To discourage some of these scams, supermarkets should use electronic shelf price labeling that is in sync with the checkout scanners.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans are nasty animals. They enjoy the pain of others. Advertisers exploit this. Just watch for physical or emotional pain as entertainment used to sell.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans are the only animal that will buy something they don’t need just because it is on sale.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans have dodged extinction the last 200,000 years not because they are individually so powerful, but because they look out for each other. However, with the invention of capitalism, that ethic has been overthrown and replaced with exploiting each other to the maximum using all means fair and foul. Not surprisingly, we are now rapidly headed for extinction by environmental vandalism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans have evolved a fear of heights, but not of speed. It is only recently in our history we could attain fatal speeds. Similarly, we have a fear of tigers, but little fear of wealthy people, even though wealthy people are far more dangerous. That can not only destroy you, they can destroy your family and friends. Further they may do it for idle entertainment. Tigers kill only as much as they can eat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans have evolved a strong desire to avoid things that kill them, e.g. poisons. We avoid radioactivity even though it very recently became a problem. We have little fear of bioweapons, nuclear weapons, global warming, environmental collapse because their danger is not immediate. We kids ourselves about the danger of addictive drugs because we are attuned only to the short-term pleasure they promise, not the ultimate destruction. Even a car crash is the most likely form of premature death, we have little fear of them because of familiarity. Oddly people fear most things least likely to happen — e.g. Jesus going Godzilla, an asteroid smashing into earth, invasions by Muslim peasants.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Humans invented money only an eye-blink ago. Our species is quite capable of functioning without it. We have social sanctions to control greed and sloth. Anything we do with money should not violate our common sense, ancient rules of fairness. These behaviours are built into our genes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am absolutely baffled by the appeal of casino gambling. You give your money to a gangster. He gives you approximately 95% back. Repeat until you have nothing left. How is this a pleasant experience? To me it looks like robbery by a thousand cuts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am baffled why Americans grovel so. They know they pay twice what anyone else does for health care. They know all Americans but the very rich receive worse health care than the Cubans. They know big pharma is screwing them. They know the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations have the politicians in their pockets. Yet they are afraid of any change for the better, as if the corporate interests and their own were one in the same.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am not interested so much is who has money, but in how they consume, and what they do with their money. I have no beef with a rich person who drives an electric car, and has his house fitted with solar panels, and uses his money to help other people enjoy their lives. The ability to make money is like any other talent that one should use for the benefit of the planet. The rich people who burn me up are those so involved in the game of acquiring money that they trash the planet, mislead the public, bribe public officials to enact policies that hurt the people, drive enormously overpowered cars, live in multiple enormous homes with a huge energy footprint, and imagine they are inherently better and more deserving than everyone else.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am puzzled by advertisers. The majority of TV ads put me off the products. They do this with actresses who screech, announcers who mispronounce words, blatant lies/dissembling/deception, ridiculing/bullying/belittling, encouraging anti-social/anti-environment activity, valley girl announcers, people stuffing their faces on unhealthful food, airhead spokespeople, whining voices… Many ads are even unclear on the product or brand being advertised. I get the impression that they are composed by smart Alec teenagers whose only aim is to get a rise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I am the only person I know who tripled his money over a lifetime of gambling. My dad explained to me that the only way you had any chance at all was to bet your lifetime gambling stake on one bet. So I put a nickel into a slot machine, won fifteen cents, and decided to quit my gambling career entirely while I was ahead.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I avoid buying American goods and services for the same reason my father avoided buying Nazi goods. Neither of us wanted to encourage them in rogue behaviours.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I find it odd that American advertisers are so enamoured of Texan regional accents dropping gs, gitting instead of getting and general corn. Perhaps they reason hick actors will project as too stupid to be deceptive, or to conjure up the homespun charm of Mayberry circa 1955. That accent to me conjures up bigots and rednecks like George W. Bush and Rick Perry, and TV evangelist scammers and homophobes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I find most Americans irrational when it come to universal health care. It costs half as much and provides better quality care. Yet Americans are terrified of it since it is an “additional tax”. They conveniently forget they no longer have to pay a private insurance bill. The USA ranks lower than any other developed nation, on par with third world Cuba in quality of health care, yet Americans claim they want to stick with the current system because they don’t want to give up the high quality. They are so stuck in the delusion of American superiority that they refuse to accept their system is third class.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I give Toyota the Weasel of the Year award for their ad confessing that “Toyota’s safety has come into question” and that they are going to deal with it by “improving communication with customers”. If they had said, “We screwed up big time, and we are making major changes to make sure it never happens again“ I could forgive them. But when they pull this crap, I remind myself never to trust them again.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I grew up in a wealthy district called the British Properties in West Vancouver. One day a friend of my little sister’s visited and went home and announced to her mother that she had met some poor people (namely us). Her mother asked how she knew. She replied “They don’t have a swimming pool.” Perhaps I should then not be so surprised at people organising charities to buy expensive hockey equipment and ice time for “underprivileged children” when there are still kids going without food, shelter or medical care.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I hate gimmicks like a free TV with your new mattress. I already have a TV, and if I needed a TV the odds I would want the model they are bundling are infinitesimal. Just lower the effing price! There is no free only bundled! Please no “free ” interest, no “free ” delayed payments for two years, no free cash back, no free rebate, no free coupon card… All these gimmicks just jack up the price.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have no problem with a rich person receiving a superfat slice of the economic pie, so long as they do something commensurate in return, such as hire people, produce useful, durable products or innovate.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have noticed that is the very rich and the very poor are most likely to murder each other. The poor do it because their inhibitions are scrambled by drugs or alcohol. The rich do it because have no conscience. That is how they became rich.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have three major reservations with the massive wall street/bank bailout:

1. The people who created the mess made off like bandits with millions of dollars in bonuses.
2. There is still no regulation to stop these crooks from pulling the same stunt or a similar one all over again.
3. It does nothing to help the mortgage holder victims of the various scams the banks and their agents pulled.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have to belly laugh at Americans. They brag they are the richest nation on earth, yet they close their schools one day a week claiming they can’t afford to keep them open 5 days a week. One town fired its entire police force. Yet they believe they can afford to subsidise the most profitable corporations in the history of the planet, e.g. BP and let them run rampant over the environment. Simultaneously, they believe can afford the luxury of excusing corporations and billionaires from paying any taxes at all. They believe they can afford to pay more than twice what any other citizens in the developed world do for the worst quality health care in the developed world (on par with Cuba). Republicans have Americans utterly blind to how much better and cheaper health care is everywhere but America and how easy it is to bring costs down and quality up. They have fired meat inspectors so that can die of Listeria. The whole country should be featured in a Jackass video and be given a Darwin award.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have to laugh at Americans making $1000 a month defending the right of the rich to avoid taxes. They imagine real soon now they will be in Mitt Romney’s tax bracket. That is as naïve as buying lottery tickets for their retirement fund. Not only is it very difficult to become rich, the rich are an exclusive club, and they will do what they can to keep new members out.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have to laugh at Chrysler’s ads attempting to sell pickup trucks to Canadians. They feature Americans speaking in what to Canadian ears sound like ludicrous regional accents trying to sound tough, the way little kids pretend to be tough cowboys. They just come off as ridiculous. I exaggerate, but to Canadians, Americans are pudgy, insincere, bigoted, all bluff, not that bright or well-informed, charming, but little substance, like an overweight James Garner. This is not the image to project to sell a rugged, powerful, durable truck. I have written Chrysler twice to warn them of their error, but their ads are unchanged. Chrysler erroneously thinks everyone else thinks as highly of Americans as they do of themselves.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I have to laugh at the corporate mind that sends me a coupon to buy more of a product I have just told them should be pulled from the market for incompetence. They seem to think quantity and quality are fungible.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I never buy at stores that offer no interest or no payments for two years…. I always pay cash. Why should I pay interest fees hidden in the price for loans I don’t need? Even people who buy on time should avoid such stores. The stores are tricking them into taking out extended, high-interest, hidden loans they don’t need.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I really wonder about people who claim capitalists should be totally unregulated. Do they imagine everyone would drive safely if we repealed all the traffic laws? That child molesters would become model citizens if we fired the police who monitor them?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I suggest the current recession is caused by procrastination. Everyone knows we need a massive retooling to deal with the end of oil and climate change. Yet we have a general failure of nerve to get on with it. However, we are not so stupid as to believe we can continue as usual. So we stall, and allow the economy to grind to a snail’s pace.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I think Americans are treating too casually the Republican threat to refuse to raise the debt ceiling and let the country default and refuse to pay its bills. Pros will realise the problem will soon be fixed. However, the general population of the world could panic, dump their American currency, and pull their money out of American banks. Fixing that would be extremely expensive. Seriously, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) needs to assassinate a few people to make sure this does not happen.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I think it is legitimate for civic governments to spend money on the following:

• transportation, for cars, cyclists and pedestrians. This includes roads and bridges.
• Sewers and water.
• Police and fire protection.
• Recreational centres.
• Public fireworks displays.
• Neighbourhood summer festivals.

It should not spend on the following:

• churches.
• professional sports, especially subsidising sports stadiums. Professional sports is highly profitable and those who support them tend to be fairly well off. The poor should not be subsidising them.
• Opera. The people who support opera are extremely well off. It is unfair to ask people much less wealthy, who cannot afford tickets, to subsidise them.

My rule is, the city should only spend on the population as a whole, not just some privileged group.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I think it should be illegal for a bank to sell my mortgage to a third party. When I contract a mortgage, I choose the lender. I may pay a premium to deal with an honest bank. The bank should not be permitted to fob me off on some crooked third party with despicable politics. If the bank wants to offload the risk of the mortgage, that should in no way affect me. I should still deal with the original bank. My contract should remain with the original bank. I should still make my monthly payments to the original bank. The current system is like an accountant contracting to do your taxes for $50 an hour, then reselling the contract to a 13 year old kid.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I used to volunteer each weekend to take mental patients from a half way house out bowling. I would buy French pastries to use as prizes. I divided them into two teams. We played two games. In the first game, the team with the best total score got the French pastries, and in the second the team with the best improved score from the first game got pastries. Every single weekend, every person got exactly one pastry. They would silently collude to make this happen. This behaviour struck me as more sane that the frantically competitive behaviour I was used to from people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I was astonished to discover that people playing slot machines in casinos show no signs of excitement. They are clearly bored out of their minds. To them, inserting the tokens and pulling the arms is onerous but entirely necessary work. They look utterly exhausted. I also discovered that if you go near one of their machines, they will snarl at you like a pit bull. They are deluded that all the money they have put into the machines still belongs to them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I watched Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me. In it, a bailiff evicted Flint Michigan families out of their homes on Christmas. They sat on the sidewalk in the rain with their straggly Christmas trees. There were block after block of boarded up homes. Property values plummeted as the city turned into a ghost town. Can you imagine rabbits being so stupid as to abandon their burrows en masse and freeze in the rain?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I will never eat a piece of KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) chicken for several reasons:

• KFC is unusually cruel is its treatment of its chickens.
• KFC wraps the chicken in cholesterol sandwich of fat and flour.
• There is something weird about the chickens. They are malformed and have rubbery bones.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I would never eat a Kraft product. Their parent company Altria neé Philip Morris Tobacco tried to kill off its customers by lying to them about the health hazards of smoking. Kraft presumably would happily kill off its customers too if they thought it would be profitable. The problem is this conglomerate has bought up so many brands often there is no non-Altria product for sale. I have to go without. I am really annoyed that crooked companies like Altria have been permitted to monopolise like this. They have destroyed so many familiar brands of my boyhood.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

I would not want to be superrich for exactly the same reason I don’t try to scarf 90% of the food when I go out with my friends for Chinese food.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a company advertises it is behaving altruistically, either they are lying outright or whatever they are doing is just a token for PR purposes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a mother wanted to teach her kids the elements of laissez-faire capitalism, she would bake a pie then invite the family to play Monopoly. She would then force-feed the winner the entire pie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If a politician decides to stop spending on repair and rebuilding of infrastructure (sewers, roads, electric grid, water supply, transit…) he looks like a genius from the savings. However, after a few decades, like the deacon’s one horse shay, all starts to fall apart at once. Even to recover 50% capacity, he must do 50% of the repairs and rebuilding that he procrastinated. It will be impossible to find the massive lump sum in a society with crumbling roads and sewers. The country then permanently degrades to third world status. Refusing to maintain infrastructure is tantamount to committing slow financial suicide.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If banks and large corporations want taxpayer socialism to rescue them when they get in trouble, they must be more willing to share the profits when times are good.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If banks are too big to fail, that means banks are too big period. Just as in the antitrust days of a century ago, we need to split them up and forbid them from merging and acquiring each other.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If due to the actions of criminals, disease, mental breakdown or other misfortune, you suddenly lost your job, your home, your belongings and your money, what should society expect of you to rectify the situation? What should it expect you to do for food and shelter in the meantime?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If hard work were truly the path to wealth, then the hardest workers would be the wealthiest, not those with the wealthiest parents or the iffiest ethics.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If health care costs are too high, the obvious place to trim is in the last year of life when 50% of all health care dollars are spent. Don’t force expensive, painful or low benefit procedures on the the elderly. If an expensive procedure offers only a few months extra life, the patient should have to pay out of pocket.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If I made a blackberry pie, and it disappeared and we discovered one of my children with berry juice all over her face, her siblings would likely blame her for their lack of pie. Oddly, middle class Republicans look at it differently. They blame the poor (those without any pie), not the rich (gluttons gorged on pie — those who conspicuously waste pie to assert social dominance), for their lack of pie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If I were interested in investing, here is how I would proceed:

1. Make a list of things I am very sure will be true in the future during the rest of my lifetime.
2. Scratch off that list the items where there is universal agreement.
3. Invest in business that will do well as changes remaining on the list come to pass.
4. The only changes I would allow myself are to move investments from company to company working on the same area, not allowing myself to be spooked by short term changes in that market sector.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If I were to give advice on investment, it would be this. Mass production will disappear relatively suddenly. What will replace it is robots that do custom manufacture. For example if you want a suit, you will get measured, pick the cloth, and a machine will cut the cloth precisely fitting your body, and stitch it together. There will be several such machines in your city and many more retail shops you can go to get measured and feel the cloth samples. Similarly, if you want a toaster, you will have a talk with a computer about precisely what features and style you want and a robot will build it for you to spec. You will be expected to express your personality by your choice of design for all the objects in your home. You may hire people to help you choose to get the effect you want. People will create designs for all household items (the analog of dress patterns) and live off the global royalties when people choose to realise them. From your local shop or home computer you can order up anything anyone in the world has designed, or design it yourself. Think how frustrating it is today looking for a sofa. You have a precise picture of what you want in your mind, but you can’t find it. You have to select something from what has already been built and is in stock. If you want a bright yellow leather sofa designed to last a century, that is up to you. Just because no one else wants one is no reason you can’t have one. Part of what will spur this is the increasing cost of shipping goods all over the world as the price of oil soars. The other main spur is reduced inventory costs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If it were not for the recession putting some people totally out of work, it would not be so bad. It has slowed the pace of life a bit. People don’t feel obligated to spend just to impress the neighbours. People are not working so feverishly and are taking time with their families.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If someone informs you that you have won a prize in a contest you did not enter, it is a scam.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If the car insurance companies were telling you the truth, you would save $400 every time you switched companies. Cycle between Allstate, Geiko, State Farm and Progressive in a ring, and presto, you’d have it down to 0.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If the poor earn any money, 100% of those earnings are subtracted from their monthly welfare/disability cheque. This amounts to a 100% income tax. Further if they start a small home business, the gross income, not the net income is deducted. This amount to more than 100% income tax. The wealthy claim even a 20% income tax stifles their initiative. Surely the poor need even more incentive than the wealthy to stay off welfare. This is obscenely unfair, especially when so many corporations and wealthy people pay no tax and all and consume billions in government services.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If there a not the resources to guarantee a child shelter, at least two loving, stable caretakers/parents, medical care and food, then it is immoral, and maybe even should be criminal, to bring such a deprived child into the world.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If there is a peanut crop failure, the way capitalism handles this is by raising the price of peanut butter so that the children of the rich continue eating as much peanut butter as before, whereas the children of the poor go without peanut butter altogether. Capitalism is a system for enforcing the privilege of conspicuous consumption for the wealthy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you are an ordinary citizen, investing in the stock market is just plain stupid. Why?

1. You lose money to the broker for fees on every transaction.
2. The stock market is essentially a sophisticated gambling game where the players attempt to take each others’ money. You are a rookie. The old timers will rob you blind. You have not the first clue how the dirty tricks they use work. You are a lamb about to be sheared.
3. To make money, you must buy a stock that is strongly undervalued. Rookies have no way of knowing which stocks those are.
4. You have to buy low and sell high. Rookies don’t have the emotional discipline. They can’t help but do the opposite, selling when their stocks crash and buying stocks that are shooting up.
5. As a newbie, you can’t help but be a lemming, constantly following the herd, being sucked in by rumours. That strategy is guaranteed to fail. The stock market is a game designed to take money from the many and concentrate it and give it to the cleverest few investors. Herds stampede, creating phony price bubbles. If you follow them, you will be punished too.
6. To succeed, you must be able to predict the future prices of stocks better than most other investors. You have no edge to do that.
7. You have not the first clue about the mathematics of the stock market or the ability to program computers to aid you in your trading decisions the way your competitors have.
8. Monkeys throwing darts to select stocks do better than most investors because they are not sucked in by rumours, they don’t feel pressured to do what everyone else is doing (a guaranteed fail strategy), because they fully diversify and because they don’t pay fees to frantically keep changing their minds.

