In my previous article, Understand Bank Runs or Get Run Over, I ended with:
“An economy where very few people produce, and a lot of people consume does not continue forever. How it stops and who gets hurt is what we will eventually find out. I will leave how not to get hurt for another article.”
In this article, we are going to look at how not to get hurt. In my previous article, I used “an extreme simplification that describes our economy.” The reason I am doing this is there is a saying: “not seeing the forest for the trees.” Well, people can also not see the trees for the forest. That is important because if the tree falls on your tent you may end up dead. So, to keep from getting hurt from the bank runs, we need to look at individual trees and also look at the forest. Years ago, we had a severe windstorm, and the wind blew some trees down that knocked other trees down. Eventually, there were huge areas where all the trees were blown down. If you were in that forest, you likely would have been crushed. If you knew where to hide, you would have been safe.
The reason I keep mentioning the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay and my article about it, is because people need to understand that “if the herd goes mad, get out of the herd.” If you cannot see that in our country that the herd has gone mad, you need to start looking. My point is we cannot keep wasting our time trying to save everyone or trying to do everything at once. As they tell us on the airplanes, put your oxygen mask on first or you and the person you want to save may both be dead.
Yes, if enough people unite to tell the mad ones “no,” we solve the problems. However, that happens by each one of us opting out of the madness. We need to be an example of why the mad ones are suffering at their own hands. That is why they keep trying to force us to do what they are doing. That is why so many people keep saying that if we don’t do whatever they are crying about, they will control us forever. The power is in you and the power is in me. The most powerful words in the world are: “No, thank you!”
We need to understand this is not a “hate the rich” issue. That is a political tool by which they try and manipulate us. Being so called rich, in and of itself, is not bad. It is the “how” that is important. If I work 80 hours a week raising cattle, chickens, and growing a garden, and I can end up with more food than I can consume, that is a good thing. That is a form of wealth. If I freeze dry and other things to make it so the food can be stored for a long period of time, I have stored wealth. Storing wealth in the form of money is useless if there is no food to by with the money.
Many of the billionaires that go to the World Economic Forum got their money trading in the stock market. I have taken classes over the years in how to be a stock trader, and I can tell you, it is not a free market. The Federal Reserve keeps creating money, claiming they need to stimulate the economy, and these billionaires get that money through the stock market.
I will use Amazon as an example. A few years ago I read an article about Amazon’s stock trading at 300 times earnings. The article pointed out that they earned 1 dollar as they were selling $300.00 for a share of stock. With that ratio, the company’s stock was likely overvalued. I remember thinking at that time that a store in my local town probably would not be able to compete with a system like that. The reason this matters to you is you need a local community. You need fairness in the market place. Go on a road trip and drive through some decaying areas. Most of those decaying areas happened because they could not compete with the companies and areas that got the created money first.
Here is where it gets very important to you. If you are part of the productive class, like my example of working 80 hours a week raising cattle, chickens, and growing a garden, you can only produce a certain amount. Some people are extremely productive and they still hit a maximum amount of output. People also need a certain amount to survive. The government says: “Yes we know this, and that is why we take from that greedy guy’s excess, and give it to the poor people that do not have enough to survive. This is also a political tool they with which they try and manipulate us.
The political class constantly parades the poor out in front of us, justifying their taking the excess from the productive class, and very few people notice that the billionaire class ends up with most of it. Why this matters to you is this kills the incentive to be productive. If someone shows up at your door, kills you and your family, and then takes all the food you produced, that is a theft through violent crime. If they show up at your door and give you pieces of paper they claim is money, and you give them all the food you produced, that is a theft through fraud crime. Both are bad, but the problem with fraud is many victims do not know they have been defrauded. Sometimes, some of the people committing the fraud do not know they are being used by the people that do know. Regardless of where you are in this, you should want it to stop.
Killing the incentive to be productive hurts everyone because eventually, people quit producing.
In the book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds,” many of the people who thought they were rich, eventually ended up poor. To have a healthy economy, we need healthy forms of wealth. Our economy has way too much unhealthy wealth. Just because the Federal Reserve has been doing this a long time and thinks it is good, does not prove it is good. It is not good, it is bad. Just like an alcoholic can go many years thinking getting drunk is a good thing, but when he dies from cirrhosis of the liver, he is proven wrong.
That is the question with which we are left. How bad will the economy need to get before people will say, “This stops, and it stops now.” Suicides, poverty and misery are horrible things we all should want to avoid. We need to stop this sham economy. It does not matter if the parasite class and the political class want it to continue. We can stop it. At least you can stop it for you. That is where it begins. One person at a time eventually becomes a lot of people. I have been on this journey for a while now, but I would like more people to join me.
Learning how it started and where we are now, are important things to know before we can know where to go, and how to get there. I will leave where to go and how to get there for another article.
