Money, Everything is about Money Ch. 03

You do make us think Susan! Sometimes I wonder if the USA is just going through the motions?

As I read this most recent entry from our talented scribe, it really has me thinking how the media influences our lives, or shall I say we let influence and control our lives. Grocery stores do it by having specials or sales to entice you to by soda, chip, snacks and beer for the Super Bowl parties regardless whether you are a football fan or not, you are being told it's the thing to do this weekend. Those 7 fellows controlling the media has the 'so called sponsors' forking over millions of dollars to convince us to by a new Ford truck, drink Red's Apple Ale or eat a Snicker candy bar. I have a whole different outlook on going grocery shopping tonight and am seriously going to think about if I really want cable TV any longer. This article should be in the New York TImes or Wall Street Journal, but alas! The power people would never allow truth like this to be printed. Thank you Susan Jill Parker, Thank you Literorica for allowing such a powerful chapter to be presented to the few who will take the time to read and think... Think, Think, Think, people, this lady has more than a pretty face and a way with erotic words! :) jaybird :)

Unadulterated crap...

Once when I was writing a chapter for a book (non-fiction), one of the reviewers said of one of my fellow authors (a well-known econmist and professor) that his chapter was 'flatulent blather." Just how I felt about this inane, rambling diatribe.

7 Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

or perhaps the 7 Deadly Syn(dicate)s... there are few things as dangerous as independent thought. MLK Day passed recently & Black History Month is upon us; I am reminded of a MLK quote that seems apt, having read your brilliant essay, which I will paraphrase, if not quote verbatim, so please forgive me if my recollection is imperfect: "True evil is not bad people doing bad things, but good people standing idly by while bad people do bad things." Let us no more stand idly by, let us stand up, now that we're mad as hell, and indeed not take it any more...

I think you're missing the key issue Susan

I agree that the United States has got massive financial inequality, but trying to compete with low wage workers in manufacturing jobs isn't the issue, nor is an American issue. No western country can compete for low wage manufacturing jobs. The problems in the USA stem from a ridiculously low minimum wage, lousy health cover (though improved through Obamacare) and, most importantly, the absolutely insane cost of American college education. The future for USA, and all western countries, is in skilled work, the business services sector, trades, high quality and high end manufacturing. Hollywood doesn't produced the cheapest movies, but they make money because they are the best. The thing is you need affordable tertiary education, which you haven't got.

Money is not the problem

You are quite wrong, everything is not about money. It is about productivity.

A long time ago, on the great savanna, the entire tribe depended on those who hunted and gathered. Some were better at providing for the tribe, some were worse. All brought the fruits of their labors to the tribe where they were divided. At that time, the most productive at hunting and gathering might not get as much as one who was not so productive. But what could he do? The transaction costs of going to another tribe were prohibitive.

But today it is different. If, for instance, a worker feels underrewarded relative to the work they are doing, it has NEVER been easier to take your talents to those who will reward that worker with more. There is still a transaction cost to moving, a risk associated with cutting old ties and moving on, but as information is widely available, the ease and variety available from which to select a change makes it easier, safer, and more flexible so the market for ones labors becomes more about how productive one is and less about needs.

So the question arises, how should one be rewarded for labor? Companies must pay workers based on productivity, because if they don't, the workers may leave. In turn, companies are rewarded in the market place based on productivity. Competition in the market is limited only by transaction costs. Again, those have never been lower, so competition has never been higher.

Consider, the variation in productivity of workers today has never been higher. Those with knowledge can apply that knowledge to raise the standard of their fellows higher, easier, with lower transaction costs, than ever before. On the other side, those without useful knowledge have never been in a worse position in history. A half century ago, one could joke about somebody being so stupid they were only fit to did ditches. Today, we need very few ditch diggers, because machines are so very productive at the work.

Consider 3 workers:

Alex looks at computer code and, in an hour, finds a way to change the code to save half a second for every one of the millions who apply for health insurance online. 50 years ago, this job was inconceivable.

Jan spends 30 hours writing and polishing a story sold online, netting a few pennies per copy downloaded from a few thousand readers on Amazon. 50 years ago, Jan's work would never have been published as the transaction cost was too high.

Sam spends 10 hours a day for 3 weeks solid, living in the folks basement, writing an internet porn epic that contains the germ of a good idea, but is so full of bad spelling, poor punctuation, typos, monster paragraphs, changes in voice and other errors so as to be unreadable. Sam contends that all english teachers harbor a deep-seated hatred of Sam. 50 years ago, Sam might have been a ditch digger.

All three need the same essentials of life. Does their writing justify that they be GIVEN what they need? Of course not.

Money is not the difference. Productivity is.

Manual labor has become less valuable today than it was yesterday.

Knowledge and the ability to adapt the knowledge you have, and to learn more, have become more valuable today than they were yesterday.

Finally, the premium earned by the transaction makers of society, such as the car sales person, the bank teller, the stock broker, the union boss, these others who made up so much of the middle class, find they are now going inevitably the way of the dodo bird.

Pat

Pat, the 0.01% love you.
You are indeed a propagandist for the Rich. Productivity has never been higher and yet that same 0.01% that SJP points to is not only unwilling to come down out of their Gated Towers, but they are cheering you on.

SJP, good points, but you forgot to mention, or I missed it, that the Thieves of Wall Street are also playing a rigged game whereby the actual producers of goods and services are getting ripped off at a rate not seen since the Gilded Age.

Money

No it isn't all money. It is the rich buying the government and the combination using POWER generated by money to erode freedom. 9/11 is being used as a tool to hold formerly free people hostage to what is called conservatism, but is really the use of force. The latest proposed changes to the internet will make it a tool of propagandists and not free discource.

I saw 1984 in 1969 when Army Intelligence hid out in a Navy medical clinic to infiltrate peaceful demonstrators opposing a war that killed over fifty thousand Americans and millions of Vietnamese in a war that gained nothing for either side. South Vietnam was corrupt and did not warrant the support given by the US government. I saw South Vietnamese troops who were small and thin while the officers were tall and bulky.

Things have not reversed. They are worse.

I fear that if we don't stop what we are doing soon we will be on the ash heap of history just like the Romans. And our leaders ride rough shod over the rest of the world, the retaliation will make 9/11 seem insignificant.

Yes, we have to band together, but what do we do then?

Susan, great essay.

You need to look at Modern Money Theory to see what we need to do.

The understand all you have to do is --

1] Open your mind, but be careful that everything doesn't leak out.
2] google MMT with Prof. Wray.
3] Read what you find there.
4] Remember even 1 false premis in a proof makes the proof useless, and economists never copy Euclid [think plane geometry] and list all their assumptions up front for everyone to see. They do this because some of them are obviously false, so their proofs are useless.

I fled the country and live on Soc. Sec. in SE Asia. I swam up streem from 1970 to 2014 and I ended up much further down stream than when I started. Meaning I saw it happening but could not stop the crushing of the American MiddleCclass. It is up to younger people now.