The one exception I would make is if you invest in a company whose product you believe in where you have personally known the principals for a long time, and you believe, based on personal knowledge, the company will succeed. You are investing partly for return and partly to support the company’s goals. There you do have an edge over other investors.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you are in a car accident, the attending doctor first works on your arm hanging by a thread before dealing with your hangnail. In a similar way, economists should attend to those in most pain first, the homeless before the multi-billionaires.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you become unusually rich, kidnappers will take your children for ransom, and commonly kill or torture them. Why would anyone seek that experience out?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you define poverty as being in the bottom 10% of income, no matter what you do, 10% of the population will remain stubbornly below the poverty line. To detect progress, you need an absolute measure for the poverty line, such as having at least 1500 calories per day, 60 grams (2.12 oz) of protein per day, 10 litres (2.64 US gallons)of clean water per day, 10 sq metres (107.64 sq feet) of living space at a temperature between 15°C (59°F) to 30°C (86°F) .
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you doubt the value of spending on universal literacy programs, study what life is like in times and places that did not have them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you ever get it into your head you can have whatever you want, just borrow money by putting it on your credit card, it is only a short time before financial ruin. The same applies to countries. If you look at the graph of the American debt over the last 60 years, it is clear the country has forgotten this caveat. Hint, to get out of debt, first stop spending on optional, expensive items without long term benefits, e.g. war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you give someone some poisoned coffee and tell them it will make them feel wonderful, you could be charged with attempted murder. Yet when a corporation does the same thing advertising foods, pesticides and herbicides that are harmful to health, lying that they are beneficial, they are never charged.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you go out with friends to Chinese food, you probably would not think well of a couple that gobbled down half the food, leaving others hungry, while paying only the usual share. Yet when a tycoon takes a share of the fruits of the labour pie 1000 times bigger than average, paying in only the usual share of labour, most likely you applaud. I find this inconsistent.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you have a relationship with someone and one of you does all the giving and the other all the taking, the relationship will not last long. Similarly, the west has used its economic muscle to take and take and take from the third world, giving nothing in return. That situation is inherently unstable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you have never been rich, you probably imagine that money would make you deliriously happy. It is nice, but not nearly as nice as you might think. I would estimate it is about 1/10 as pleasant as having a stable relationship. It has its disadvantages too — people trying to con you out of the money, people pretending to like you, having to manage your money (boring!), the clutter, time spent caring for possessions… On the other hand, being destitute where you have to go without either rent, heat or food, is much worse that you would think. It is not just the deprivation, it is the constant stomach-kicking worry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you have two people, one obsessed with making wealth and one more balanced, the obsessed one will end up richer. If you have two people, one willing to hurt and exploit others and the other considerate, the cruel one will end up richer. If you have two people, one for whom no amount is ever enough, and the other satisfied with reasonable comfort, the first will end up richer. If you have two people, one willing to break the law to make money and the other not, the crook will end up richer. This leads to the richest, most powerful people being the least capable of handling wealth responsibly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you knew even 1% of the unconscionable things Chevron is doing in Ecuador, you would never again buy their gasoline.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you knew that the crew pampering you on a cruise were paid $450.00 USD a month, and worked 14 hours days, and your ship dumped raw sewage into the pristine waters you plied, could you still enjoy it?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you lost money speculating on the stock market, that money did not evaporate. A clever speculator you will never meet skunked you out of it. If you made money, you did it my outsmarting some less sophisticated investor, perhaps a grandmother foolishly putting her life savings into the stock market. Speculation is just a slightly more respectable form of gambling. It is a con game where the experienced players fleece the novices. Why would you even want to make money that way? You are conning others out of their savings in the same way a pool shark or card shark cons marks. Any technique for making money without effort is a way of conning others to give you money and giving them no value in return. It is a form of theft even if it is legal.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you ran a boat rental business, and you wanted to ensure that nobody ever had to wait for a boat, you need extra boats. To cover the cost of those extra boats that wait around unused most of the time, you have to raise the rental rate. The same applies to waiting times for doctors. If you want to reduce waiting times you need more doctors, then doctors spend less of their time treating patients and the cost per visit goes up. You can’t reduce costs by decreasing waiting times.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you remember your high school history, both the USA and Canada suffered extreme cyclical boom and bust in the 1800s. Then economists came up with the counter intuitive remedy — the government should spend more in bad times and less in good. Oddly, Republicans counsel doing the reverse or nothing at all, both of which are proven ineffective strategies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you subscribe to the view that corporations are better suited to make decisions than elected representatives, if you believe that corporations should be permitted to spend unlimited amounts of money influencing/bribing elected representatives, if you believe there should be no laws constraining corporations, then be honest, you have lost faith in “one man one vote” and subscribe to “one dollar one vote”. If you lived in the middle ages, you would have been advocating government of, for and by the landed nobility.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you think about it, you probably would not enjoy being super rich. You would have a house too big that needed endless cleaning. The snooty neighbours would hassle you if your lawn and garden were not perfect. Criminals would be breaking in all the time, and sometimes even kidnapping family members. People would resent you. There would be endless streams of pests wanting you to invest or spend your money with them. You could afford any tempting food you wanted. Finances would be no check on overeating. Taxes would become a major life preoccupation. Your current friends would feel awkward around you. You would not have a minute’s peace.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

If you write to a company to complain about a consumer product such as soap with an obnoxious perfume, they will send you a coupon to buy more of the product you found of unacceptable quality.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Imagine a couple had twin 9-year-old boys names Jim and Don and a brand new hardwood floor. The mother came home and found the boys roller skating/inline skating/roller blading on the new floor. It was covered in white scratches in a diamond pattern.
Cut that out! the mother shouted.
No! the boys shouted back in unison.
What? You are ruining our new floor!
But Miltie Fryedmon says that rollerblading is the most important thing there is! It trumps every other consideration!! That is the most fundamental principle of the universe!!! argued Jim.
Not in my house it isn’t! Who is this Miltie Fryedmon anyway?
You don’t know?? Jeez! Everyone who is anyone knows who he is!! He has a website and everything!!! jeered Don.

This story is not literally true. It is a parable about the way so many people have taken as an article faith that profit is more important than anything else, no matter how destructive it is.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Imagine a future where every child born is guaranteed shelter, at least two loving, stable, adult caretakers/parents, medical care and food.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Imagine a game so intense that major losers sometimes commit suicide. One such game is money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Imagine a planet where once in a lifetime, people play a dart game. Someone throws a ball with coloured squares into the air and the player tosses a dart at it. If he misses, he is instantly killed. Whichever colour the dart lands on determines the player’ entire life destiny. Some people will be confined their entire lives to a region corresponding to the square. Some squares mean income will always be below subsistence no matter what the person does. Some regions guarantee lifetime medical care, dental care, education, food and lodging no matter how they subsequently behave. Some regions bestow the right of the player to say whatever he pleases without interference. Others constrain the player to flattering the leaders on pain of death. When you point out how arbitrary this scheme is, they remind you it is scarcely different from how things are done on earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Imagine a species of pig than spent huge amounts of energy finding and rooting up truffles, then buried them in a hole and forgot them. That is similar to what humans do with gold.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Imagine being born a prince and being taught from birth that you were, simply from your status as a prince, not from any special skill or talent, specially favoured of God and vastly more worthy than ordinary men. Imagine being taught your privilege extended to taking anything you wanted from any non-prince, including their time, wives, daughters or sons. Imagine being taught that anyone who resisted your will was a terrorist who deserved the death penalty. Now you know what is like to born Israeli or American.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Imagine being filthy rich. It would be similar to a world where you could afford everything because it was so cheap. The fanciest imaginable steak dinner would be only a penny. A yacht would be $5. What would constrain your consumption? — just the health damage of too many calories and nuisance value of too many possessions. Like an obsessive-compulsive lunatic, you would fret over very penny, as a way of keeping score of your worth, even though none of the wealth had any effect at all on what you could buy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Imagine trying to buy Bill Gates a Christmas present at a department store. It would be impossible. He already has everything. If you gave him a billion dollars, he would not spend it, he would just save it, waiting for the recession to end so he could invest it safely. Imagine trying to buy a low-income family a Christmas present. Its easy. They would like almost anything you could find in any store, since they currently have nothing. If you gave them a thousand dollars, they would spend it on clothes, groceries, furniture, cable TV, new tires for the car, etc. This is why giving big tax cuts to the top 2% don’t stimulate the economy in a recession, and giving them to the middle and lower classes does. The rich save; the poor spend. Giving the rich large tax cuts has been tried by both Reagan and Bush 43 and was proven not to work. But that does not stop the current crop of Republicans from touting, yet again what Bush 41 called “Voodoo economics”.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In 1929, just prior the great depression, the richest 1% of Americans owned 50% of the wealth. In the prosperous 60s, they owned 25%.

At the start of the Bush-43 depression, the rate was back up over 50% again. Consider the possibility that extremes in wealth distribution might cause economic instability. In America’s most prosperous times, the rich paid a whopping 91% income tax. Reagan lowered it to 28% while simultaneously raising it for everyone else from 11% to 15%. Bush-43 lowered capital gains taxes on the rich.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In 2011 in the USA, the government was gridlocked. It was as though there were no government. Business flailed about utterly helpless to do anything about the recession on its own. The stock market crashed. Where do the Tea Party get the idea that the country will run more smoothly without government?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In a boom economy, cash is king. In a collapsed economy, inventory is emperor.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In a game of musical chairs, because there is one less chair than there are children, in each round, no matter how vigorously the children compete, one child will not be able to get a chair. The same is true in an economy where you have more people than jobs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In a pre-monetary society, about the only thing you could do with your wealth/food was share it in a big feast, trading your wealth for status. Back then, there was not much else you could do with an abundance of food, since it did not keep. Today, since money keeps indefinitely in a bank, the game has changed to miserly accumulation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In a recession, there is the same amount of money in the universe as usual, it is just the prices of almost everything are lower, including houses and stocks. Yet oddly people refuse to buy. They want to wait until the prices are high again. Yet everyone claims they understand the principle, buy low, sell high as the road to wealth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In America there are a special class of actors who can speak very rapidly but almost unintelligibly. Their job is speaking the fine print legally required in advertisements the vendor would prefer you did not hear, such as drug side effects or contest rules that explain why you can’t really win.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In an ideal capitalist system, the companies that produce the best quality goods, at the lowest price with the least environmental impact, prosper and the rest go bankrupt. Capitalism can’t work unless the consumers have a mechanism at least as powerful as advertising to punish the companies that produce shoddy, overpriced, dishonestly marketed or environmentally unfriendly goods using the law or exposure. Without such a mechanism, the dishonest companies have an unfair advantage over the decent ones, and the wrong companies prevail.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In ancient times, the wealthy avoided taxes by bribing the tax collector. Today they bribe the politicians to lower their taxes and provide loopholes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In BC, Canada, the homeless are not given any money for shelter. Further they are not permitted to save up for the one month rent plus security deposit. Homelessness then is like a black hole. Once you lose the roof over your head, the government will work tirelessly to see you never get it back.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In Nevada, slot machines are required by law to pay back at least 75 cents of every dollar they take in. That is like a 25% gambling tax. It is odd that people volunteer to pay such a tax when they could gamble with each other for free.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In Oliver Twist a magistrate sentences Oliver to be hanged, just because he is poor. Today we would consider that barbaric, but we are still quite happy to condemn the homeless to death from exposure, lack of food or medical care, not to mention the millions in third world countries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In the American health care debate, we have seen the power of corporate America to threaten and bribe the politicians to thwart the will of the majority. There are 100,000 private contractors in Afghanistan. Is it any surprise the collective power and wealth of the defence industry was able to quietly force Obama around 180 degrees to become a hawk?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In the fall of 2008, stock brokers wept that billions in wealth had evaporated overnight. Stuff and nonsense! Not a penny of real wealth was lost. The factories, the land, the buildings, the work force, the farms, the trucks, the ships… were still 100% intact. They were weeping that their cons to sell people empty promises of future wealth had collapsed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In the movies, the actors win tens of thousands of dollars gambling after a few minutes of play. (Product placement.) Glamourous folk excitedly watch the activity shooting alluring glances at the gamblers. In real life, the gamblers are sweaty, bored and exhausted. They treat gambling like the drudgery of doing hundreds of baskets of laundry. The casino tries to create some excitement with lights and sound effects, but it is as tired as a circus midway on the edge of bankruptcy. The casino creates the illusion that time has stopped, that there is no day or night and what is happening has always been and always will be, unchanging limbo.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In the United States you can place bets with casinos, investment companies, banks and insurance companies. I think if would be a better if these institutions were not permitted to poach on each others’ territories.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In the United States, homeowners can deduct their mortgage payments in computing their income tax. The net result of this is people who cannot afford houses subsidise those that can. “What?” you say “Isn’t that wealth transfer? The Republicans will never tolerate that!” Republicans object to wealth transfer from rich to poor, but consider poor to rich transfer as well-deserved tribute.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In the USA right now there are more than 11.5 people working for every one seeking work. Why all the hand wringing? Is it really all that big a burden for each employed person to support an additional 1/11.5th of a person? There is no survival problem, just a reluctance to share.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In the USA, the insurance companies take $2 for themselves for every $1 they pass on to the doctors. Republicans and Democrats on the take from the insurance companies have convinced the American public this is a Good Thing™.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In the year 2030, what are the odds that face creams, headache tablets, toothpastes and laundry detergents actually do what their advertisements claim? This could come about two ways.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In their ad, Tostitos assures me they make their chips with “real ingredients”. Even if they made them with rat poison, that would still be true.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In this time of recession, it is cheering to remember that endless economic growth is not sustainable. The environment cannot even sustain the current level of economic activity much less constant doubling that stockbrokers demand. We are like little boys so intent on playing video games that we don’t notice the house burning down around us. Instead of increasing our industrious assault on the planet, we need to learn how to get more enjoyment with less fuss and damage to the natural systems that sustain all economic activity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

In Victoria where I live, government welfare is $150.00 CAD a month less than the cheapest one bachelor apartment rent. If a welfare recipient manages to earn $400.00 CAD , their welfare income is reduced from $500.00 CAD , to $100.00 CAD , effectively a 100% income tax disincentive. Just what does the government expect these people do if not resort to illegal means to pay the rent?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Income taxes are incredibly stressful, not so much paying them as computing them, and the fear of making a mistake. You’d think people would do them by the buddy system to either work on both sets together or to work on each other’s to reduce the tension.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

ING Direct advertises that if you give them $100 a month, and the end of two years your savings will have grown to $2400. No kidding. That would also happen if I just stuffed the bills into a hole in your mattress.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Investing money in the US stock market is like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy van Pelt not to yank away the football. That is what she always does. Nothing has changed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It bothers me that cities typically find hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidise a sports stadium, attended by people with thousands of dollars each year of disposable income for tickets, when it can’t even come up with a few thousand dollars toward the homelessness problem. It is not right that people with little money should be subsidising those who have plenty.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It bothers me the way deceptive marketing tricks are becoming standard business practice:

• No payments for 2 years! Yes, but goods are such poor quality they will break before they are paid for. Exorbitant interest rates are built-in for a loan you did not need.
• Reward Points. You have no idea what the points are worth, and the vendor can change them at any time or expire them, or put onerous condition on them, unlike an honest discounted price. Chances are you will never get around to redeeming them.
• Mail in rebate. They count on you not bothering. They make it as onerous as possible to fill in forms with fine print. Often you never hear anything or that the offer expired even before you bought the goods. They will find some excuse not to give you the refund by devising all manner of arcane rules. The store will trick you by posting the price less the rebate you will likely never get.
• We donate $1 per sale to some worthy cause. Dawn dish detergent promises to donate a dollar to saving wildlife for each bottle sold. When you read the fine print, you discover they do no such thing.
• Club Cards. These raise prices since they take extra checkout line processing time, and provide an excuse to rip off tourists and occasional customers.
• Come Back Cash: Sears offers a $50 cash rebate for every $50 you spend. They don’t tell you that must apply by mail, and then spend the rebate only on certain brands of men’s clothing. It is in no sense cash.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It costs the cable company less to provide all the channels to a subscriber than to install an encryption box to limit him to a dozen. Capitalism feels no shame at this dog-in-a-manger pricing structure.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is a cliché that rich people are obnoxious bastards. However, there are facts to back up this generalisation. The USA is the richest country on earth, but on a per capita basis is the stingiest of all the developed nations. Even with the USA in recession, the income of the rich zooms while that of the rest plummets. Even then the rich bribe Republicans to let them continue avoiding taxes through various loopholes. Not only are they unwilling to help the disadvantaged, while claiming Christian piety, they stiff the government and leave the poor to pay their share of government services. And they demand that the poor not get the pensions they paid for so the money can be used for projects to benefit the wealthy. These people are rich because they are ruthless, unprincipled and greedy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is a fairly common thing for an American to go postal, and kill his boss and co-workers when he loses his job. In that light, I would expect Republican politicians would be daily assassinated by workers who have lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings due to Republican policies, such as cutting people off unemployment or giving the banks and investment brokers free reign to defraud their customers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is a national disgrace that 46 million citizens of the richest country is the world receive the same health care as those in a Darfur refugee camp — namely none.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is a wonder that Republicans, as part of their smaller government obsession, have not insisted it stop interfering in the traffic of buying and selling infants.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is almost amusing to watch middle class and lower class Americans pressing for the government to take more of their money and give it to the richest 2%. They consider coddling the aristocracy even more important than their own needs. Why do they do this? Because they were suckered into believing the American Dream. They sincerely believe they will be part of that aristocracy any day now, so they had better get busy feathering their nest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is amazing how many cockamamie schemes sellers have cooked up to create the illusion of lower prices but which actually increase the amount you pay:

• coupons
• air miles cards
• loyalty cards
• no payment for two years
• we pay the sales tax
• cash back
• mail in rebates
• lottery chances for purchases

As best I can, I boycott any product that uses any of these dishonest ploys.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is amazing how many people pretended to believe Professor Milton Friedman’s assertion that capitalism is naturally self-regulating. It is patently false. Consider:

