patches70 wrote:
I pity the poor bastard who is relying on a politician to swoop in and save them from the very abyss often self inflicted or caused by the State. Hey, if Bernie wanted people to make more money how about NOT taxing their income?
I don't want anyone robbing someone else to give me a pittance of the money stolen or even a single dime of such stolen money. Robbing from the rich to give to the poor is a romantic and morally reprehensible thing to do and it's from a freaking fairy tale. It's still stealing and not to mention trying to apply a fairy tale morality to reality isn't the best idea.
Have to stop you right there, cowboy, because you're riding down the wrong trail fast. Robbing from the rich to give to the poor may be morally reprehensible if you take the assumption that the rich are entitled to their money, but most of the rich stole their money from you to begin with, and there's nothing reprehensible about stealing back from a thief.
Let's start with the top of the list, the Limited Liability Corporation. Now, here's a scam that has been run for hundreds of years and is still accelerating. Corporations borrow a pile of money, sell a bunch of shoddy products, work their employees hard. For this, the officers and directors pay themselves huge bonuses. Then there's a downturn in the economy, company goes tits up. The creditors get ripped off, the customers get ripped off (because they're just now finding out how shit the product is, and the warranty is now worthless) and the employees get ripped off (they'll probably get their final paycheque after a bit of a delay, but they'll probably lose their pension, etc.) The officers and directors walk away with everything they looted from the place. Everybody loses except the authors of the scam. This is legalized theft, and the right to steal in that manner is enforced by the power of the State.
Absent the state, if someone was unable to pay his debt to you, and you saw that he himself was destitute, you might be tempted to forgive the debt. But if you saw him collecting a five million dollar bonus during a quarter when the company was going down the toilet, if you saw him riding around in a Maserati and handing out diamonds to his mistresses, you probably wouldn't be so forgiving. But this is exactly the situation that the State forces you to accept.
Okay, that's the tip of the iceberg. Number two. Fiat currency and legal tender laws. This is several scams in one. The bankers inflate the currency, they pay themselves first. The inflation of the money supply leads to price inflation, but by then
they've already spent the money. By the time you get it, prices are going up and your paycheque is worth less than it was when you contracted to work for that sum, but the important thing is that the people who made the bubble got to spend it and buy assets with the money
before the prices went up. So, they bought things at yesterday's prices, but by the time the money works its way down the food chain you'll be buying things at tomorrow's prices.
Legal tender laws make it impossible to protect yourself from this scam. You have to accept the devaluing money, because the bankers control the government and the government says this is the coin of the realm, na na na na na na naaaa!
Then they play this pulsing with the fiat currency, which they call the business cycle, but actually should be called the scam cycle. They pump out shitloads of funny money and everybody thinks they're rich and runs out to buy a bunch of stuff they can't afford. Then the money supply is cut and suddenly everyone is declaring bankruptcy and the bankers pick up a lot of nice houses at firesale prices. Lather, rinse, repeat. With every cycle the bankers have a bit larger percentage of the nation's wealth, without really creating anything at all. This is legalized theft, and the right to steal in that manner is enforced by the power of the State.
Okay, we all know the bankers are thieves, but certainly people that make honest products aren't, are they? Well, let's have a look at just some of these. Car manufacturers, let's say. The quarter-panel on your late-model car is a piece of extruded plastic that costs about five bucks to squeeze out of the plastic extrusion machine. Need to get one replaced? $1400. Now, I understand, everybody needs to make a living, supply chains cost money, etc., etc., but the process by which this $5 piece of plastic becomes a $1400 commodity has nothing to do with costs or supply chains and everything to do with bullshit patents. Hey, I'm all in favour of rewarding ingenuity and granting patents to inventors, but the patent on the quarter panel for your car has nothing to do with inventors. There's no tech there that we didn't already have 35 years ago. The quarter panel on your car is probably almost identical to another car like yours that was made a year earlier. Some little cosmetic change was made, and you probably don't even know what it is, but that little change allowed them to get a new design patent which means that aftermarket competitors won't be able to make that part for you. We're told competition will bring down the price of goods, but these bogus design patents exist precisely so no competition exists and the price never goes down. This is legalized theft, and the right to steal in that manner is enforced by the power of the State.
I suppose even with the patents, aftermarket manufacturers would fill the niche, through the black market if necessary. If people had to pay for those parts out-of-pocket, they would rebel and break the law and build secret manufacturing facilities of their own. But that kind of rebellion is prevented because nobody pays directly for those parts. They pay for them, oh yes! The dearly pay for them! But invisibly, through another little scam called mandatory liability insurance. Thus, everybody pays, a bit at a time, and don't even realize how badly they're getting screwed. And when the bill for the quarter-panel comes in, they say "well, I guess I paid for it already" and shrug their shoulders. Yes, they did pay for it already! But they would never have paid that amount if they had to hand over the cash at the time of the installation. The pain was spread out over many years, and it's already in the past. This is legalized theft, and the right to steal in that manner is enforced by the power of the State.
Here's one of my favourite stories, from when I drove courier. The $22 pack of matches. Now, you can go into a store and get a pack of matches for 5 cents. Back then it was 2 cents. But one of our clients would pay me to go to the safety supply company and buy a pack of matches. The pack cost $12 and I charged them another $10 to deliver it, so $22 total. The pack of matches had the stamp of an engineer on it, and it was "guaranteed to produced smoke." Now, any fucking match will produce smoke -- if you got one that won't smoke, just bring it to me and I'll make it smoke. But these guys couldn't use an ordinary pack of matches from the corner store, because they were running a hotel, and their insurance company wouldn't renew their insurance policy unless they tested their smoke alarms with matches guaranteed to produce smoke. So somewhere out there is a clever engineer who takes 2 cent packs of matches, puts his stamp on them, and makes them into $22 packs of matches. He's got a license to print money; the insurance companies maintain his license, and in turn the government maintains theirs. This is legalized theft, and the right to steal in that manner is enforced by the power of the State.
Which brings us to the next scam -- barriers to entry and the university degree. The engineer is an engineer because he had parents who could afford to send him to a very expensive university and get him an engineering degree. Now, this is the Internet Age. All the knowlege to become and engineer is out there, free to anyone who wants to learn. But no matter how much knowledge you accumulate, it doesn't mean shit unless you get a piece of paper from a semi-monopolistic institution saying you're an engineer. That piece of paper will cost you (in my country) about $60,000 to procure and (in your country) quite possibly five times as much. Don't get me wrong -- I'm all in favour of high standards, but we could let people study on their own and bring them in for rigorous testing at the end to make sure they're not bullshitting, and we could probably maintain really high standards for a few hundred, not thousand, dollars. Licensing boards, universities, professional associations, are all part of a rigged system to make sure that high-paying jobs only go to those who already have a lot of money. This is legalized theft, and the right to steal in that manner is enforced by the power of the State.
I could go on and on, but it's been an hour already and my fingers hurt.
Bottom line, the rich are not innocents. The laws are written to make sure the rich get richer. LLCs, fiat currency and all its derivatives, legal ternder laws, eminent domain (I didn't get into that one -- basically the process by which a developer can acquire "rights" by paying off a handful of politicians instead of a large number of homeowners), mandatory insurance, bloated patent and copyright laws, licensing and other barriers to entry -- these are all parts of a system that fucks you over regularly, constantly. Unless you're camping in the high Andes and eating grubs, you can't get away from all the perfectly legal ways the rich have to rob you.
Socialism isn't about robbing innocent bodies. Socialism is about Robin Hood taking from a very corrupt Sheriff of Nottingham.
