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shadowlightI find myself really puzzled by the repeated comments I see on the internetz that: a. government can't create jobs (anymore than they can make it rain)... followed by b. Government is Too Big and that's bad in general and/or for the economy. uuhhh....doesn't bigger govt mean a govt that's employing more people in, y'know, jobs? but apparently those jobs don't count because (hypnotized monotone--uh, I mean, c.) Corporations do everything better than Government does the equivalent thing. ...ok, some things, sure. but everything? schools?? generally, corporations tend to talk outwardly about how many jobs they'll create but inwardly measure their success by how much productivity they can squeeze out of the minimum number of people. In America, salary is an expense to be minimized... unless it's your salary.
I feel like people don't understand how the concept of money works. Money is not a god or a force of nature, it's just tokens we exchange for goods or services. (Even gold, Mr. Beck, is just a shiny rock if you can't exchange it for something useful. In a true societal collapse, gold is just piss-colored lead.) The money we don't spend on our neighbors' goods is money they can't spend on ours. You can save for later, bargain for better prices, gamble ... these are part of the game. ...but greed, price-gouging, loan sharking, theft, fraud, and price fixing/monopolies all break the game. That's why they've been illegal since the time of Moses. It is as if we programmed computers to play poker with us, and now they win all the time and we keep playing. A prime example: rising oil prices drive inflation because most businesses need oil to ship their goods, and/or heat their offices/stores/etc. so the price of everything else goes up and then no one's going to lower prices when everything else is so expensive now, so yeah... government can't make it rain, but they could pour water in better places than their lobbyists' swimming pools while farmers at the bottom of the hill are told to grow crops with what's trickling down to them.
I feel like people don't understand how the concept of money works. Money is not a god or a force of nature, it's just tokens we exchange for goods or services. (Even gold, Mr. Beck, is just a shiny rock if you can't exchange it for something useful. In a true societal collapse, gold is just piss-colored lead.) The money we don't spend on our neighbors' goods is money they can't spend on ours. You can save for later, bargain for better prices, gamble ... these are part of the game. ...but greed, price-gouging, loan sharking, theft, fraud, and price fixing/monopolies all break the game. That's why they've been illegal since the time of Moses. It is as if we programmed computers to play poker with us, and now they win all the time and we keep playing. A prime example: rising oil prices drive inflation because most businesses need oil to ship their goods, and/or heat their offices/stores/etc. so the price of everything else goes up and then no one's going to lower prices when everything else is so expensive now, so yeah... government can't make it rain, but they could pour water in better places than their lobbyists' swimming pools while farmers at the bottom of the hill are told to grow crops with what's trickling down to them.
no subject
on 2011-04-25 06:42 pm (UTC)