• Capitalism naturally creates an exaggerated boom and bust cycle because corporations naturally fire employees and stop spending at the first sign of a recession.
• Capitalism, left to itself, reduces competition through mergers and acquisitions. Competition is the key to why capitalism works as well as it does. In the 1890 era of unregulated American capitalism, many sectors collapsed to monopolies and small oligarchies, just as oil, media, cable, agribusiness… has today, killing competition.
• Consider that unregulated Chinese milk producers and American tobacco companies, when unregulated, went so far as to deliberately kill off their customers in the pursuit of increased profit.
• In pursuit of profit, unregulated corporations successfully reduce wages below subsistence. This is below the value of food and shelter given to slaves or livestock.
• Because corporations are unaware of the value of waste, they pollute rather than recycle, because they imagine doing so is more profitable.
• Consider how unregulated American financial institutions managed to pull the entire world economy into a black hole through deliberately bad investments.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is bad enough having to pay income tax, but forcing people to compute the tax or pay somebody to compute it is the real pain. It is time to give taxpayers the option of allowing government computers access to your computerised financial records and have it come up with number that you can pay without doing any computation yourself, if you think it is fair, with the option to dispute.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is bit thick for a millionaire to pontificate on how overly generous the social safety net is when he has never used it. How the hell would he know?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is distressing that McCain has to advertise that its frozen rising crust pizzas are made of genuine food.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is far less of a thrill than you might imagine to make more money than you can spend, and far more unpleasant than you would ever imagine to lack sufficient income for rent, heat, food and dentistry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is improper for cities to subsidise professional sports, e.g. by building stadiums. It takes money from the poor and gives it to the rich who can afford tickets. Ditto for opera. Tax money should be spent on necessities. Delights should be funded by donation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is naïve to expect corporations to solve world problems. Their sole legally-mandated function is to extract as much money as possible for their shareholders. It is similarly naïve to expect government to solve world problems. Big government attracts the corrupt, the dishonest and those with the biggest egos. However, you do have some clout over both. You can refuse to patronise the worst misbehaving corporations and tout the best behaving ones and encourage your friends to do likewise. You can campaign for the best politicians and campaign against the worst. If you don’t fully use your tools to steer them, you fully deserve the typical mistreatment you get.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is odd how people slavishly fawn over the super rich. It somewhat like drooling over gangsters or bank robbers. There is almost no chance those rich people acquired their money legitimately, possibly legally, but not legitimately. To acquire it legitimately they would have had to have provided service to others equal in values to their assets. With a few exceptions, there is no blinking way they did. They conned others into giving them money without returning a service of equal value. The super rich have learned to work the loopholes in our money system. They have no moral restraint to stop them from taking more from society than they contribute. They do whatever they can get away with. They are like pigs at a group Chinese meal who eat five times their share and skip out on the bill.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is odd how people talk about billionaires earning their money. They could stay in bed all day and watch TV and still receive millions in interest and the fruits of the labours of their employees would still flow to them. They don’t work that much harder than anyone else but they receive thousands of times as much per hour. They are sponging off society to a degree that dwarfs anyone on welfare.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It is odd that jewels are still in fashion. I mean rare gems such as diamonds, emeralds and rubies that require enormous labour to find and polish, not quality costume jewelry that looks almost identical. The wearer of such a jewel is saying “I’m rich and you’re not. Hundreds of people died in third world countries so that I could wear these rocks.” The wearers must broadcast the fact the jewels are real and their cost for the proper effect, and may even wear counterfeits in public while the original rests in a safe. Why would anyone want to project such a cruel, crass, conceited image?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It never seems to dawn on people that the cause of rising land prices, rising food prices and falling wages is increased population. When the population increases, planet earth does not magically expand her bounty of land, food and resources. There is less to go round for each person.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It seems puzzling that people can become rich in the middle of severe shortages, and there can be a recession when there is still plenty of everything anyone could need. There is a strong disconnect between money and the real world. Money is a game, played primarily by high stakes gamblers who are all very good at cheating. These people have no conscience about the effect of their play has on the rest of us who treat money as real.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It should be illegal for employers to cut pensions to give to shareholders. Corporations have a contractual obligation to pay the pensions. They have no such obligation to the shareholders.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It takes most people at least two irritating days a year to accumulate the paper and organise it to compute income tax. This amounts to roughly an additional 1% tax. Surely there is a simpler way of collecting the tax that happens as a side effect of purchasing and banking.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It would be trivial for cell phones and PDA (Personal Digital Assistant)s to allow you to transfer money from person to person, or person to vendor locally or over the Internet with high security. Mugging would be pointless. You would just go to the police, explain you gave somebody money under duress, then they would know precisely who he is and his bank account and get you your money back even if they could not find him. Cash would disappear for everything but illegal transactions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

It would cost $9 billion per year to educate every child on earth. That is less than 1% of what we spend on the military.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Its no coincidence that the majority of people blocking action on climate change are older, wealthy males. They don’t care what happens to our planet. They will soon be dead. What matters to them is the incremental prestige of making a bit more money out of the old economy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Its odd that drug dealers have more status than drug addicts, even though they cause misery on much wider scale. I guess people look at their money and close their eyes to where they get it. Oddly though, for arms dealers and soldiers it is the reverse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Jeb Bush explained in his article in Imprimis Magazine 1995 that the Republicans want to destroy the government of the USA. They want the USA to be like a third world country. Why pray tell? Consider Columbia and Mexico. They are run by criminals. The lack of a strong government lets the criminals take over.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Jeep Wrangler takes the cake in brazen lying in its commercials. They claim their gas hog is “solar-powered” and “wind-powered”. In no conceivable context is that true.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Joseph A. Bank clothiers advertises that if you buy a suit “you get any two free”. What’s wrong with this picture? It turns out the price includes two shirts not two additional suits.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Karl Marx would be pleased. Even Bill Gates gets the same crap on his cable TV as the rest of us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Let’s say you were having a particularly difficult barn raising. Which strategy would work best:

1. Ask everyone to come hungry, and have a corn roast after the work was done.
2. Send everyone a boxed turkey dinner with all the fixing, and ask them to come stuffed to the gills.

The second method is how Republicans want to encourage rich people to get to work creating jobs, by giving them huge amounts of money up front whether they create any jobs or not.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Like poker, for there be big winners in the stock market, most players have to lose.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Little boys admire pirates because they don’t have to wash, they can stay up as late as they please and get to fight with swords. They ignore the fact that pirates earn their living by pillaging, raping and murdering. Grown-ups admire billionaires in much the same superficial way.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Long ago, economists theorised that the swings in economic prosperity could be damped if governments reduced spending in flush times and increased it during recessions. Oddly, politicians usually do the reverse. Note how American Republicans suddenly got religion in reducing the deficit only during the current recession. They ballooned it during the boom years of the early Bush-43 administration.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Long before I studied mathematics and probability at university, my Dad explained to me why pyramid schemes don’t work and while it is futile to gamble at casinos, and why strategies such as doubling your bet every time you lose will not work. He said the only way you have any chance at all is to bet everything you plan to bet in your entire life on one throw of the dice, or spin of the roulette wheel. I took his advice and tripled my money — I put a nickel in a slot machine and got back fifteen cents. I have never gambled since.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Lying Through Pictures Dept.

On 2011-05-30 M&M’s Candies aired a commercial where a talking candy opened a bag of candies and two theatre tickets popped out. This sounds too good to be true. It is:

• You need not just any pouches, but specially marked pouches.
• You needed to buy 8 pouches not just one.
• You needed to send away in the mail. There in nothing in the pouches.
• The contest expired on 2010-12-30. So no matter what you do, you get nothing.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Lying With Pictures

An M&Ms commercial shows two movie tickets falling out of a bag of M&Ms candy. You might think each bag contains two movie tickets. The reality is you must collect 8 bags and mail them away to get the movie tickets. People are not used to labeling visual lies like this for what they are. Arby’s advertises its 2 for $5 promotion by repeatedly showing a row of 3 hamburgers. Actors in white lab coats trick the viewer into thinking what they say has the backing of some actual doctor or dentist.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

M-A-C, a lipstick company has raised $128 million dollars for AIDS research by donating 100% of the retail price of a line of lipstick. Surely an entire country could do better.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Mag stripe cards have as much security as a pile of signed blank cheques. The new RFI (Request For Information) credit cards have even less. Somebody should sue the credit card companies for this gross negligence. If you give your credit card over the phone or over the Internet to a merchant, he, his crooked employees or anyone snooping electronically, can use that number to makes as many purchases as he wants over the net. He has your number and your expiry date. If you hand your card to a merchant, he can easily record the information on the card for later illicit use. If you have a RFI credit card, a thief can steal the information on all the cards is your wallet simply by walking within 3.05 metres (10 ft) of you in a shopping mall. Your card willingly divulges this information, without your permission, on being given a tiny prod of radio waves from a $10.00 CAD device. The technology for secure commerce has been known for half a century. The credit card companies refuse to use it, presumably because they can usually stick their customers (vendors and purchasers) with most of the costs of the thefts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Manually tracking financial information and compiling it for income tax wastes at least two days a year of everyone’s time. What a drain on national productivity!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Many Americans leave the country and become citizens of other countries. They may have disowned the USA because of its illegal wars or backward social policies. Yet the US government still tries to collect taxes from them, even though the US government provides no services. Unless they provide a service, e.g. a pension or medical care, I don’t think they have any right collecting taxes or even demanding that people file. I think the idea was originally to catch tax cheats who are for all practical purposes Americans, but arranged official residence in some other country to dodge taxes. There should be some way to sort these two types of people out and treat them eat appropriately.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Many of the rich acquired their wealth legally, but very few acquired it legitimately. By that I mean they gave full value for the money they accepted from others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Marco Rubio, the Republican candidate for the senate in Florida has an interesting economy theory. If you give millions of dollars to a rich man it will stimulate the economy. However, unemployment benefits do not. His reasoning: the amount of money an unemployed person spends is too small to make any difference. I am unconvinced. The rich man will spend a chunk of the money on expensive imported clothes, jewelry, cars and foreign vacations. These clearly do nothing to stimulate the domestic economy. In contrast, the unemployed man will spend on groceries and locally provided services. That money will be recycled over an over in the local economy. The problem is not that there is a shortage of money, but that those that have it are just sitting on it, waiting for better times to invest or spend it. If you give the rich more money, they will just sit on that money too, making matters even worse. What is needed is incentives to the rich to get them investing and disincentives for just sitting on money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Meredith Baker head of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) approved the monopoly-creating purchase of NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation) by Comcast. A few weeks later she resigned to become VP of Comcast. That should be illegal. That is about as ballsy a nose-thumbing at the public ever done.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Military spending to stimulate the economy works about as well as taking in each others’ laundry. Unlike other forms of spending, it produces no new wealth. Military research does spin-off benefits, but they are delayed since military discoveries are usually withheld from the civilian sector for decades.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Millions of Americans imagine they can spend 36% more per year than they earn and get away with it indefinitely by borrowing on their credit cards. No wonder they can’t see any problem with the USA importing 36% more than it exports, or that the polar ice caps lose 4.2% per decade more than the snow replaces.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Money is a way of convincing people to accept less than their fair share without complaining.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Money is like a complicated board game where the players use politics to continually change the rules to their advantage. The goal of the game is to cheat — to find a way to earn money without giving anything of value in return, and to a lesser extent, to stop others from cheating.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Money is like blood. It does little good pooling in a few organs; it has to circulate throughout the entire body.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Most Americans have a rather childish view of taxation. They think of it as a form of piracy. I see it as convenient one-stop shopping for a huge omnibus of services including police, fire, water, sewer, snow removal, defence, medical care, navigation, product safety, food and restaurant inspection, emergency rescue, combating forest fires, environmental protection, fisheries protection… It would be impossible to hire private contractors to do all this for me. The big advantage over a private scheme is I periodically have a vote I can use to vote out all the top CEOs at once if I am not happy with the deal I am getting. In contrast, corporations are dictatorships and the employees and customers have no power whatsoever over the management, other that boycott.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Most commonly, people get rich by conning others into giving generously to them, while giving almost nothing of value in return. It seems so odd that people do this to gain respect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Most countries try to go easier with taxes on those who have less. In contrast, Americans believe taxes should be used to transfer wealth from the poor to the super rich to reward them for being rich, and to stimulate them to consider creating jobs. The wealthy are rewarded for being rich enough to create jobs not for actually creating them. The rich enjoy all manner of tax loopholes. For example, those with mortgages (even multimillion dollar mortgages) get to deduct them. Those who rent, who can’t afford to buy a home, get no corresponding housing deduction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Most of the evil in the world is a side effect the mad pursuit of money by a small group of selfish, ruthless, short-sighted elite psychopaths. The public don’t seem to appreciate how concentrated the source of evil is. They protest if the evils were an abstract ether, rather than the concrete behaviour of a few identifiable bastards like the Koch brothers and Dick Cheney. ~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Most of the population is constrained to always pick the cheapest option. This leads them to select options that are unwise in the long term or that damage the environment. I suspect if wealth were distributed more evenly that people would take factors other than cost into consideration when making decisions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Most of the world’s petroleum transactions are done in US dollars. Another way of putting that is the global petrodollar is the US dollar. This bestows great benefit on the USA. Among other things, it can effectively tax everyone in the world without their consent by printing money and causing inflation. Surprisingly often, the USA has attacked countries that hinted they would accept some other currency than American for petroleum transactions, most recently Libya. The world is getting impatient with the US dollar since financial finagling in the USA is making the dollar unstable and the USA is threatening to renege on its debts. I don’t know how much longer this free ride will last. Russia, the European Union and Africa are all too big to invade. Perhaps some new artificial Petrodollar can be invented, based on a bundle of currencies, that will be more stable than any single currency. Americans have abused the privilege with effective counterfeiting Petrodollars by printing US dollars. They don’t deserve to keep it exclusively.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Motorcycles are designed to be far noisier than they need to be to appeal to the buyers. Because of the way the capitalist system works, the desires of those who have to listen to the motorcycles are immaterial.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Mott’s garden cocktail puts out an ad that states “People who don’t like garden cocktails probably have not tried Mott’s garden cocktail.“ It sounds like they are claiming that even people who don’t like garden cocktails will like Mott’s, but they are not. They are just stating the obvious, that people who don’t like garden cocktails won’t likely try many brands of them, including Mott’s.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

My dad did not gamble, but he was interested in the mathematics and psychology of horse racing. He figured that since people did not pick their horses rationally, there should be some way of exploiting that. He kept records and discovered that the fifth rated horse on average did better than the odds. He also discovered this effect disappeared after a couple of years, presumably because others noticed too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

My dad told me that all casino games were rigged against the player so that he had no chance over the long run. He suggested the only strategy that had any chance of coming out ahead was to make one bet in your lifetime, e.g. bet on black at roulette. I studied probability and statistics at university and came to understand the math behind his advice. When I was taken to a casino, I decided to try the strategy. I put a nickel in a slot machine, won 15 cents and have not gambled since. I am one of the very few people in history who tripled his money in lifetime gambling at casinos.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

My packet of Stash tea says the best before date is 01122013A#5. Why do they disguise it as a Klingon stardate? Why do they want me to drink out of date tea?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Nationwide Insurance have some of the most annoying commercials on TV. In one, the spokesperson coughs up phlegm, but they are honest, after a fashion. They promise to be proactive which from the context appears to mean they will send you lots of junk mail.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Nature’s Path makes a line of organic breakfast cereals. The catch is they only fill the boxes half full. Why? It is not to “allow for setting”. Their competitor, Dorset, manages to fill its boxes almost to the brim. It is to deceive their customers into thinking they are getting twice as much as they actually are, which helps justify the high price. Yet surely they can deceive their customers only once. I won’t buy them again. I remember for years when companies have cheated me. Nature’s Path is following a suicidal policy because a breakfast cereal company relies on repeat sales. Perhaps we should demand a clear window on the side of the box so you can see just how full it is. Perhaps consumer protection should demand that boxes be at least 90% full. This second problem with this sort of cheating is environmental. Nature’s Path is using twice as much packaging as necessary. In the meantime, turn the box upside down before you buy. If you hear a clunk as the cereal falls the empty bottom of the box, try another brand.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Nearly all Americans agree it is not a Good Thing™ that America imports over a billion dollars of foreign oil every day.

• Economists are concerned about all that money leaving the country, ruining the balance of trade.
• Military men are concerned about dependence on unfriendly countries.
• Environmentalists are concerned about theCO₂ emissions from burning all that oil.

But oddly almost nobody is willing to do anything to reduce those imports. What could be done?

• Tell the car manufacturers they must up fuel efficiency.
• Sales tax on new fuel-inefficient cars.
• Gas tax.
• Fuel oil tax.
• Cap and Trade tax.
• Subsidies for home insulation.
• Subsidies for public transport.
• Subsidies for solar, wind, geothermal etc. conversion.
• Penalties for driving cars with fewer passengers than they can hold and benefits for those who car pool.
• Benefits (e.g. a cup of coffee) for riding your bike to work.
• Lotteries. You acquire tickets with activities to reduce oil consumption.
• The option the oil companies push is deep-water offshore drilling in the USA, however, it would provide only 2 or 3 years worth of relief, with the possibility of another BP-like spill.
• Check any environmental site. They have thousands of ideas.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Nestleé and Altria/Kraft (two large unscrupulous food companies) have put all their eggs in one basket by using a single common brand name on a bewildering array of products. The first time there is a contaminated food recall of any product, the entire product line will crash, at least temporarily.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

No other communal animal but man has a social structure that directs a slice of the resource pie 10,000+ times bigger than usual to each pack leader.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

No state that attempted to set up a Communist economic system had the computer power necessary to centrally manage all production and consumption. Had Marx been born in 1918 instead of 1818, the fate of Communism might have been much different.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Nobody complains louder than the Americans about having to pay taxes, even though their taxes are lower than other developed nations. The reason is they get so little in return for the taxes they do pay. The average person still has to buy his own health care, twice what people pay for public insurance in other countries, and even that produces outcomes on par with Cuba. Intractable attitudes towards guns and drugs mean law enforcement is hamstrung at controlling crime. Entrenched attitudes towards coddling industry means the rivers and lakes are polluted and corporations cheat and rip their customers off. The oversized military, bigger than all other militaries put together, leaves precious little to pay for everything else.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Nobody earns a billion dollars. They steal it. They extort it. They con for it. They gamble for it. They cheat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

North America imports $2,517 billion dollars each year and exports $1,854 billion. Everybody knows what happens when you spend $2,517 each month, but only make $1,854 and put the $663 difference on your Visa card. Governments are not immune to compound interest and interest rake hikes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Note how commercials are almost always either deceptive, dissembling or outright lies. Think what these corporations would try without any regulation at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Obama wants to bail out people whose house price has dropped below the outstanding mortgage. These people are certainly unfortunate but at least they own a home. Why should people who don’t even own a home dip into their pockets to help out those more fortunate.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Obviously, if you want higher employment:

• You must hire more people.
• You must lay off fewer people.
• You must get money circulating rather than sitting in bank accounts.
• You must get money circulating at home rather than fleeing overseas.

