Time for a Change

 

Are you uneasy and a bit out of synch with the world? You can’t quite wrap you mind around it, but you know some how you’re not where you want to be, and you can’t see how to get there. Everything seemed good until a few years ago. You went to college; engaged in a curriculum of courses where parroting radical professors guaranteed good grades. You smoked pot, partied, and hung out with your group, who viewed themselves as some omniscient modern day intellectuals, who having done nothing, knew everything. You got out and found that your skills matched the intensity of your studies, and you landed a 7pm  to midnight job as a bartender, which was fine enough, because you wanted to keep the old college party going, and you absolutely didn’t want a full time job.

That was good until an few years ago. Then you noticed the kids across the street, who had been working full time, had a brand new BMW. What a waste; who needs a fancy car in the city anyway? And then you heard that a friend of a friend closed on a condo, or was it a house? What a waste of resources, who needs that much space anyway? It’s just not right that they have those exorbitant things-that you can’t afford.

Somehow them having those things caused some discontent in the back of your mind, a black cloud of psychic oppression that consist of people having resources which you don’t have, and now you must change something to rid yourself of that cloud.

What should you change? Did you think about it, or did you jump straight to politics?

I agree a change is in order-a change in your life, not mine.   

Possibly the most reasonable thing is to do something to improve who you are. Yes, that’s right change who you are: Become an adult. Stop being such an insipid babbling child. Despite your college diploma, granted for regurgitating radical ideology, you might go to a community college and get a skill based degree or certificate, one that would open the door to real, responsible employment with a real salary and benefits.

It isn’t my fault that you didn’t do that, nor do I care to become your financial mommy or daddy.

You do know that with the Trump economy there are more skill jobs in the US than there are skilled workers? Wouldn’t the Zen of improving oneself be better than launching a political campaign to pull successful people down, to steal from them, and to destroy businesses that hire people who were smart enough to learn something useful? Oh, I know that your professors told you that you are a philosopher king and you weren’t meant to do anything useful, and that you are to control and orchestrate everything for the proletariat.

They lied.

Being that you are too lazy and to arrogant to learn anything useful and actually work, you could do one of the following for a short term lift in your fragile morale:

You could paint your house, or condo, or if you were never able to get a mortgage, and since you are young and employed part-time in a non-skill job, it is likely you don’t qualify for a loan ( whose fault is that?), then paint your rented apartment.

OR,

You could buy a new used car, maybe a Toyota to replace that old Subaru that rattles and pops as you drive it. You could show your new car off and brag about its energy efficiency- for six months until it gets repossessed after you have fallen three months behind on payments. Those predatory banks! They just live to repossess used cars and auction them off at losses.

OR,

Just buy a new pair of designer glasses, shoes, and lipstick. Maybe change your color from glister red to flat orange?

PLEASE DO ANYTHING BUT:

Push Democratic Socialism, or progressivism, or whatever label you and your Comintern handlers have put on those old tired, twisted, and deadly communist ideas.

Because when politicians start trying to redistribute the wealth, everyone ends up worse off.  You tear down the old houses, because they aren’t energy efficient or because they represent the oppression of the wealthy. Whatever excuse you use, you destroy good, warm, adequate structures. Then you build bleak high rises of uniform concrete 20 by 30 cells: cold concrete walls, concrete ceilings, concrete floors. Look beyond the “old town” of any socialist European city, and you’ll see them standing like a wall in the distance. What is it about your brain that you think it is bad for chickens to live in cages, but it is okay for people?

And when you confiscate wealth from the rich, it isn’t that they can only afford Lexus’s and everyone else now can have Toyotas. Rather it is that the once wealthy can now only buy Trabants, there is nothing else to buy, and the poor people only get bicycles. Why do the rich still have better transportation than the proletariat? Well, because, alas, they have skills which even the Democratic Socialists need to run the country.

Unsuccessful, uninsightful people think it sounds reasonable to tax wealth, i.e. the assets, of the wealthy, because, what the hell does anyone need that much money for anyway? They think a wealthy person, or maybe even a company can write a check for say 5% of his assets, because, well, doesn’t a rich person have all that money stored in her mattress or bank or vault? In truth the rich person’s assets are in buildings, machinery, and stocks of other businesses. That money is already helping businesses hire people and make things that people want and need. If the wealthy person has to sell a fraction of her wealth then a fraction of the businesses has to be dissolved and given to the government. In thus fashion the nation’s economic engine is slowly dismembered and handed over to the government.

So how important is capitalism to the United States? Do we really need all that intensity of production? Would it be wrong to chill a bit? I mean Europe is so relaxed: bla, bla, bla, social benefits, one month of vacation each year, bla bla, etc.….

Sounds great- to you. But does everyone really want to chill out and live a bla, bla life where someone else fulfills their needs because they can’t care for themselves?  Some people actually take pride in improving their lives, in being driven to success, and in having earned what they have. So if you really want socialist system, then go somewhere else; there are plenty of places to go.

Back to the question: Is capitalism that important to the US? How about we elevate the challenge: How important is capitalism, US capitalism, to the world?

The top economies in the world are more or less these from top downward: USA, China, EU, Japan, and India.

China, a communist country that was wallowing to near self-destruction in the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution, got bailed out by a bunch of American capitalists, who saw a huge cheap labor force there. The capitalists shook hands with the communists, who, upon the consummation of the deal, became fascists and herded the laborers into the factories. Were it not for capitalists, China would probably be like Venezuela today. 

EU: At the end of World War II, Europe was a pile of rubble, Germany more than anywhere else, but there was enough destruction that every government faced massive rebuilding. Where did the money come from? The US Marshall Plan, without which Western Europe would probably still be struggling. Also the US continued to infuse their economies through the presence of our troops, which pumped additional US dollars in to their local economies, and at the same time relieved those nations from the responsibility of developing and funding their own national security.

Japan: Ditto EU, regarding US aid after the war.

Mexico: Ditto China without the fascism/ communism 

You get the picture: US capitalism has put the top economies on their feet and continues to fuel them.

The problem with socialism is that it is conceives the supply of assets as static, an omnipresent pie, which they can parse and redistribute equitably-to their thinking. The pie, however is not static, but rather is a fluid, living entity and when they attempt to alter it in their ways, apple strudel becomes oatmeal, and less of it at that.