Oddly, Republican have convinced themselves, or perhaps pretend to have convinced themselves, the exact opposite is true.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

On 1637-02-02, in the Netherlands, the speculation bubble in tulips burst. Overnight, bulbs that the day before sold for more than houses became unsaleable. This bit of history should be a lesson to anyone tempted to buy some essentially worthless thing on the hopes somebody else will soon pay more for it. Yet people fall for this con with stocks all the time, to this day.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

On the surface, an advertisement merely tries to persuade you to buy a particular product, but underneath is a message about values:

• Consumption is good.
• The products you already own are unfashionable and hence undesirable.
• The suffering of others is the best entertainment.
• The way to gain status is through extravagant spending.
• The best way to show your love is through expensive, useless gifts.
• Create relationships with technological objects instead of people. This creates a void that can be filled by more shopping.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Once a feudal system is in place, it is very hard to get rid of it. It requires killing off the nobility and in a massive armed rebellion. Americans are wimps when it comes to handing over their wealth and power to a landed, inherited-money neo-aristocratic elite. The main problem is they worship the their oppressors. The other problem is the elite control the media and fill the heads of the people with utter nonsense. Americans should have a look at what life in Brazil is like. That is where they are headed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One bizarre side effects of our monetary system is the fewer children a couple has, the bigger the house they live in.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One common form of deceptive advertising is to portray a competitor’s product as ludicrously inept. Since they never actually name the competitor, they can smear all their competitors with these outrageous lies. When a corporation brazenly lies to you like that, does it makes sense to trust anything else they say?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the goofiest ideas I have heard for creating jobs is to give tax breaks to the wealthiest citizens. Instead of creating jobs the wealthy could do many other things with the windfall:

• salt it away in the bank.
• invest it in the Chinese stock market.
• Go on a vacation to Paris.

Instead why not do what the Canadian governments do, pay people to create jobs. I used to hire all kinds of ”unemployable” people, and the government would subsidise half their salaries. After I had trained them, nearly all of them went on to even higher paying jobs. This is clearly a much more efficient way to create jobs.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the ironic things about insurance, is the people who can afford it are the ones who least need it. They are the most capable of absorbing unexpected expenses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the least attractive features of money is it lets a cretin like George W. Bush become the caretaker of a Cézanne or a Monet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the major backward steps on the road to civilisation was the corporation, a conspiracy dedicated to profit at the expense of every other value. Its function is to make nobody feel responsible for wicked deeds done in the name of profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the more absurd lies the banks are pushing lately is that it is wise to borrow money then put it in a savings account. Obviously, the bank has to pay less interest on savings accounts than it charges for loans, otherwise it would go out of business.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the most baffling thing about the Americans in the way even the poorest people seem more concerned with coddling the ultra rich than they are looking out for their own interests. One possible explanation is they have bought into a lie sold them by the ultra rich, that they too will be fabulously wealthy any day now, so they had better get busy feathering their nest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the most improbable cons of all time was the Republican party convincing Americans that capitalism and Christianity were one in the same. Capitalism requires you to be selfish. It teaches you are not your brother’s keeper. It teaches any action is acceptable so long as it is profitable. It requires you to destroy your competition. About the only place capitalism and Christianity coincide is in their disdain for long term consequences. “Take no thought for the morrow”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the nice things about commerce is every transaction is in a sense win-win. If the seller did not want the money more than the object sold, and the buyer did not want the object more than the money, the transaction would never take place.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the odd things about a recession, is that the total amount of money in all the bank accounts is the same as before the recession started. If governments print money to restart the economy, there is even more!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the oddest extravagances governments indulge in is building stadiums for professional sports teams that pay players hundreds of millions of dollars. Surely these teams can afford to build their own. Why spend on luxuries when so many necessities go begging? Why should people who cannot afford to, or who have no interest in, attending live sports events subsidise those who can afford to spend hundreds of dollars per game?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the reasons the American recession is dragging on so long is the wealthiest 2% want it to. They have ordered the Republican to block any measure that might help end it. Why?

• During the recession, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer faster than ever.
• When jobs are scarce, workers are willing to take less pay and fewer benefits and tolerate poorer worker safety.
• The recession is good cover for exporting jobs overseas where wages are lower.
• In a recession, it is easy to buy up the competition for pennies on the dollar.
• They want the public to blame the Democrats for the slow recovery, install the Republicans, who will then let them dictate laws in their favour.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the side effects of the way our monetary system works is its instability, i.e. the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This continues until the inequity becomes so great, the poor rise up and kill the rich. Republicans think this is a desirable feature. I do not.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the strangest notions of western jurisprudence is that any wrongdoing can be erased by either a payment of money or by locking the wrongdoer in a cage. Yet no conceivable punishment will restore a rainforest. The only sensible plan is to block the wrongdoing in the first place.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One of the thing that really impresses me about the economy, is that even if the government secretly prints money, or expands the money supply through covert means such as by diddling the bank regulations, the public seems to just know, and there is a precisely corresponding inflation. The recent collapse of the American dollar is a direct result of the USA printing money rather than borrowing, cutting spending or increasing taxes to pay its bills.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One problem with commerce is businesses that cheat, lie and steal have a competitive edge and thus drive out the honest businesses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One reason Obama is reluctant to wind down the Afghan and Iraq wars is that the returning soldiers will be unemployed. Here is a suggested. Take the money saved from the wars, and offer American business to pay 50% of the wages of each new job they create. America will lose the military jobs but create at least three times as many civilian ones, which will have much better spin offs since the spending will be in the USA rather than the middle east.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One silliest notions the Republican have sold the American public is that rich people create jobs and that giving them money is all you need to do to encourage them to create jobs. How do you know this is nonsense?

• The US government has been throwing money at rich people ever since Reagan, yet employment is worse than ever. It simply does not work.
• Read the business magazines. The celebrated ones are those who reduced costs (by laying off the most people). The jab of CEO is about 50% dreaming up ways to fire people, in other words, not create jobs.
• A CEO could be sued by his stockholders for creating jobs. He is legally obligated to create them only under duress of outstanding orders.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One thing that drives me nuts about capitalism is that pumpkin cookies contain no pumpkin, Belgian chocolate is made in Canada, Canadian bacon is made in the USA, McDonald’s apple pie contains neither apples nor pie, frozen apple juice contains no apple juice and Canadian souvenirs are made in China.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One way of looking at the Israeli-Palestinian problem is as an huge real estate fraud, far bigger than any of Bernie Madoff’s schemes. In 1948, the Jews forged God’s signature to a deed to Palestine, then proceeded to push the Palestinians off their property they had occupied for centuries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

One way to judge a society is to ignore the money. Just look at what the people are doing through the eyes of a child. Are they sitting around doing nothing? teaching? learning? repairing? building luxury homes and yachts? sitting in fancy offices talking on the phone? overeating? growing food? rebuilding forests? killing people? healing people? shuffling papers?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Orajel brazenly lies in its commercials that the product will instantly stop all the pain of a throbbing toothache. At best it will ameliorate it by 20%.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Originally there was no private property. Everyone would graze their animals on the same common plot of land. There was a strong temptation to overgraze. If you didn’t, somebody else would. This caused a race to ecological collapse. Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of private property to solve this tragedy of the commons. Private properly allotted a bit of land to each person. People then each had motivation not to overgraze. They directly benefited from all their efforts at conservation and land improvement.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Originally, the complaint with the rich was envy and the way the rich used dishonest, immoral and illegal techniques to accumulate wealth. However, it is becoming more their ecologically-destructive conspicuous-consumption lifestyle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Other individuals have no right to do things that harm my health. Why should corporations be permitted to get away with them?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Our ancestors created corporations to produce wealth for mankind. They have since waxed so powerful that instead of serving mankind, mankind serves them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Over many decades, most Americans will contribute a substantial percentage of their income to social security to save for their old age. When they get old enough to start drawing on that fund, Republicans treat them like deadbeats. But but, it is their money! Republican are pirates. They plan to abscond with these funds to pay for massive tax cuts for billionaires and pointless wars.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Ownership is a concept in a complicated game whose social rules define who is allowed to use which objects. It is not a feature of the physical universe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

PennyTalk fraudulently advertises on TV you can dial long distance to India for $0.02 a minute. If you read the fine print, you discover there is a $0.49 connection fee per call. So a 5 minute call will actually cost you $0.59 or $0.12 cents a minute.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

People raised in poverty speak a poverty dialect. This dialect marks them as from the poverty class and keeps them from getting decent jobs. They know perfectly well how to speak standard English, but cling to this familiar millstone dialect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

People should be paid roughly commensurate to how valuable the goods and services they provide. By that reasoning, bankers should be one of the lowest paid professions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

People who have never been unemployed are not qualified to pontificate on the causes of unemployed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

People who vote Republican remind me of the gullible Charlie Brown who over and over trusts Lucy van Pelt not to yank the football away at the last second. The Republicans say, give your money to the rich and you will become rich beyond your wildest dreams. It has never worked. The rich just keep the money. It is like those TV evangelist con men that promise fabulous prosperity if only you give them great hunks of cash first. All you get is some lame green prosperity handkerchief.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Percentage of the word’s population comprised of Americans: 5%.
Percentage of the world’s resources consumed by Americans: 30%.
America has military bases in 38 foreign countries.
That pattern sounds familiar. Ancient Rome persuaded its conquered territories to send it tribute to allow it to bask in fabled luxury. Americans, like Romans, imagine this tribute comes purely as homage to their unique wonderfulness.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Playing the Money Game

The goal of the money game is to accumulate as much money as possible. You do this by buying low and selling high. In other words you try to con others into accepting a small favour from you in return for a big favour from them. Ideally, it is a win-win game when both partners exchange things they don’t want for things they do, but more commonly it is a con game where the seller tries to trick the buyer into thinking what he has to offer (including labour) is more valuable than it is, and the buyer tries to convince the seller it is less valuable than it is. Money is an inherently dishonest game, but a fair one when the two partners interacting are peers. It becomes unfair when one partner is poor and the other exceedingly rich, or even worse, a corporation with hundreds of thousands of times the power of an individual.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Politicians are rightfully concerned about how to finance old age pensions now that people are living longer than ever. Some of the solutions suggested are just plain silly:

• Stop paying pensions. You can’t just let people starve to death. If you stop paying pensions, you have to pay welfare. Pensions are a contract with the people. Surely the courts would find such a measure would be a breach of contract if not theft.
• Tell people to buy their own private pensions. You can only phase that in over many decades. The pensions will be even more expensive, since they have to make a profit. Even if you get the expense off government books, the people are still worse off. Further, self-directed, company and private pensions often go bust, leaving the pensioners with nothing. The government will have to support them anyway. If there are to be private pensions, they need to be insured, much the way bank deposit are. They have to be made mandatory, otherwise many people will reach old age without a pension. They not going to voluntarily starve to death. The real point of enforced private pensions is to hand the public sheep over to the Wall Street/Bay Street wolves for fleecing.
• Up the retirement age. This one does makes some sense. People used to drop dead the day after retirement. Today many are eager to work for a decade or two more. However, some people are burnt out by 65. We should not force them to keep slogging.

I think the solution is simply to up the required contributions to cover the extended retirement period and inflation. The contributions should be constantly adjusted so that one generation is not sponging off another.

The other solution is to let people die when they want to rather than forcing extremely expensive, painful and pointless medical procedures on them. We spend over half our lifetime health care budget in the last year. Even a marginal savings in the last year could give a huge boost to the pension budget.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Politicians like to play word games with what a tax is. Paul Ryan wants seniors to come up with an additional $6000 each per year to pay for their medical care (which they already paid for by government payroll deductions over their entire life). That is not a tax according to the Republicans. The Republicans demanded Obama extend the period of the Bush tax cuts for the uber wealthy. Failing to do that would count as a tax increase according to the Republicans. What matters is how much more or less money you pay than you used to because of government actions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Pretty well everyone agrees corporations have too much power. There are two ways I can see to reign them in:

• Electing politicians willing to regulate their behaviour.
• Non-co-operation. Simply refuse to buy their products wherever possible and refuse to work for them.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Prides of lions rarely grow beyond fifty members. Even the leader of a superpride takes only somewhat more of the pie than the other lions, but not millions of times more the way the elites in human civilisations do. The very idea is ludicrous. It would be impossible for a lion to consume a million shares of meat. The abstraction of money makes this possible for humans. Money hides the fact that elite individuals are taking a share as large as that of an entire city of a million people. If their greed were expressed in meat, lion-style, they would have a pile of rotting carcasses spreading for blocks around their homes. Money also allows a very small number of people to concentrate nearly all the decision making for a society.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Proctor & Gamble’s Dawn fraudulently advertises they donate $1 for every bottle to dishwashing detergent sold to help clean wildlife damaged by oil spills. This is a lie. In the ultra-fine print they tell you they donate only if you go to a website and negotiate a gauntlet designed to discourage you, including browser specific html, an eyesight test and a typing test. Finally, they confess in the fine print that they will donate no more that $500,000 no matter how many bottles they sell. Granted, their offer did seem too good to be true. This is really sick, ripping off animals hurt by the BP oil spill.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Proctor Silex, like other manufacturers of small appliances, company his discovered it can make the most money by having its kettles wear out quickly or have not-immediately-obvious but fatal design flaws so the customer discards the kettle early to try a different model. This is good for the Proctor Silex shareholders, bad for the environment, and infuriating for me, the consumer. This is the one feature of capitalism I find intolerable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Psychology tells us that someone living on $300.00 USD a month will appreciate $100.00 USD a lot more than a capitalist making $30,000.00 USD a month. Even doubling the capitalist’s income has almost no effect on his happiness or well-being. Yet capitalism tells us that is far more important for a society to see that the capitalist gets the $100.00 USD .
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Quite often TV ads dissemble rather than outright lie. It can be a fun game to look carefully at the words to determine both what they legally mean (usually nothing) and what the advertiser is trying to trick you into thinking they mean.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Recall France in 1789. The elites had become outrageously rich and decadent. They competed to waste with the greatest imagination and extravagance. Bit by bit, they had ground the people into such poverty that they could not even afford bread. Suddenly something snapped. Rivers of blood flowed and nearly every noble or member of the elite was guillotined. Mathematicians model such events with catastrophe theory. It amounts to this. When you push people too far, something snaps, and they will not back off, even when you stop oppressing them. Today, elite Americans are snatching bread from the mouths of the world’s poor to feed it to their SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle)s and Hummers, fermented as ethanol. I think they are pushing it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Recessions don’t require an objective cause. They happen without a war, natural disaster, crop failure, or shortage of crucial materials. This suggests they are a primarily psychological problem and the remedy will be found in the psychology of large groups. I suspect the only way to tame them will be to give up the legal freedom to behave irrationally with money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Religions tend to focus on petty thou shalt nots. This allows believers to ignore the two big issues of morality — what do you do with your time, and what you do you do with your wealth to contribute to your planet?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republican cheek is astounding. They are calling for the rich to pay lower tax rates than everyone else. The Democrats are calling for them to pay the same. Republicans claim the Democrats are waging class warfare. It is obviously the reverse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans are beginning to worry about the giant deficits and debt. They want to reduce the size of government. However, this necessarily means reducing spending. The most logical place to start is the military, which in 2010 will spend $693 billion. This is the biggest slice of the pie. The USA spends more than the rest of the world put together, so you could argue it is where the most fat is. However, Republicans are funded by the war lobby, so they want to increase not decrease military spending. Subsidies to the meat and corn industries are another massive expenditure that could be cut. Republicans would never allow that since they are funded by that lobby too. If they won’t touch any of the big expenditures, they can’t make any meaningful cuts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans are funny. They imagine the government has the right to refuse to pay out pensions. It can no more do that than a life insurance company can take your payments for your whole life then refuse to pay out when you die. Republicans think of those who accept pensions as deadbeats. Those payments are no more handouts than bank withdrawals. Republicans also think of those on disability pension as deadbeats. Through years of taxes, those people paid the insurance premiums during the years before they became disabled. They are no more deadbeats than those who live off private disability pensions. Republicans think of the government only as a group of pirates. They forget completely the government role of arranging group purchases of goods and services. If Republicans gain control of the government and cut all government services except those close to the heart of the rich such as warmaking and police protection, they are sadly mistaken if they imagine people put up with continuing to pay taxes. People grudgingly pay taxes because they want the services, not out of some sort of patriotic altruism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans are obsessive about coddling the wealthiest 2% of people. They are concerned the need careful handling or they will stop trying to make even more money by investing. This makes no sense to me for the following reasons:

• Surely the very richest people are incredibly, perhaps even excessively motivated, or how else could have found themselves in the top 2%.
• Giving rich people even more money is like giving obese people even more whipped cream. It will satiate desire not stimulate hunger.
• The wealthy are so rich that extra money would have no detectable effect on their lifestyle. Even a tiny bit extra for the middle or lower class can make the difference of life and death. There is no point is directing such a most of the total wealth to the wealthy. They can’t even tell the difference.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans are so greedy, they sentence a diabetic to death rather than help provide insulin. That sort of outrageous greed should be a capital crime.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans are such liars! The Ryan plan to reduce the deficit does not even claim to bring it under control for 70 years (in other words, it does nothing to reduce the deficit, let alone the national debt.) What it does instead is take money from the poor, disabled and elderly and give it to millionaires. There are no savings, just reverse wealth transfer to those who need it least.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans argue that corporations should not need to pay income tax, because they just pass them on as increased prices. Consider General Electric which exploits loopholes to pay no income tax at all. Let’s say one of their customers buys 100 light bulbs a year while another buys 5. The government provides services such as water, roads and recycling to GE to help manufacture those light bulbs. Why should not the customer who uses 100 bulbs indirectly pay more for that government support than the customer who uses only 5? Without corporate income tax, the customer who buys 100 gets a free ride from the government. Though Republicans would never admit this, they want corporations to sponge off society by receiving government services without having to pay for them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans argue that their policies of firing government workers, taxing the poor, giving tax breaks to the rich, and tossing out all environmental and financial oversight should be followed to fix the recession and reduce unemployment. Yet these are the very policies that created the mess in the first place. Why does anyone take them seriously? Why don’t Americans laugh out loud when they make such preposterous claims?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans assert the absurdity that infrastructure spending does not create jobs. Where does the money go? to buy concrete and steel and hire people to assemble it. The concrete company has to hire workers to make the cement. The steel company has to hire workers to make steel. How could infrastructure spending possibly not create jobs?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans call for the rich to pay lower tax rates than everyone else, and be given loopholes so they don’t have to pay any tax at all if they don’t feel like it. I could understand some rich bastard possibly voting Republican (ignoring all the other reasons to avoid them), but nobody else should be stupid enough to vote against their self interest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans claim American cannot afford healthcare for all its citizens. How peculiar! America claims to be the richest country on earth, but they cannot afford this? Every other developed nation manages to afford it. Further other countries spend about half the money that Americans do. Further, even for the gold-plated prices Americans pay, they rank #42, on par with impoverished Cuba. So what are the Republicans really up to:

• Helping the health industry make more money for doing less work to pay back the industry that bribes them both legally and illegally.
• Pissing on the poor.
• Refusing to save money on military spending or fund government programs by taxing corporations as billionaires. Most big corporations pay negative taxes. The beneficiaries of the status quo bribe the Republicans both legally and illegally to keep thing the way they are.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans claim that taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich creates jobs. This is a bald-faced lie. Bush did this in spades and created massive unemployment. Reagan tried it and it did not work. If you think about it, it is obvious why this does not work. When poor people have money, they spend it on groceries, clothes, entertainment, furniture, electronics etc. This automatically creates jobs since it requires people to manufacture, ship and sell these goods. Rich people do these things too, but they also do things with their money that don’t create any jobs such as store it in an offshore bank, invest it in gold, buy paintings and antiques, speculate on the stock market, speculate in real estate, buy foreign luxury goods, take foreign holidays, invest overseas…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans dream of a coming golden age of self reliance where citizen sink or swim purely on their own merit where the government does not interfere with the natural right of the rich to exploit the poor. They forget we already attained this dream in the days of Dickens, and it is even today available for the taking in any third world country.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans favour legislation to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. I wonder if any of them have ever visited Latin American so they could see where such a policy leads.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans usually behave as if they don’t believe anything has value other than as the dollar value someone has attached to it. Why then don’t they lobby for the right to buy and sell body parts for transplant, babies and children? Why don’t they see this as unholy interference with commerce?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans want the taxpayers to foot the bill for oil spills, chemical spills, asbestos poisoning and new drugs that kill rather than cure. This sounds suspiciously like big government socialism for corporations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans worry endlessly that any service to the poor will destroy their initiative. Yet, oddly, they have no fear whatsoever of destroying the initiative of the rich with benefits thousands of times larger.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans wring their hands at the billions paid out in government pensions and social security. This is like a bank wringing its hands when a customer makes a withdrawal. These deadbeats are just an entitled to collect as if they had paid into a private pension plan because they paid into the fund every pay day over their lifetime. Republicans like to imagine the social security fund is theirs to spend on submarines or their buddies on wall street if they so pleased.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Republicans wring their hands at the cost of public health care. What matters is how much cheaper it is than private health care. It replaces private health care. It is not an additional expense.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Researchers have discovered that lemurs don’t like to gamble. When given the choice of a safe single food pellet reward, or a risky random reward, most often nothing, but sometimes a dozen pellets, the lemurs choose the reliable single pellet. This behaviour persisted even when the odds were adjusted, unlike casino gambling, so that the lemurs received more total food pellets with the risky choice. The researchers considered their behaviour irrational. I disagree. To a lemur, a reliable source of steady nutrition as far more valuable than a bounteous but unreliable one. A large supply of food pellets may spoil or be stolen. It has to be stored and guarded. A lemur must estimate the time to another jackpot to know how to ration the previous jackpot. The human researchers have completely disconnected food pellets from nutrition. They see them only as counters is a mindless game of marbles where the goal is to acquire as many food pellets as possible. Most rich humans play the money game the same way that they played marbles as a child. The money has little purpose other than as a way of keeping score and bragging about skill.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Restaurants in a big city are an example of free market capitalism at its best. Restaurants compete on price, service, variety, uniqueness — creating an abundance of excellent and varied choices. Monsanto is capitalism at its worst. Three documentaries
The Future Of Food,
The World According To Monsanto and Food Inc. just scratch the surface of their evil deeds. They do things like patent other people’s seeds then stop them from using them. They stole Iraq’s entire seed bank of heat tolerant crops. They have taken extreme risks with genetically modified foods cavalierly introducing weird genes into the wild, then claiming ownership of any organism they infect. They even sue people whose seed stocks Monsanto has contaminated. They use their immense size and wealth to take what they want from whomever they please. Why the huge difference in the fruits of capitalism? Monsanto was able to eliminate the competition with mergers, acquisitions, infiltrating the government and buying off politicians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Rich people are essentially those without conscience who decide every action by which makes the most money, in other words, mostly pirates.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Rich people flail themselves to make enough money to afford unlimited quantities of the most delicious foods and every conceivable labour-saving appliance. The result is they become fat, and then fail themselves for that.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Right wingers like to rail against the lack of initiative in the poor, yet they tax those on welfare at over 100%. If a welfare recipient manages $100 in sales with a small home business, they get $100 deducted from their dole. Since they cannot deduct any business expenses, they always lose money! I asked a local politician why this disincentive, he said almost nobody on welfare attempts to run a business, so it doesn’t matter. With the game so rigged against them, no wonder!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Roughly 1/6 of the people on earth live on less than a dollar a day. Roughly 1/3 live on less than two dollars a day. This was not always so. This would not happen if we in the west did not take unfair advantage of those in the third world. We exploit the third world primarily by propping up (aka bribing) dictators who are friendly to western businesses, but do nothing for their own people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Screw rebates!

• You pay extra sales tax.
• You have to pay postage and waste time applying for them.
• 90% of the time the vendor weasels out of paying the rebate on some technicality.
• Rebate program overhead costs the vendor, who passes it on in the price.

Just lower the G.D. price!

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Societies always collapse for environmental reasons. It may look superficially that the cause was an economic problem, but if you look closely, you will see an environmental problem precipitated the economic one. For details, read Jared Diamond’s  Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed .
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Society works because most people contribute more than they take. Republicans find this infuriating. They believe the wealthy should be exempt.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Some simple mathematics explains homelessness. If you have enough housing for 95% of the population, then you will have 100 - 95 = 5% homelessness. The poorest, sickest and least capable will largely form that 5%. Conservatives will lie to you that the problem is the homeless are losers and nothing can be or should be done about it. The actual problem is there is not enough housing to go around. The solution is more affordable housing. The formula also applies after a major earthquake when you have only enough remaining housing for 30% of the people and 70% homelessness. The solution is the same too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Taxes have several functions:

• Fairly bill the public for the various services the government provides for them, such as roads, sewers, water, schools, medical care, defence, air traffic control, meat inspection…
• Stabilise the wealth gap. Without something to compensate, capitalism naturally widens the wealth gap. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
• Encourage people to do things that benefit the public good, e.g. conserve fuel.
• Discourage people from doing things that harm the public good, e.g. pollute.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Teabaggers claim lower taxes will bring more freedom. Each family’s share of the US national debt is about $170,000. If you had that much credit card debt, reducing your payments would hardly be the road to financial freedom.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Telus.ca advertises you should buy its HTC (High Tech Computer corporation) Desire cell phone because its is much faster than the competition. In the ad, they take it out for a blazing spin where it appears to outperform a desktop computer with dual 3 GHz processors. My eyes popped at this amazing advance in computer technology. The next time the ad was aired, I noticed a disclaimer in the fine print, that the demonstration was a simulation. The phone only has a pedestrian 1 GHz snapdragon processor, no faster than any of the competition. The entire ad is a lie.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Afghan war costs $107 billion a year (over $1 trillion a decade). Nobody has ever offered a single reason why this war benefits the USA. The USA spends more on its military that all other countries put together. Yet Republicans would rather eliminate medicare, which seniors would then have to buy themselves anyway, rather that cut a penny from the bloated military budgets.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The American economy is much more vulnerable than anyone will admit publicly. Consider that America has borrowed trillions to finance deficits for two lengthy wars, homeland security and a major bank bailout. Consider that the free ride its currency enjoyed as the global petrodollar is coming to an end. Consider that US corporations have outsourced nearly all manufacturing jobs, and are working hard on exporting the remainder. Consider that corrupt politicians on both sides of the aisle worked hard to bankrupt its citizens with exploding health care costs. The medical system is so focused on profit it charges twice what any other country does, and provides outcomes as measured by IMR (Infant Mortality Rate) that rival Cuba’s, 42nd in the world. Consider that there are only feeble new regulations to prevent a repeat of the banking collapse that triggered the current recession. The price of gold has climbed to new heights which reflects a lack of confidence in the US dollar. The US now has two technologically and economically robust competitors: China and the European Union. Much like the British in the sunset of the empire, out of patriotic blindness, Americans love to pretend that nothing has changed and the USA is still the one and only superpower.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The American middle class remind me of an abused wife who blames herself for the exploitive behaviour of her abusive husband. The middle class imagine that if they give ever bigger tax breaks to the super wealthy to transfer an ever greater slice of the wealth pie to the top 2%, then the wealthy will finally take pity and create more jobs. Fat chance!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The analysis by the Pew Research Center, found that from 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell 66 percent among Hispanic households and 53 percent among black households, compared with a 16 percent decline among White Households. And of course the 1% most wealthy people’s income has increased 400% since 1979. Basically the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Republicans see this as a Good Thing™ caused by the superior virtue and worthiness of the wealthy and laziness of the poor. I see this as sign the rich have rigged the money game in their favour. There are no tax loopholes for the middle class. Nearly all the subsidies go to people who already have a million bucks in the bank, to people with the money to buy influence with politicians.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Anastasi created the tallest buildings in the USA prior to the arrival of the Europeans. They built a magnificent city out in a desert. They were doing well, until they were hit with a 50-year drought. Then the people became extremely angry with the politicians for failing to make it rain and fomented social unrest that made matters worse. This reminds me a bit of Americans blaming their government for failing to create jobs in the private sector. If the government tries to push the private sector to create jobs, or help the private sector to create jobs, the people blame big government for interference with private enterprise. When the government creates jobs in the public sector, the people blame them for spending money. Both civilisations suffer from unrealistic expectations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The ancient Romans built roads and aqueducts that are still working to this day, 2000 years later. Very little we moderns build lasts even 100 years. Why? We have access to all the technology the Romans used. We choose instead to ensure little we build will be of any use to posterity. Why? I can think of two reasons:

• We believe the future will be so different from now, that any sewer or subway tube we might build will be of any use.
• We are selfish and spiteful. We don’t care about anyone but ourselves. We don’t want anyone but us to benefit from our labours, not even our grandchildren. I think this is the more likely explanation given the way we are determinedly leaving a wasted planet to our grandchildren by refusing any constraint at all to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming or accepting any inconvenience as all to avoid poisoning the oceans.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The average advertisement is almost completely deception, including misleading wording (lose up to 40 pounds, guaranteed!, if you order in the next 5 minutes, this $200 value free with your order, best fuel efficiency in its class) and silly claims, e.g. chewing a certain brand of gum will cause women to stick to me like magnets or that chopping vegetables with Vince’s Slap Chop will cure my depression and make me lose weight. At best these advertisement could result in a single sale. If ever an advertiser pulls one over on me, I never buy from that company again. Such a one-shot advertisement must have an extremely high cost per sale. It could even be less profitable than no advertisement at all. An honest ad that directs me to a product I truly need, and leads me to appreciate its unique charms is far more likely to result in repeat sales.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The basic Christian con goes like this, “If you want to be wealthy, give your money to me, a man of god. God will reward you.” The basic Republican con goes like this, “If you want to be wealthy, give your money to me, a billionaire. The unseen hand of the market will reward you.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The best way to stimulate the economy is to give the money to the people hurt most — namely those who have lost their jobs. They will use it to buy groceries, make their car and mortgage payments and get their kids teeth fixed. If you give it to the fat cats, they will just spend it on foreign luxuries or sock it away in Swiss bank accounts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Better Business Bureau cannot protect consumers as it claims to. It gets all its funding from the businesses it claims to oversee and none from consumers. Businesses could look on it as a racket, presuming if they join, the BBB (Better Business Bureau) will give them gentler treatment than if they did not. So ironically, BBB members may be less reputable than non-members because they plan to behave badly and thus they will need the under the table protection. To do its job properly, the BBB (or a new consumer protected agency) should be funded by the government, the way other law-enforcement is.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The big errors in stock market investing are:

• Buying something worthless.
• Paying too much for something valuable because of a current fad.
• Trusting someone else with your money.
• Buying and selling so frequently the commissions eat up any profit.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The big financial institution long ago moved away from Wall Street. The occupy demonstrations are symbolic, rather than designed to inconvenience.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The biggest depression the USA ever had was in 1929 when the wealth gap had grown to a chasm. The same thing has happened today. We have not had such a wide wealth gap since 1929. It is like a monopoly game that can’t continue because one player has all the wealth. The wealthy are using their immense power to fire people, pay them less, make them work longer hours, strip their union bargaining rights and outsource jobs overseas. Americans fail to notice that the rich are so spectacularly rich, not because the rich are so much more hard working and clever than others, but because the whole system is rigged in their favour. They get richer and richer even if they never get out of bed. The rich have convinced the general population that anything that levels the playing field is wicked.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The biggest problem with capitalism is not that it creates a monumental wealth divide, but that it rushes to satisfy any human desire, no matter how trivial, short sighted or destructive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The CEO of Goldman Sachs makes $50,000 per hour. Seriously, who is taking more than their fair share relative to what they contribute to the well being of the planet, him or a union worker?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The chief tool of the conjuror is distraction. The Republicans and Democrats (at the request of their corporate donors) are conspiring to use distraction to transfer wealth from the middle class to the uber rich. They distract by screaming “We must cut government spending now or the sky will fall”, then legislate massive tax cuts to the rich and massive tax increases to everyone else in the form increased medical costs with no net reduction in the public debt, nay with increased deficits — the very opposite of what they claimed to be doing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The commercials for the Snuggie don’t reveal that it essentially a hospital gown than cannot be closed at the back. They also don’t reveals that the garment has properties very like the one Dopey wore in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that makes it impossible to accomplish any task such as making a sandwich or pouring a cup of coffee while wearing it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The conventional wisdom is if you give a poor person some money, you will destroy his initiative. Yet the same conventional wisdom claims if you give millions of dollars to a rich person, it will stimulate him to create jobs. This naïve belief persists despite being proven over and over to be untrue. There are just too many other tempting things for the rich to do with their money. If you want the rich to create jobs, you must reward them if and only if they actually create jobs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The corporation was a strange invention. It is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for a group of investors and executives to rack up debts then not pay them back without penalty. Further, for example, it lets BP investors and executives deliberately cause a giant oil spill like Deepwater Horizon that kills people and wipes out an entire ecosystem without any personal penalties.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The cost of a stock has two values. What I call the actual value is the money it will actually pay back in dividends over time, discounted for the interest you demand you have to wait for most of it. Then there is the gambling value, the amount you could earn by buying then selling the stock later at a higher price. The actual value is much easier to compute than the gambling value. The problem is, during a recession, people grossly underestimate the gambling value. They presume it is negative, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy at least in the short term. Actually the stocks are undervalued. Sometimes they sell below actual value. Their gambling value is high. Conversely, in bullish times, people tend to overestimate the gambling value. Actually the stocks are overvalued. Their gambling value is low. The successful strategy is so simple, buy low, sell high, but nearly everyone does the reverse. They are stupid as a herd of cows, partly because of herd mentality and partly because of impatience and a childish need to get rich quick.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The current globalisation fad is bound to wane for four reasons.

1. It requires cheap oil to transport goods all over the planet. We have hit the Hubbert peak. As supplies shrink the price of oil will inevitably rise.
2. Transporting goods willy nilly all over the planet needlessly emits huge quantities of greenhouse gases.
3. Globalisation is a way of exploiting labour and using its economic hammer to discourage environmental and labour protection. Business has pushed so hard, they are in for an angry massive counter force.
4. Globalisation encourages extreme specialisation. If anything goes wrong, nations are in deep trouble because they have lost their ability to produce their own food and other basic necessities.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The current world economic system is very close to slavery. Some people do all the work. Others do all the consuming. In some ways, literal slavery was preferable today’s economic slavery, because the slave owners felt obligated to keep their human livestock in good health and to care for them their entire lives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The desire for money is the desire to take more than your fair share of the pie. In our hunter gather days, such people were chastised as pigs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The easiest way to start a fight among a group of children is to give them all a carrot but one a chocolate chip cookie. Capitalism is the economic theory that doing this is a Good Thing™.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The elites in the USA have decided they want their country to join the third world. The basic notion is, by making others poorer, removing all government services to others, dismantling environmental protection… they will be more prosperous, and then in their strange value system, they imagine they will be better off living surrounded by poverty, pestilence and a toxic waste dump like Mexico. You’d think it would be simpler and quicker just to move to a third world country. Further, you’d think they would at least try out this life before committing to it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The essence of the Republican policy is to help the wealthiest 1% exploit the rest of us. The only way they can get more than 1% of the vote comes from wishful thinking — the belief that real soon now™ I’ll be in the top 1%.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The essential philosophical difference between Democrats and Republicans is over what should be done for/to those unable to care for themselves. Democrats believe they are obligated to provide for such people. Republicans believe such people should be punished by be allowed to die. Even those Republicans opposed to the death penalty for murder believe it is appropriate for failing to earn sufficient income.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The essential problem with advertising is it lets corporations use lies and deception to convince the populate of things are blatantly untrue, and swamp any voices expressing the truth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Federal Reserve waited until two days before the wall street meltdown before acting. That should be cause for impeaching them and criminally prosecuting them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The financial reason for repealing DADT (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) is that 14,000 soldiers were booted out. They might as well have been fatalities. All that money invested in training them went down the drain. Yanking them out of their positions is just as disruptive as if they had been killed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The function of a CEO is cutting costs. He does this by introducing efficiencies, shutting down dropping unprofitable plants, figuring out how to get more done with fewer people, outsourcing jobs, paying workers less than the competition does, dropping unprofitable product lines, automating and computerising. In other words, his purpose in life is to kill jobs. It is thus naïve to rely on CEO s to create the nation’ jobs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The global financial system was not designed to be stable, merely to make money in the short term. One executive at AIG took down the company with risky decisions. The collapse of AIG almost took down the entire global financial system. The global financial system is too important to just leave it to grow wild like a blackberry bush.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The goal of a suburban home for every family is a unwise. It means paving over farms and forests. It means increasing the energy and greenhouse gas footprint of each family. It means tempting families, especially hoarders, to pack their extra space with useless junk. And finally tricking people into buying a house they cannot afford is just leading them to bankruptcy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The goal of capitalism is to give as little as possible to others and take as much as possible, always pressing your full advantage to squeeze others dry. Oddly, Christians claim this is compatible with the teachings of Jesus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The goal of modern capitalism is deception — to sell goods that look durable, but which soon break and never work properly. This way the consumer is forced to soon buy another defective replacement. The system penalises makers of quality goods with fewer sales. To fight back we need to sue the pants off manufacturers, for example, whose kettles are designed to scald and to tirelessly hassle vendors with warranty returns.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The governments of the USA and Canada are facing extreme pressure to cut costs. Oddly they both refuse to cut costs of optional wars like Afghanistan and Iraq. They won’t even try to cut the fraud from no-bid or cost-plus contracts. Granted this is to be expected because the politicians are on the take from the defence industry but it is idiotic just the same. Wars provide nothing for the future but holes in the ground. Expenditures on education, roads, railways, alternative energy, sewers, factories… pay dividends for decades to come.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The gullibility of the average American is beyond belief. Americans were paying twice what people in any other developed nation was paying for their health care. Now with the 2010-02 rate hikes, they will be paying 3.5 times what others pay. To cap it off, he imagines Americans are so idiotically patriotic that they insist they must be getting the best care on the planet when in actuality the USA is in 45^th place, two rungs below Cuba!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The important fact in the health care debate is that you spend 50% of your lifetime healthcare budget in your last year of life. Possible savings include:

• No more Hail Mary, painful, expensive procedures that can only hope to extend life by a few months.
• No more pushing terminal patients into treatments they don’t want.
• Many levels of care so that people can live as independently as possible as long as possible.
• Legalisephysician-assisted suicide with safeguards to prevent pressuring either way.
• Research into nursing care technology — machines to keep the bed comfortable and clean, help patients into the bath or to their feet, help patients dress and undress, deliver medications on time…

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The key to capitalism is competition. Americans worship at the state church of capitalism, yet they refuse to lift a finger to stop corporations from eliminating competition with mergers, acquisitions and lobbying congress for sweetheart laws and no-bid-contracts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Keynesian economists explain the way to flatten the economic cycles is to reign in spending and pay off the debt in the good years, and run a deficit to stimulate the economy in the bad. Oddly, American politicians like to do the opposite. They spend extravagantly in the good years, and ruthlessly cut spending in the bad. This is because they are trying to gain short term political points rather than actually smooth the humps in the economic cycle. The result is a super-nasty recession-depression as the USA is stuck in now.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The least efficient way to stimulate the economy is to spend money on the military. Why would this be so?

• When you are done, you have nothing to show for your money like a school, road or bridge that helps serve the economy in the long term.
• Military contractors spend the money wherever they can get product cheapest, rarely in North America.
• Job experience killing people does not help on a resumé
• Military contractors are pond sucking scum who steal and cheat. They spend the money the bilk from their country on foreign luxuries for themselves.
• Much of the money goes for oil or bribes which ends up in the pockets of foreign dictators.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The least efficient way to stimulate the economy is with military spending. Why?

• When you are done you have nothing to show for it, no highways, schools, education, sewers or airports that help support business.
• The spending usually happens on the other side of the world. The spinoffs flow there, not back home.
• Military spending is a high profit business. This means most of the money ends up in the pockets of a very few, very rich people. Other forms of spending spread the money around more evenly.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The magic of capitalism is that it harnesses greed to persuade entrepreneurs to race to produce the goods and services that people actually want. Unfortunately, it is unable to similarly harness greed that leads entrepreneurs to:

• fix prices
• Kill off the competition and create monopoly or near monopoly.
• Bribe government officials to do things beneficial to the corporation but detrimental to the public good.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The magic that makes capitalism work is competition. According to Axelrod, with less than 26 competitors, you get co-operation and de facto price fixing. Corporations naturally seek to increase profit by reducing competition through mergers and acquisitions. Left to itself, capitalism collapses into an oligarchy or monopoly, which then tries to convince everyone not to interfere with the impaired “free market forces”. If you value free market capitalism, you must necessarily support regulation to preserve competition.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The main requirement for wealth is a willingness to take unfair advantage of others and to bend rules of morality if not break them. It is wonder then that being rich has such high status.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The main thing I noticed when I visited a casino was the pervading air of boredom. People considered it onerous drudgery to poke the coins into the slot machines. This was the last thing I expected after seeing casinos depicted in James Bond films.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The man who invented the Monopoly board game hoped it would demonstrate a major flaw in capitalism — the instability of the wealth gap. Under an unregulated capitalist system, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Brain dead Republicans missed the point entirely. They thought this was a fundamental and desirable feature of the universe, and that this instability was a natural effect of the exceeding virtue and worthiness of the rich. Their philosophy calls for accelerating the process by exempting the rich from taxes and disbanding the social safety net to further reward the rich for being wealthy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The medicare debate in the USA is quite simple. The Democrats want to make sure seniors get health care, even if it means topping up the fund from general revenue. The Republicans want to get rid of medicare altogether. They want to abscond with the funds seniors have contributed over the years for their care. If the seniors don’t have money to provide their own private medical care, they should go without, even if it means dying. That is the same as an insurance company accepting premiums over the years then refusing to pay out. It is a breach of contract.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The money game is heavily rigged in favour of the already rich. Such people can earn extravagant incomes without even doing any work. Conservatives blame the losers in the money game for laziness, calling for them to die of starvation as their natural lot. Liberals blame the rigged rules of the game.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The most cheerful thought to someone with HIV (Human Imumuno-deficiency Virus) is that Big Pharma has a vested financial interest in keeping them alive. The most depressing is if someone ever marketed a cure for HIV, it would destroy the immensely profitable HIV drug industry. Big Pharma would fight it tooth and nail.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The new vaccine H1N1 vaccine is temporarily in short supply. Who should get it? the people most at risk for the disease or the people with the most money. The answer to this question neatly divides the population into two warring values camps.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The notion that you can create jobs by throwing money at rich people is ludicrous. They are richer than they have ever been and they are still not creating jobs. There are millions of things they can do with their money besides create jobs in America. Throwing even more money at them obviously won’t work. This is just an endlessly repeated Republican lie. Republicans have no interest in creating jobs, just in making the rich richer. I can think of only two guaranteed ways to create jobs:

1. have the government hire people to do useful things such as maintaining infrastructure or contract such work out.
2. pay people and companies to create jobs by subsidising the wages of new hires. With sufficient incentives, the rich will be lining up to create jobs. My company took great advantage of such a program in Canada.

Some people claim military spending is a good way to create jobs. Yes it does, but it is extremely inefficient, since when you are done, you have nothing to show for your money but a hole in the ground. With spending on infrastructure you have a new bridge which creates new wealth for decades to come.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The obvious metaphor for a economic system is the blood supply that brings nourishment to all the body. Imagine if something went wrong and 1/3 of your blood congested in your big toe. You went to the doctor. He approached your toe with a lance, and gremlin screamed out from within the boil, Get away you damn socialist! This blood is mine. I don’t have to share it with anyone.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Occupy Wall Street Movement derailed their protest even before it began with distracting it with irrelevant issues:

• The right to raise a tent on public property.
• The need for safe injection sites.
• The right of urban dwellers who have homes to camp out.

Without purpose and without plan, all they could succeed is doing was making all opposition to Wall street look disorganised, self indulgent and foolish. The net result is they hurt their cause.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The only multi-level marketing scheme where nearly everyone who signs up makes money is selling drugs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The pejorative term for budget cuts is firing people. Cutting has its benefits, but creating jobs is obviously not one of them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The problem with nuclear power plants is if they did everything to make them safe, they would lose money. The only way they can make any money is by cutting corners on safety. They are constantly tempted to nibble away the safety margins.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The public heavily subsidises the education of doctors. Later some doctors go into cosmetic surgery and handle only vanity cases. They should be required to pay back the subsidy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The purpose of accumulating wealth is to make others do things they don’t want to do either because they are onerous or because they are unwise. The lust for money is primarily the desire to enslave others.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The purpose of anti-gambling legislation is primarily to protect the monopoly of the those who run legal gambling. In that I include casinos, government lotteries and race track betting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The purpose of the monetary system is to encourage people to contribute useful work. It rewards people with goodies proportional to the value of what they contribute. If you discover a way to earn large amounts of money while contributing little useful work, either what you are doing is illegal or you are exploiting a loophole in the monetary system that should be illegal. Our religious-based systems of morality created before the ascent of money, are too outdated and too immature to label such behaviour as wrong.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The purpose of video games is to instill military and capitalistic values in the young, namely to mercilessly, viciously and mindlessly squash the designated opposition without remorse or reflection.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The reason the US economy has stalled is the rich people have nearly all the money. It is like a late stage in the game of Monopoly. I have to laugh at the Republicans claiming the way to jump start it is to give the uber-rich most of the remaining money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The recession is caused by rich people hogging nearly all the wealth and refusing to invest it. If our prehistoric ancestors has suffered under an analogous problem they would have exiled or killed the pigs if they refused to share. Today we meekly suffer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The recession of the summer of 2010 is unusual. The banks and corporations are more profitable than ever, while the unemployment rate is through the roof and mortgage foreclosures are rampant. What is happening?

• Corporations are eliminating jobs by exporting them overseas, automation and simply by driving employees harder.
• Corporations are lowering wages, and reducing benefits. They can get away with this since the high unemployment rate means they will have no trouble finding applicants.
• With the Citizens United supreme court ruling, corporations now have the legal right to buy politicians with no limit on the size of the bribe. They are using this to arrange laws in their favour so that money flows upward from the poor and middle class to the corporations and the wealthy that own them far faster than ever before.
• The media have convinced the average Americans that coddling the corporations and the uber-rich needs to proceed still further before the general public have any hope for jobs and prosperity.

The essential problem is an extreme wealth imbalance, and hence power imbalance, and a moronic public (especially the Tea Party) who have been manipulated to lobby for their own shafting.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The relationship of America to the rest of the world is similar to the relationship of ancient Rome to its provinces. From Rome’s point of view, the purpose of the provinces was to provide goods and services to the people of Rome. Rome was prepared to use any means necessary to transfer wealth/capital from the provinces to Rome. Like ancient Rome, the USA is a parasite. With only 1/20th of the planet’s population, America consumes the lion’s share of the global production. It vainly imagines itself to be magnanimous, yet it is actually the stingiest of all the developed nations. It’s wealth comes from deliberately grinding other countries into poverty.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Republican plan to deal with a recession is just to wait for private enterprise to fix it. This approach has been well tested, both back in the depression of the 1930’s and the recessions of the Bush and Obama eras. It has been thoroughly tested and proven, as you would expect, to have no effect. Businesses pull in their horns and lay off people during recessions. They don’t have enough business to do otherwise. Republicans see boom and bust as inevitable, like the tides. They counsel despair.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Republicans try to convince me the wealth gap is natural and righteous, that one individual should have hundreds of billions of dollars to use for whatever pleasure or mischief they please, where others have no money at all, (in Africa, not even a dime). They even try to persuade me that the public should further reward the rich by giving them money in the hopes these gods will take pity and provide jobs. It reminds me of sacrificing virgin daughters to the volcano gods. There is no other animal species with this sort of yawning wealth gap. It was not a part of any primitive human society either. It is an urban phenomenon. It started with religious con men, the pharaohs who tricked the people into thinking they were gods. It extended with the divine right of kings to spend the public’s money on personal pleasures. But it did not really get going until the renaissance, with the Medici and the invention of modern finance and usury.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The rich are constantly trying to increase the wealth gap. The poor are constantly trying to shrink it. Inventions that widened the gap include corporations, capitalism, interest, stocks, bonds, stock markets, globalisation, the Chief Justice John Roberts and the Citizens United decision that effectively legalised corporations anonymously bribing politicians with unlimited amounts of cash. Inventions that shank the gap include the graduated income tax, the Internet, cell phones and microcredit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Why is this?

• Once you have money, you can invest it and make more money, without expending significant additional time or effort.
• The rich have the money to influence government to rig the rules in their favour, e.g. tax loopholes.
• A poor person has to spend almost all his time just to acquire food and shelter. A rich person is free to devote nearly all his time to acquiring more wealth.
• Being rich is sort of like a club. You deal only with other members of the club.
• By having sufficient wealth to hire other people, a rich person creates an army of people working to produce wealth for him. It is not just his own efforts creating his wealth, but the efforts of all those he hires.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Rich Get Richer

In the first seven years of the George W. Bush’s administration, the 400 richest Americans each increased their wealth an average of 1.5 billion dollars. The income over that period of the average American decreased by $28,000.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The funny thing is, there are people who, even when faced with this reality, still insist on the validity of the trickle down theory of helping the poor by giving money to the rich.

The rich imagine themselves great benefactors, but the truth is, when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. A preposterous share of the planetary labour is diverted to the care, feeding, protection and entertainment of the wealthy, so it could hardly be otherwise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The rich in America have been sitting on their money. They have not been using it to hire people. They tell us they have no intentions of hiring anyone any time soon. They just don’t have the sales to justify the hires. So it seems to me, taxing the rich at the same rates as everyone else will give the government some of that money they are sitting on to hire people to do things like repair bridges, roads and schools, which have to be fixed sometime anyway. Repairs are nearly always cheaper now than later. Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, tries to pretend giving the rich even more money to sit on is what will create jobs. What BS! He knows perfectly well that is a lie, but that does not stop him from bleating it over and over like a lost goat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The rich in concert with the politicians have pulled off some sleight of hand so that the wealthy pay a lower tax rate than ordinary folk. Here is how they did it. There are so many loopholes in the income tax laws put there by legislators for their patrons that the rich can pay no tax at all if they choose, or even receive money. Few elect to pay more than 15%, the rate ordinary folk pay. However, ordinary folk are also subject to two additional payroll taxes, one 6.2% hidden, nominally paid by the employer out of the same pool of money used to pay wages, and one explicit at 4.2% paid by the worker. (The Republicans plan to raise the latter to 6.2%.) Rich people effectively don’t pay payroll taxes if they are self-employed or even if they make $5,000,000 a year employed as a CEO because the payroll taxes only apply to the first $100K of income.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The right to refuse to buy is one of the most fundamental human rights though it is not usually stated that way. No matter how powerful the seller, no matter how he has you over a barrel, e.g. by cornering the market or by destroying the competition, you still have the implicit right to refuse to do business with him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Shark Liftaway Vacuum Cleaner is sold in TV infomercials. They tell you that the vacuum costs less than $200. Then they tell you it costs 5 easy payments of $49.95 (= $249.75). Then they say they if you act now, they will remove one payment. This patter is designed to trick you into thinking you are getting the vacuum for $150. If they lie to you about the price, they will lie about anything else.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The stock market flails about like some hysterical bimbo on a Perry Mason episode. It has become divorced from the real world activities of the various companies it supposedly represents. People are not investing, they are gambling, and with the skill of a herd of lemmings.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The stupidity of American workers is beyond belief. They are so gullible they believe the Republicans that unionised workers are their enemies. When union workers won new rights, the rights soon spread to everyone. When they lose rights, everyone else will lose them too soon after.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Tea Party brazenly lie to the American people that debt default offers no serious penalties. They blithely suggest when it happens, you just pay some of the bills. This is preposterous. Consider what happens to individuals who don’t pay their bills. Let’s say you stop paying your mortgage but continue to pay the electricity, cable and phone. Let’s say you pay just the interest on your credit cards, but no principle and you pay less than the minimum payment. What happens to your credit rating? The fact you paid some bills does not get you off the hook. Your rating will be downgraded. It will stay downgraded even if you start paying your bills again. What happens to your ability to borrow more money? If anyone is crazy enough to lend to you, they will demand a premium interest rate. If any of your loans mature, and you have to reborrow money, you will have to pay that premium interest. Eventually you will be paying a premium rate on all your debt.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The Tea Party claims it is in a panic ever the deficit. Yet they want to fix it by taking from the people who have the least and giving it to those who have the most, with no net effect on the deficit. They are crooks and liars.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The top 2% in wealth are for the most part suffering from a repulsive mental illness. They have far more than they can possibly consume, but like heroin addicts, they desperately crave more money. They are willing to stoop to any filthy deed to get it, including bribing politicians. They most enjoy taking from those who have almost nothing. Oddly, a sizeable proportion of Americans idolise these people, and are happy to sacrifice themselves and others to pamper them. What is really odd, is the general public tries to figure out how to stimulate the 2% to crave still more money, imagining it will then trickle down like a shower of gold from the gods on them. They imagine these folk are the source of all things good, rather than the thieves they are.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The traditional wisdom is buy low sell high. However, Americans have their own peculiar rule. Don’t buy houses when prices are low. Wait until the prices are high and rising.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The trick to getting rich is to persuade large numbers of people to give you money in return for something that takes you almost no time to produce. One way of doing that is to persuade other people produce goods for you for considerably less than you sell them. It is odd that rich people are not more ashamed of how they exploited their fellows to get rich. It is also odd the way these cheaters are universally admired. In a pre-technological society, they would be considered deadbeats, cheats and pigs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The trickle down theory of economics is a con. It has been repeatedly proven not to work, but that does not stop Republicans from flogging it again and again. By the same logic, you could just as easily have a trickle up theory where you give all the money to the poor. Don’t be ridiculous! If you take money away from A and give it to B, A will always be poorer and B will always be richer. Any school child could see through a con where one kid tries to talk the others into giving him most of their money for nothing in return.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The trickle down theory of economics is aptly named. The rich piss on the middle class.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The two least efficient ways to stimulate the economy are the military and giving money to the richest 2% of the population. The General Accounting Office calculates these things. This does not stop the Republicans from championing them whenever stimulus is needed. Clearly their motives for such expenditure have nothing to do with stimulus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The United Moving company claim that if you pick any other company but them, the competition will set your belongings on fire and raccoons will run amok with your electronics. This is obviously a lie. Probably everything else in the ad is a lie too. Just put them on your do-not-buy list.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The United States, even when it is reeling with trillion dollar deficits still manages to give Israel $4 billion a year. Israel is a relatively wealthy country running surpluses. Such a relationship in the animal world where one creature is induced to sacrifice itself for the benefit of a stranger is called parasitism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The United States, gives $4 billion a year to Israel to run an apartheid system. The supreme court would not let them spend that money on apartheid in the USA, so why does it let them spend it in Israel?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The US government subsidises meat to the tune of $30 a pound. As water and land become increasingly scarce, the rich will eventually lose interest in providing cheap meat to the masses. It will then become a luxury, like Japanese Kobe beef.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The US secret service caught Art Williams Jr., one of the best and most prolific counterfeiters who had printed $3 million. This is amusing. The banks have legally printed trillions electronically by legally lending out money they did not have. Both have the same effect on the money supply and both cause inflation. It is just the banks have corrupted the politicians to let them commit the crime without penalty.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The USA is not really a democracy. Lawmakers talk pretty well only to those who hold out substantial gifts. The lawmaker has to harmonise the requests from all the donors with party policy. Huge donors get their requests promoted verbatim, no matter how crazy or planet-killing they are. Some donors simply threaten, like AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Much of this corruption would go away if there were party discipline on votes and laws against donations by corporations, especially foreign corporations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The village idiot, George W. Bush, masterminded the greatest crime in US history. He appointed John Roberts head Supreme Court Justice. Roberts then gave corporations the right to bribe politicians with unlimited amounts of money — the final death blow to democracy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The voice arguing for more privilege for the rich is much louder than the voice arguing for getting the rich off the backs of the middle class. It is not because more rich people arguing the case for their self interest. It is because the rich can afford to hire a virtual megaphone to drown out everyone else. The media, owned by the rich, pretend that arguing for the middle class is extreme and representing the views of an ultra-left wing minority, when actually it represents the mainstream. Because there are so many stupid people, it is fairly easy for the rich, using repeated simplistic slogans, to persuade a substantial portion of the population to vote against their own self-interest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

The world economy is a bit like a game of solitaire collectively played by the world’s financiers to stave off the boredom.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are 300 channels on my TV, most of them broadcasting trash. The best are PBS (Public Broadcasting System) and KNOW, the BC government education channel. The problem is free programming means advertiser-sponsored programming. That means the shows are just filler between the ads. The producer would never dare say anything offensive to the advertisers. To move the producer’s loyalty to the viewer, we viewers will have to pay, not that much, just as much the advertiser paid to torment us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are all kinds of ways of extracting wealth unfairly from others. They include:

• burglary.
• threat of violence (mugging, extortion).
• blackmail.
• con games, making promises of large rewards without delivering.
• adulteration. Providing watered down or defective goods.
• price fixing.
• monopoly. Eliminating other providers of a good or service then jacking the price way up.

When it comes to enforcement, nearly all the effort is placed on burglary. Corporate and ecclesiastical crimes are almost never prosecuted. This is odd given corporations take billions with their schemes, and most burglars don’t even reach middle class incomes. Our notions of theft, roughly speaking, make it ok for the rich to steal from the poor but not the reverse. Eventually, this framework will be considered part of the upper class’s shameful exploitation of the rest, quite at odds with our current view where the middle and lower classes feel honour-bound to co-operate in unfair transfer of wealth from poor to rich.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are basically two kinds of economists:

1. Those whose goal is creation of maximum wealth for the elite primarily by taking it from the poor.
2. Those whose goal is to create wealth for everyone, without widening the wealth gap, perhaps even by closing it.
   ~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are so many things the world needs done that the notion of a make work project where nobody actually needs the results of the labour, such as gold-plated military spending, is absurd.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are special advantages to stealing $1+ trillion.

• There is plenty of money to pay off or threaten anyone who would prosecute or even report the crime.
• There are enough proceeds to get government people on board who control the curtain of national security to block investigation and the Patriot Act power to torture and/or disappear anyone who makes trouble.

Consider some of the biggest heists:

• There was a massive trillion dollar transfer from the middle class to the richest most crooked Americans disguised as a real estate bubble and bank bail out. It was a super-heist orchestrated with even more precision than Oceans Eleven
• There were a series of multi-billion dollar heists from the Pentagon totalling over $1 trillion. The thefts were reported only on the back pages of the New York Times, not even as embezzlements but as accounting glitches blamed on computer incompatibilities.
• Then, of course there was Dick Cheney receiving “residuals” from Halliburton while handing out billions in no-bid, no-audit contracts where Halliburton charged unbelievably high rates for goods and services it did on even deliver.
• There there are subsidies, thefts right out in the open. Big oil bought sufficient votes in congress and the senate to have the government give it billions, even though there have never in recorded history been more profitable corporations, even though ostensibly we are trying to get them to stretch the remaining supplies of oil.

The crooks are still is charge and are no-doubt planning even bigger heists.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are things that have no inherent use or value, but have value just because they are rare, e.g. old postage stamps or diamonds. The pleasure of owning these things, their value, comes from the delight in denying them to others, hardly a motivation one would be proud to advertise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are three motives for Republicans to strenuously oppose universal health care:

1. They are Ayn Randians. They believe the sick, weak or poor should die. Some even oppose completely private insurance. This view lasts only until they become seriously ill themselves.
2. They strongly resent any of their money going to prolong the life of another. In their view, compassionate care of one another is weakness. Selfishness is the ultimate virtue, an attitude they unwittingly borrowed from Hitler.
3. They take large amounts of money from private insurance companies to espouse such views. It is not just politicians who take under the table money. There are also astroturf rent-a-crowds.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are three problems with bailing out failed banks and financial institutions.

1. It is fundamentally unfair. When thing go well, investors keep the profits. When things go badly, ordinary people are stuck with the bills.
2. It encourages bankers to take excessive risk.
3. It interferes with competition. In a capitalist system, incompetent banks are supposed to fail.

If banks are too big to fail, then they are too dangerous to allow to exist.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are two basic theories of government. One is the government represents the collective interests of the people. Their job is to ensure everyone has their basic needs met, housing, food, medical care, education. The government should protect the population from criminal predators. The other theory of government is that its function is to ensure the wealthy can make money. The government must help stop the people from interfering with this enterprise by suppressing unions, consumer labeling, consumer protection, social safety nets, taxes on the rich etc.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are two competing value systems: in one you evaluate your worth by how much you contributed to your planet. In the other, you judge by how much you were able to take from it, giving the least possible back, e.g. how much money you accumulated.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There are two ways another country could defeat the United States. One of them is wait for the USA to bankrupt itself with deficit spending and buy the country at the bankruptcy auction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is a great pleasure in doing the night thing and not only the right thing, but the best thing. I think many people falsely imagine the pleasures of extra wealth or extra status are superior.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is a sort of religious faith in the USA that the government should do nothing and capitalism should do everything. That is impossible. Private enterprise is not interested in tackling projects that require massive capital or that are not almost guaranteed to make money.

Which Projects are suited for Government and Private Enterprise
Very expensive?	Almost Guaranteed profitable?	Can Government do it?	Can Private Enterprise Do It?

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is a specialty of medicine that works by analysing hair samples. Imagine this group of physicians became so powerful that they were seen as the only serious form of medicine, and that they gained the exclusive ear of governments on all matters of health care. They would become enemies of health, where previously they were helpful. A similar thing has happened with economists and businessmen. We are ignoring the health and sustainability of our planet because of their highly-specialised way of looking at the world.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is basically one route to mega-wealth — the wealthy con people into giving them much more money than the good or service they give others in return is worth. They cheat by every means imaginable. The people who succeed at this game are exceptionally good liars. They created a political party in Canada called the Conservatives and the Republicans in the USA who champion their interests. They hire the best liars money can buy as candidates.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is more than one way a society could handle supporting people who are severely injured and need help with a mountain of medical bills and ongoing support.

• There is the American way. The victim sues some random person who has a tenuous relationship to the accident. The assumption is somebody must have maliciously caused the trouble. The belief derives from witchcraft. If such a person can’t be found, then the victim is up the creek. The person sued pays out of pocket or with insurance. The “victim’s” lawyer keeps half the award. The victim receives a lump sum which may be more than enough or not enough. It is up to the victimto manage that money to cover the expenses for the rest of their lives. They don’t know how long they will live, or what complications lie down the road. The lump sum is often a temptation to spend lavishly and they are left with nothing for support.
• You could insist that everyone gets insurance (public or private) to handle such contingencies. The money is handed out on a per-month basis to cover the actual expenses of the month. That way the burden of an accident is shared. The burden is not dumped on some individual who probably did nothing much out of the ordinary in the way of fault.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is no lack of natural resources, wealth or money during a depression. The problem is people become paranoid and the money stops flowing. We need to measure economic health by the speed of money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is no point in making treaties with the USA. They honour them only so long as it is convenient. Two recent examples are the Softwood Lumber treaty where America illegally slapped tariffs on Canadian lumber, and the Buy American program where Americans ripped Canadian pipes out of the ground even though NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement) requires equal access to American and Canadian markets.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is nothing more overrated than having more than enough money and nothing so underrated as having your back scratched. I speak from experience.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There is something fundamentally nuts about the Republican notion that massive tax cuts are the best way to stimulate the economy. It has been tried several times. It never worked. It just ballooned the public debt. Let’s look at some of the ways the government could stimulate the economy.

1. Reward employers with money or tax cuts if they actually create jobs. They don’t get the reward unless they actually create net jobs. You can do this by subsidizing part of the wages of new hires or difficult to hires. You have to block cheating, e.g. firing massively then rehiring and trying to get the subsidy. You can also penalise companies that outsource jobs or lay off workers, or reward those that don’t.
2. Spend the money on government services, especially infrastructure. The roads, bridges, schools, water works, sewers etc. support business in creating still more prosperity.
3. Give a tax cut to the poor and middle class. They will almost certainly spend it on goods and services, unfortunately most of it at Walmart which stimulates only the Chinese economy.
4. Give a tax cut where the bulk of the money goes to the super rich, (the Republican plan to extend the Bush tax cuts). The super rich put it in the bank, invest it in the Hong Kong stock exchange, spend it on imported luxuries or anything else that suits their fancy. There is no reason to presume they would spend it since they already have everything they need, and there is no reason to expect them to create jobs with it. This is obviously not the best way to stimulate the economy.
5. Start another war and spend it on armaments. This is the least efficient way to stimulate the economy since you have nothing left in the end to show for your money but a hole in the ground and a small army of crippled soldiers to care for.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There really is no need to coddle the rich. Giving them more money won’t make them any happier. They already have much more than they need. I know from personal experience. I used to have far more money than I needed. I used to hand out $100 bills to people just to watch the reaction. The rich who complain they absolutely must have more money to survive are like women weighing in at 226.80 kg (500 lbs) at an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord whining they are still hungry.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There two classes of economic problems to worry about:

1. Primary. The same problems animals face, sufficient food, water and territory. Ensuring our environment supports us, avoiding erosion, pollution, global warming, epidemics…
2. Secondary. The money game, the way we track who is winning, the wealth gap, speculation, various ways to legally con others, illegal ways to con others, debt, contracts. No animal but humans worries about secondary problems. Most humans believe that these secondary problems are more important than the primary ones, and real men should ignore the primary ones. They consider concern for survival soft-headed.

I think humans are stark raving bonkers.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There was a time when the uber-wealthy felt obligated to give back to the community. Andrew Carnegie built libraries in all the major cities in the USA and Canada. Today, they indulge in garish conspicuous waste instead. What I find so strange is the way the general public admire these eco-vandals.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

There was once an American who went to a Hilton hotel, and decided to take a nice long bath. He filled the bath half full. Not understanding how the newfangled faucet worked, he inadvertently added pure cold. He thought, maybe I turned the handle the wrong way. He turned it the other way, and lo, the water started to warm up. But it was still nowhere near hot enough for the relaxing soak he was looking for. He was impatient, so he turned the handle in the cold direction and blamed God for picking on him.

This is of course a metaphor about the American economy and the foolish voters who think its should be possible to undo the damage of the 8 Bush years in 1½ years.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Think about the things that matter most to you. Most likely they have zero monetary value. Money is an idiot’s way of measuring value.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Think about your beliefs around the wealth pie:

• Whatever you can make, steal or con is yours. There should be no taxes. The government should run only by voluntary contributions.
• We should ensure everyone has some minimum income necessary to stay alive.
• Since the economic system tends to concentrate wealth, there should be a mechanism to keep the wealth gap stable.
• The goal should be to maximise happiness for everyone. Since $1 means less to a very rich person to a very poor person, there should me some flow from the rich to the poor.
• People who are not productive should be allowed to starve to death.
• The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a good thing since I am going to be rich any day now.
• Rich people should pay more taxes because they get more benefit from government services.
• Rich people should pay more taxes since paying them is much easier to bear than for others.
• Rich people should pay more taxes since money is not really important to them, just the relative income compared with their fellows.

Where did your ideas come from? Who do you know who shares them? What experience do you have living with the very poor, middle class and ultra-rich that might help you formulate ideas fair to everyone?

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

To make money, an insurance company or HMO (Health Management Organisation) needs to sign up as many people as possible and pay out as few claims as possible. This explains why they have such a Jekyll and Hyde personality.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

To me this is obvious, but most people don’t seem to think this way. It is fun to splurge every once in a while, and buy the very best. When can do you that safely?

• When the thing does not cost that much. Go ahead and buy any toothbrush or pen that appeals to you. Whereas buying a top of the line car will really set you back both initially and for maintenance.
• When you don’t buy the thing that often, e.g. shave cream, or a Christmas turkey, pick anything that appeals. On the other hand, a couple of $5 lattes a day will set you back $3,650 a year.
• When you use something many times a day, e.g. a kettle, keyboard or coffee cup go ahead and splurge.
• When something will last for decades, e.g. loudspeakers.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

To sell an implausible idea, such as “your choice of breakfast cereal will transform your life”, a corporation typically hires two actors, one to sell the implausible merely nutty idea, and one to sell a certifiably insane idea. The first idea then seems reasonable in comparison.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Toyota advertises that “your safety is one of our top priorities”. This is not reassuring. Clearly, profit comes before safety, even if safety is in the top ten. This ranking has lead to the great chain of Toyota’s safety bloopers. Further, they advertise that they will rectify the situation with improved communication with the customers. Reassurance and spin will do bugger all to improve safety. Grow up, Toyota.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Truck commercials rarely sell transportation, economy or hauling capacity. They sell you the lie that people will admire you for spending so much on this model as you drive by. They sell you the lie that women will have sex with you if you drive this type of pickup truck. They sell you the lie that other men will perceive you as ultra-masculine. The sell you the bad-boy image of ecological vandal and thug beating up those evil liberals who dare to protect the earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Trying to head off a depression with massive tax cuts is inefficient because:

1. The poor spend their windfall at Wal-Mart, stimulating the Chinese economy, but doing nothing for the North American.
2. The middle class save their windfall. What else would they do on seeing their retirement savings and home equity evaporate and continued employment insecure?
3. The wealthy invest their windfall in parts of the world where commerce is still bubbling along happily.

It would be better to target efforts on creating and sustaining jobs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

TV commercials usually depict one actor hurting, insulting, lying to, cheating, betraying or sneering at another. Usually, some improbable calamities befall the lead actor. What is the advertiser trying to tell us? Is this some Freudian honesty about how he will treat us after the sale, how much care he put into manufacturing the product and how well the product will work?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Two hundred years ago people who kept slaves excused themselves on grounds of economic necessity. Today people excuse themselves for bypassing fair trade products on the same grounds. They are cause almost as much hardship for others, with only a tiny fraction the excuse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Underwear was invented to protect clothing. It is only a matter of time until Proctor & Gamble (the parent company of Pampers) starts marketing a disposable underwear liner for normal continent adult males to protect their underwear. Mark my words. Industry works ceaselessly to convert the recyclable to the disposable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Unequal distribution of wealth becomes a much bigger problem when rich and poor rarely see each other. It makes even the cruelest exploitations easy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Unlike humans, no wolf would tolerate a pack leader who took 10,000+ times as big a share as the other pack members.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Using technology, we humans have managed to create massive problems that we are not capable of solving. It is as hopeless as expecting a pack of dogs to solve the problem of soil erosion. Humans are not up to the task:

• They don’t care about the big picture.
• Their prime focus is on competing with, defeating and hurting enemies.
• They are driven primarily by emotion.
• They tenaciously hold onto beliefs that have been proven wrong.
• They prefer I win-you lose solutions to win-win. This creates political logjams.

I can see three possible solutions:

1. The development of artificial intelligence that simple overwhelm humans and tricks them into doing the right thing.
2. Some sort of technology to amplify intelligence, the ability to concentrate or the ability to look at problems from a planetary perspective. A think of these people might be able to overwhelm ordinary humans.
3. A think tank of the brightest people funded by billionaires who see our planet is in peril. People are selected for their intelligence and global perspective. It is one thing to create a solution, but quite another to get idiotic FOX viewers to accept it.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Vendors think they are attracting me with gimmicks, such as cash back, rebates, air miles, coupons, no payments for two years, club cards, point coupons, discount stickers, Canada Tire money, lottery discount cards etc. They are just jerking me around making the sale more complicated and time-consuming, most of the time with some deception about the true value of the perk. I run the other way when I see this crap. The overhead of managing these schemes just raises overall prices. Just lower the price! That is the only honest way to deal. Even a simple discount is often a scam. When you get to the counter, they tell you the discount has already been applied to the sticker price, so there is no discount, or the cashier forgets to apply the discount manually since the scanner knows nothing of it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Very few people brag that they managed to scarf 75% of the food when they go out with the gang for Chinese food, yet they will happily brag they managed to grab a disproportionate share of natural resources and manufactured goods.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the USA, said he pays a lower tax rate than anyone else in his office including his secretary. He said he does not even exploit loopholes and uses no tax shelters. Republicans worship the rich, and wish to flatter them with loopholes and low tax rates. Buffet said he, more than anyone, feels happy to contribute his fair share to a country that has so helped him prosper.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Watch a troop of ring-tailed lemurs. The alpha animals bully the others into letting them have the choicest food, and into restricting the calories of the non-alpha animals. Humans have devised a way to do the same thing much more efficiently. The alpha humans give the others a pay cheque once a month. This gives them total control of the underling’s consumption, and it keeps the underlings in subjection, because without the pay cheque they have no access to food or shelter.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

We are all familiar how addiction to illegal drugs causes people to have a desperate craving for money. They then commit robberies and even murders to get money to pay for drugs. Republicans tell us that a strong craving for money is a good thing. Yet it leads people like Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, to destroy the entire ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. It causes the CEO of Nestlé to kill thousands of babies through malnutrition and deceptive advertising. It leads the CEO of Goldman Sachs to cause thousands of people to lose their homes and/or go into bankruptcy. 1:6 got it right: the love of money is the root of all evil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

We forget that, first and foremost, a corporation is a group of people: management, staff and stockholders. It should have no special privilege above other groups of that same size. We get so used to thinking of corporate size in terms of dollars, we start to think they deserve civil rights in proportion to wealth rather than population.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

We have all seen obscenely rich Hollywood types get in deep financial trouble when they continue to spend the way they did when they were making their biggest incomes. The United States is likewise living on past glory. America spends more per capita than any other nation. The U.S.A. is spending 36% more than it makes, borrowing to make up the difference. The Tea Party crazies are right to make a fuss.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

We have had television broadcasts since 1941. Oddly, it has still not evolved a version for the rich without commercials.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

We have rapid exponential growth in population, waste, environmental degradation, pollution… Any mathematician will tell you that we must put on the brakes. There is no conceivable technology that will let us continue to grow. It is deluded wishful thinking that we can keep breeding like locusts without dire consequences. Economics is based on deliberate ignorance of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. It is its own little game-world.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

We imagine that we have a free Internet, but really we have an advertiser-sponsored Internet. If we want quality, we will have to pay, not much, just more than the advertisers were willing to pay to annoy us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Well poisoning in times past was the ultimate crime. Today doing it on a massive scale is standard business practice.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. I guess that includes your money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

What is American cheese? a radio-active-orange-coloured product designed primarily to be manufactured cheaply. It has the texture and taste of Silly Putty. It is reputedly non-toxic, at least acutely non-toxic. Americans feed it to their children but not to their livestock or upper classes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

What sank the Soviet Union? Spending more money than they had on the military. They simply went broke. The USA is doing the same thing to itself, without even a credible enemy pushing them into it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

What will happen when the US borrows so much money it can no longer pay the interest on the debt? It happened to Mexico in 1982 and Argentina in 1989. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) took over Mexico and slashed government services, even ones needed to sustain life. In Argentina, inflation reached 100% per month. Shop owners could not afford to buy new stock and closed their doors. There was widespread rioting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

What you would think of a guy who was always trying to deceive you in order to rip you off. He even hired professional actors to lie that he was a fine, upstanding, trustworthy fellow. He had no moral code other than would the legal penalty and the statistical risk of getting caught gain or lose money. That is the behaviour of your typical corporation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When a company offers you a 100-year warranty, what are the odds they will be in business in 100 years? If they are feeding you BS like that, chances are most of whatever else they tell you is also BS.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When a corporation misbehaves, write them a letter of the form: “You did a bad thing. That is unforgivable. I will never again buy your products.” Granted this is just an ant bite, but if enough people do it, corporations will heel. They are rational. They presume for every such letter they get there are 20 people who think similarly but did not bother to write. Consider how much money they spend trying to make you like them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When a lender’s debt goes bad, it is the lender primarily at fault, not the borrower — for deliberately making a high risk loan. Competitive capitalism insists that the lender pay the penalty, even to the point of going out of business, but what we have been doing is forcing taxpayers to bail out these incompetent lenders, which just encourages them to harm the economy with even more risky loans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When a life necessity is in short supply, a government can either ration it or let its price rise. Rationing gives everyone a basic allotment, however it encourages people to take their full ration whether they need it or not. If incomes vary widely, letting the price rise freezes out the poor while the wealthy deliberately waste the commodity in a display of conspicuous consumption. I suspect a patriotic appeal for conservation with public shaming of wastrels might work better than either rationing or price rises.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When a lottery or contests says one in four is a winner, that is a lie. What they mean is one in four times you get another ticket, but just gets you back where you started. You are no closer to winning an actual prize. This is just a way of dishonestly disguising the actual odds.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When a Republican asserts that you must leave the market forces alone, what he means is you must permit rich people to do what they damn well please. They are a privileged class, like the nobles of old.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When a right winger talks about freedom he means that governments should not interfere in any way with the activities of corporations or wealthy individuals. Corporations should be free to use their wealth and power even to exploit those without power. Instead of freedom, I would call this laissez faire capitalism. The sort of freedom I want for myself is freedom from bullying by governments, corporations and wealthy individuals. I want the government to limit the power of those institutions to run roughshod over me.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When all the donuts suddenly disappear, it is clear somebody took more than their share. When an economy suddenly dries up, the money is still there. It is just that a few super rich people are sitting on it and blocking the usual flow. But no one ever thinks of punishing the rich for sitting on their money. Instead they blame people who have nothing to do with the problem, such as the unemployed or union workers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When American politicians say that China is improperly devaluing its currency, what they mean is America wants China to raise its prices. They are undercutting American sales. It is the same complaint small businesses have with Walmart.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When Americans support competition, they mean allowing corporations to compete unfettered for the greatest dishonesty, forcing the honest corporations that give fair value out of business.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When an average man gets in over his head financially, the banks raise the interest on his credit cards to 40%. When a bank gets in over its head, the government bails it out with a no-interest loan or an outright handout. In America, it is sink-or-swim cutthroat capitalism for the average man and socialism for the bankers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When economists opine that the problems is a “lack of demand” this sounds divorced from concrete reality. Could you imagine a Cro Magnon philosopher announcing the problem was too much mastodon meat and people not hungry enough? This sounds like the Italian Mamma school of economics.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When embezzlers wiped out my company, I, as sole proprietor, was liable for all debts, including the rent on the remaining 6 months of the lease on our premises. Had my company been incorporated, the company would have been liquidated. I could lose up to my entire investment, but no more. My creditors and customers would be stuck instead. That is not quite as unfair as it sounds. The assumption is, my creditors would know they are dealing with a corporation, and would be wary of selling too much on credit. They assume the risk in return for my business. Incorporation absolves the investors and management of taking responsibility for the consequences of the actions of the company. We need something intermediate where the investors and management are partly liable for malfeasance and incompetence, and at the least criminally liable. Investors should not be able to pretend they have no influence on the behaviour of the companies they invest in, e.g. tobacco companies, oil drilling companies, mining companies…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When fish are abundant, the fishermen can barely break even because the abundance drives the prices down. When fish are all but extinct, the prices go through the roof. Capitalism works hard to thwart sustainability. Pre-capitalist societies would never dream of trying to destroy sustainable abundance.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When I was a little boy, my grandmother made extensive repairs to my Teddy bear: new eyes, new nose, new feet to hold the straw in. She understood I did not just want a Teddy bear, I did not want a new Teddy bear that looked just like this one; my loyalty was pledged to this specific Teddy bear. Even as an adult, I feel that way about many of my belongings. I find the disposable consumer culture crass, even obscene.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When it comes to the environment, capitalists are worse than retarded. They read wishful thinking written by other capitalists in order to become spectacularly incompetent, more confused than a second grader.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When orange juice is scarce, the price rises. Capitalism deals with the problem of shortage by ensuring the rich are fully satisfied and the poor get none. There are other ways it could be handled.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When pilots are learning to fly, they start in the classroom, then move to the flight simulator. Investors should test their skills with a dry run, without investing any real money. Otherwise, they are investing as a form of entertainment gambling.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When somebody is laid off because automation has eliminated their job, the employee suffers all the resulting pain and the employer gets all the benefits from the cost savings. I think the pain and gain should be shared more equitably.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When someone says “I can’t” he often means “I don’t want to.” When Americans tell me they are the richest nation on earth and they can’t afford to honour their commitments to support the elderly, or to properly care for the sick they clearly mean they don’t want to. They want to spend the wealth on something else such as luxuries for the wealthy, toys for the military or locking up all black people in jail.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When you have a large imbalance of power, the strong take advantage of the weak. Republicans would have us believe this is not so in the case of corporations in their relations with their customers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When you hear the words up to in an advertisement, e.g. lose up to 40 pounds in the first week, or your money back” you know you are dealing with a crook who is trying to put one over on you, trying to make it sound like he is making a promise, but is actually promising nothing. Chances are the rest of the ad is made of more subtle lawyerly deceptions. Just put them on your do-not-buy list.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When you say “the economy is improving”, what do you mean? It means more cars are being manufactured and sold, trucks are shipping more miles, more tonnes of fertiliser and pesticides are being applied to fields, more gold, lead, copper and iron are being mined, more land is being cleared to build housing subdivisions, the population in growing, more people are being held in jails. More people are being processed though hospitals. More coffins are being built. For the most part, you are saying that humans are doing more damage to the environment than before. Ask any mathematician if it is even theoretically possible for the economy to improve indefinitely. He will tell you it can’t, because the planetary environment that sustains economic activity is finite. Given that the more the economy improves the less time we have before we do ourselves in by irreversibly ruining the environment that sustains us, I question the term improves. “Improving the economy” should mean making it sustainable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When you see the word dramatisation in an ad, it means that the effects of the product, even in the best cases, are not noticeable, so instead the promised effects had to be faked.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

When you were a kid, you took three hours of physical education a week. You walked or rode your bike to and from school. You probably played various sports. Why would you expect better results now as an adult from an exercise program advertised on TV that takes only three ten minute sessions per week?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Who are the target audiences for all those shampoos and conditioners that look like semen and green snot?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Who is more of a useless pimple on the body of humanity? The homeless guy who collects bottles, cans and scrap metal or the stock broker who spends it time jetting around the world playing golf?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Who primarily benefits if social security is disbanded? Naive people will have to put their retirement savings in the stock market only to get cleaned out by the pros. The people pushing this are the wall street sharks. Their political agent is the Republican party.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Why are Americans having such a tough time pulling out of the recession?

• During the recession, corporations used hard economic times as an excuse to lay off workers and outsource their jobs to the third world. The jobs are permanently gone. Corporations are now global. They have no special loyalty to the USA as they did in past.
• Good economic times primarily require a surplus of goods and services. The US had bled itself dry with 10 years and 4 months of continuous illegal, unnecessary war in Afghanistan and 8 years and 10 months of continuous illegal, unnecessary war in Iraq. All those people creating goods and services for the war were not contributing any goods and services to the civilian economy. All their production was effectively thrown into a hole and blown up. How can an economy possibly thrive with two such giant parasites?

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Why are people so much less resentful of Sir Paul McCartney’s wealth than Bill Gates’? Possible answers:

• McCartney’s product is purely optional. Gates’ product you are forced to buy.
• McCartney’s product causes joy. Gates’ product causes frustration.
• McCartney made his money honestly. Gates made his money by all manner of unethical business practices.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Why do Goldman Sachs and brethren have any business at all after the way they swindled their customers?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Why do people go to casinos where they are guaranteed to lose when they could gamble with other individuals in games with equal odds of winning and losing? You might think it is the entertainment value, but visit a casino. You have never seen more exhausted, frustrated, bored people. They seem to look on gambling as onerous, necessary labour.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Why do the announcers for truck commercials always sound as if they had wobbly lips like a camel?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Why in the USA the biggest economy in the world? It is not because the USA has the most natural resources. It is not because the USA is a manufacturing giant. It is not that the USA provides valuable services to the rest of the world. It is not because Americans are inherently better than everyone else. There reasons are these:

• The USA has a military bigger that every other country combined. They use this to intimidate other nations into making trade deals that favour the USA.
• The USA props up corrupt dictatorships all over the planet. In return for bribes and political support, the dictator gives American companies unlimited free access to the natural resources of the country. America considers democracy too valuable to share.
• The USA usually flattens any country that dares use any other currency than the US dollar for making petroleum trades. This means when the USA prints money, it acts as an inflation-tax on all holders of petrodollars. It also means that US corporations can collect enormous fees converting other currencies into petrodollars. This gives the USA a competitive advantage since it does not need to convert.

The USA is driving itself to bankruptcy with out-of-control military spending and massive borrowing, while simultaneously refusing to tax the wealthy. Russia is accepting rubles for fossil fuel payments. That is the first shot in the rebellion against the American petrodollar. China is skunking the USA in manufacturing and alternative energy. India is taking all the computer programming jobs. As oil runs out, the prices will inevitable rise. Since America has flatly refused to take almost any measures at all to conserve oil or develop clean alternative energy, oil producers will be able to bleed them dry. The USA cannot remain in the #1 position much longer. Like Britain in the 1960s, America in basking in faded glories of empire.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Why is the current recession such a bear?

• Years of policies that exported jobs.
• Years of policies that created extreme income inequality. The rich are fabulously richer than ever before.
• The expense of two wars bleeding the funds that normally would have been used for building roads, bridges, subways, sewers, waterworks, schools and other projects that both provide jobs and serve business.
• The Republicans have blocked all measures to improve the economy. They hope it will get worse, and the Democrats will be blamed, and the Republicans will benefit.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Why should the rich pay more total tax than other people? Because they use far more government resources. Ordinary people have two cars tearing up the roads. A wealthy person has whole fleets of giant trucks that are much harder on the roads. Ordinary people deposit at most a couple of kilograms of waste into the sewers each day. Rich people own factories spewing torrents of toxic wastes for the government to clean up. If ordinary person’s home is broken into, they are lucking to get 20 minutes of the police department’s time. If they break into a rich person’s bank, a team of 10 officers may spend months tracking down the culprits.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

Wrangling over taxes, tax loopholes, and budget cuts can be simplified. It is a war between the rich and poor. Think about the effect of any particular proposal on the hardship for each type of citizen. If you reduce medical benefits, you are taking money from the pockets of the ill and elderly. If you close a tax loophole, you are taking money from a wealthy scoundrel who has been taking from the country but contributing nothing. The < growing steadily ever since the 1950s. If you don’t do anything to counter, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (technically called wealth condensation). Yet we have the rich demanding measures to widen the wealth gap even faster. The rich pay lobbyists to bribe politicians and press their case for greater unfairness.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

You can count the number of privileged elite who went to bat for the common man on one hand. There is no need to coddle the aristocracy for the common good.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

You have a power over corporations, similar to your power of the vote over government. Simply refuse ever after to buy anything from corporations that misbehave, cheat you or lie to you. If enough people do this, those corporations will go out of business. At the very least, you hurt their profitability. Corporations have no moral compass. They do what makes the most money. Make sure that behaving responsibly is the only way to get your money. Then let the corporations know why you are boycotting them. Even when they give you the brush off, they still pay extra attention to such letters.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

You see an advertisement on TV for a shiny gold coin. They tell you gold is selling at $1500 per ounce so this coin will soon become immensely valuable. Buying this coin will be a good way to hedge against inflation. What’s the catch? The coin is clad/plated in only 6 mg of gold worth about $0.29. Other catches include shipping and handling that roughly doubles the cost, and never telling you the actual size of the coin. It could well be the size of a shirt button.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

You’d think the defence industry would have a strong incentive to keep America afloat. Without a country they would have nothing to do and no source of income. However, corporations take a short term view. So long as they can make more profit today, they don’t care if their customers go bankrupt tomorrow. They will happily lobby, bribe and threaten legislators to overspend and spend unwisely. They will also twist the legislators’ arms to initiate endless, pointless wars, simply because wars mean more profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

You’d think the Republicans who hold up their arms in the sign of the cross at the mention of a government health care option would refuse on principle to use other socialist institutions such as firemen, police, libraries, national parks, roads, air traffic control, 911, Medicare, community centers, garbage collection, water, snow removal…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

You”d think generic drugs would be safe from monopoly price gouging, but in 2009 the FDA (Federal Drug Administration) gave URL (Uniform Resource Locator) Pharma a seven-year monopoly on the generic drug colchicine, a crocus extract, used for decades to treat gout. They celebrated by raising the price from $0.09 to $4.85 per pill. In return URL Pharma agreed to do two drug studies. I thought the FDA was supposed to protect the consumer, not hold him down while the drug companies raped him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)

“inspired by’ is one of the silliest tools in the ad-makers kit. Dog food is “inspired by” French chefs preparing filet mignon; nursing homes are “inspired by” ski mountain resorts; puddle jumper cars are “inspired by” luxury Italian sports cars; FullBar granola bars are “inspired by” weight loss surgery. It means absolutely nothing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: