Suicide at New Ruskin College
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
Lecture Notes: 03-17-05 Betrayal III
A car was found on the Oakland Bay Bridge with a flat tire. Abandoned. Later the owner was found floating in the bay.
It was theorized that that had been it, the flat tire, that literally pushed him over the edge.
The people on the radio could hardly restrain themselves. It seemed so amusing to them; that over the edge.
Lieutenant: “Sire, he wants to know if you are going to make him walk behind your chariot tomorrow when we return to the capital?”
Emperor: “Let him decide.”
We all have our limits. (But when you have been targeted for a few weeks you start to get sensitive. Then after a few months you become ill tempered. And after a few years distraught. Over a decade withdrawn, isolated, ready to jump.)
I imagined there must have been others on the bridge who saw the stranded motorist climb the rail. Did they report what they saw? Or did they just drive on? And the flat tire . . . was it his first? Or had they done to him what they have done to me? What they did to Duane Garrett? Had he been followed for months, years, someone sabotaging his tires? Interfering with his employment? Conniving with his marriage counselor to betray him? Perhaps even repeating things he had said in private, when no one else was around?
“One man wants to remember the Holocaust because his parents and brothers and sisters were killed. Another man wants to remember the Holocaust because his aunt and uncle and cousins were killed. And another man wants to remember because of all those who were killed. And another person wants the Holocaust remembered so she can park her car in a red no parking zone.” (The leftwing journalist who repeated this line, on the radio, never came forward to give evidence.)
Now when I read about someone shooting a bunch of people before killing himself, I wonder: What did they do? Or I read about someone jumping from the bridge, I think, did Ron Owens or Michael Weiner have anything to do with this too? Is that why the people on the radio were so amused by “over the edge”? Did they know something?
At first over the first few years I had thought that someone, some how, justice would be done. Or not. Life goes on. Doesn’t it? Time will pass. If I only just stop writing those letters, in time they will forget. But even as slow as I am, after twelve years you start to see how it is going to be. It must just be me. Perhaps I should have done things differently. The exception that proves the rule?
But now I see that there is nothing exceptional about it. When I said earlier that I expected nothing some of you did not believe me. Bernie Ward keeps talking like he thinks I expect something from him. I do not. Gene Burns has felt compelled to repeat I do not know how many times, “Sometimes the answer is ‘no.’” One time, immediatley after a posting here, he actually began a show with that, --- started talking: Sometimes the answer is no.
Don’t you guys understand? I gave up on you along time ago. The Last Letter was fourteen years ago. I don’t expect anything.
This alienation is the norm. Don’t most people know it already or are they still as I have been: deluded? Living in a dream world? America. Justice. Freedom.
And those who do see it? What of them? Can they see the pitiful nakedness of humanity? And stay sane?
This is why I do not understand the leftwing hostility to markets. For most people, most of the time, this is their only connection. Without markets we would have no connection with one another. But then maybe they are deluded. Do they really think that there is anything else holding most of humanity together? Without markets we would be like the old Soviet Union or China under Mao.
It may not be much but it is all we got. And quite a bit of information is conveyed in the price: The cost of raw materials, labor, shipping, interest rates, taxes, the ability of entrepreneurs to satisfy consumer’s needs, on and on . . .
There is first their stomachs. Then their children’s stomachs. Then maybe they think about a spouse. From this core they reach out into society. The material goods ‘which are indispensable for all worldly culture’ as Weber put it. The whole of the interaction with the world, society, is this dollar for that, that for this, and so on. The narrow horizon of survival. Yet without this, this market, there would be no way for any interaction. You would let them starve to death, go without homes. Perhaps only those of us who have been truly alienated, destroyed, can see you for what you are, beasts, isolated in the herd.
After several Lecture Notes on zoning codes and state interference with the housing market in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Gene Burns felt compelled to explain that his “libertarianism” was not a “doctrine”. He for one recognized the need for zoning and building regulations to limit the supply of housing.
Yet without the market to inform you, to intermediate between the various people, buyers, sellers, yes, and all the others, the owners of land who had not thought about it, the builders who were otherwise engaged, the capitalists who might have invested in Shanghai as the Outer Sunset.
Without the market how would you know? What other possible way is there to allocate resources, to intermediate between all these people? Mr. Blair likes to talk about the “third way.” But this is a mere empty phrase. There is no third way. So far there has been the market which has been studied intensively for two hundred or so years. There has been the communist proposal to organize economic activity, but which did not allow for economic calculation, and failed as a result. There has not been a third proposal.
In Britain also government interference with the market has driven up the cost of housing in Southern England, where people want to live, have to live, because close to government, where all the important decisions are made. But this hardly constitutes a third way. Without the market to intermediate between them the British also each year become more and more estranged from one another, alienated.
The San Francisco Chronicle explained to its subscribers in a recent editorial that for some reason unknown to the editorialist market forces have simply stopped working in San Francisco. Everywhere else in the known universe markets work but not here not in housing. There is demand. Last year house prices rose 25%. In one year! 25% on a base several times the national average.
Inexplicable said the editorialist. There is plenty of capital. Just look at the interest rates. The city has zoned areas for building the editorialist assured us. Land, capital, labor, materials, and demand, demand, demand. Fortunes to be made. 25% in one year! (And that is not 25% on the invested amount, that is 25% on the selling price. It might be 50% on the cost to build the home. On a cash basis, return on actual dollars invested the return might be more than 1000% in one year! The Mafia does not get that kind of action!!) But for some unknown reason . . . no housing.
Bernie Ward also has no explanation. “I’m just a simple boy from the Sunset,” he says. Of course the British Prime Minister is clueless too. In Southern England, San Francisco, Boston, New York, markets have just stopped working. Remarkable.
After his father died Bernie Ward appeared on his late night radio show, sobbing. “It does make me feel better,” he moaned, “It does make me feel better. . . (sob) . . . to think of my father in heaven with my other (sob) family members, altogether . . . .”
Bernie Ward on his Sunday morning show, God Talk, regularly ridicules Americans who have “not continued their religious education after Sunday School;” Whereas he, Bernie Ward, had graduated from a Seminary School he likes to boast.
And what is his religious education? He believes in the “happy hunting ground”? So when Mr. Ward goes to heaven and embraces his father, what? They will want to embrace for an hour? A day? A year? A million years? A billion years? Eternity? You are glad to see him but . . . and how old will the gentlemen be? Will Bernie be older than his father? That would be weird.
Did they ruminate over these issues in the seminary? Workout all the details did they? And what is this but another example of alienation? Religion as another form of alienation.
It is true that Jesus taught that if you believe in him you can find eternal life. But do you suppose He meant you, as an isolated ego, and alienated individual? If you believe in what? A happy hunting ground where all the family egos get together in and eternal bear hug? The ego in perpetuity?
Jesus taught everlasting life not by identifying with your limited ego. You find everlasting life in the body of Christ. This is his body this is his blood. Identify with life. Believe in the life of the world to come. Life is with the people.
But Bernie Ward has completely missed the point. He has gone in the opposite direction. He identifies with his limited ego. And those figures immediately around him. Ancestor worship. The eventual reunion of these isolated egos, this family group, in the happy hunting ground. This is primitivism. It is also alienation.
And for him politics also is like his religion. He believes in things more out of desperation than due to reasoned argument. He really believes you can have progressive taxation and make the rich pay more, or ‘their fair share’ as he would put it, without wage and price control. You can explain to him that without wage and price control the rich will simply collect their “fair share” from the consumers, but it will make no difference to him. He is not really listening. For him it is not a subject for reason but belief.
Recently he was on the phone with the operator of a Contra Costa County soup kitchen, (the Lord’s work), and the budget shortfall of $500,000 was mentioned. ‘How could that be?’ asked Bernie Ward. Where, oh where is our common humanity? He did not stop to reflect that Contra Costa County is a blue county. That it is in a state that has been for years run by Democrats: both houses of the state legislature, the governor’s office until a movie star recently moved in, also they control the judiciary.
That this party, his party, has controlled the nine counties of the Bay Area for generations, for "hundreds of years" as Ralph Nader pointed out during his election campaign, does not signify to Bernie.
Whose party is in control? His! Whose budget shortfall is it? His! Being Post Liberal means never having to take responsibility. Then the soup kitchen operator mentioned that the County’s total budget shortfall was $50 million. Mr. Ward had nothing to say about this bit of news.
His party has controlled the San Francisco Bay Area for generations. Has down zoned and down zoned decade after decade, blocked development of every kind, including housing, managed the schools to ever lower standards, encouraged workers to abuse the workers compensation system, including a series of retiring police chiefs who have made huge claims just before retiring, (who will watch the watchers?), torn down freeways, the ones they did not allow to simply fall down in shambles due to lack of repair, allowed its bridges to deteriorate even faster than its roads, were even then planning on building the world’s largest single tower self anchored bridge, (Why the world’s largest? Because no one else would dare such a project, especially in a high earthquake zone such as the Bay Area with its two (2) major faults), and about all of this, and the taxes, and the regulations upon regulations, about all of this the fat Bernie Ward has absolutely nothing to say.
He knows that there is not going to be a happy hunting ground in heaven for his fat relentless ego. He knows this. He knows his party has controlled the housing, highways and schools, the taxes, the state, municipal, yes, and the county governments, he knows about the abuse of the workers comp system, the featherbedding at every level of government, he knows that if his party ever got its hands on the medical system they would soon set into that like maggots into dead meat, he knows and yet reason can not be applied to any of this. His belief is religious, i.e. utterly alienated.
He tolerates all of this, the same way he maintains his belief in the happy hunting ground with his father’s ego traipsing around in a cloud landscape: He simply wills himself to believe, all evidence to the contrary not withstanding.
But what is this but alienation? Alienation from community, from God? Alienation from reason itself.
And you might say ‘but this isn’t fair, Bernie Ward doesn’t know anything about economics.’ This is not fair? OK, Bob Brinker was on the radio condemning any reduction in benefits for the top 20% of Social Security recipients. A group whose non Social Security income is double (2 times) the national median income. Twice the income of a family that must buy housing at today’s prices, must send their children to schools, (and miserable schools they are), who must buy everything at today’s prices unlike the top 20% of Social Security recipients.
Bob Brinker hissed in his scalding way that “they will have turned all your Social Security contributions into an income tax.” Then he grumbled, “they never saw a tax they did not like.” (“Contributions”? Has Bob Brinker lost his mind? Contributions?)
Brinker knows perfectly well that nothing has been contributed. All those taxes were spent on other Social Security recipients, a long time ago, decades ago. Contributions? What a liar. And those taxes were paid when there were still ten, eight, five tax payers for each recipient. Now we are down to 3.
Limbaugh was on the radio explaining that “Social Security is not a welfare program.” And then he repeated that observation a few more times. Then he explained that “Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.” So what was his point? Not welfare? What is he saying? How does Ponzi scheme aid our understanding?
It is true that if a private entrepreneur were to put forward a “benefit plan”, a “retirement plan”, a “savings plan”, in which “contributions”, would be “deposited”, in a “lock box”, and these “individual accounts”, would be held “in trust accounts”, for the “beneficiaries”, etc, such as the Social Security System, he would be arrested for fraud.
But why the “not a welfare program”? Of course it is a welfare program! What point is Mr. Limbaugh trying to make? He has no point. He is not moving his audience to explore some new area, to expand the general understanding. He is not trying to explain anything. “not a welfare program” are just some words he has strung together. He is making no distinctions.
But then neither is Mr. Brinker. He knows that the Social Security funds were not invested but spent. Spent to keep the old out of poverty. A maintenance income for most of them. But not all.
Some Social Security “beneficiaries” bank their checks. If they did not get the check they would only be able to take one or two cruises a year instead of the five or six they now enjoy. Their homes, paid for before the real estate bubble, (a bubble their own restrictive growth policies helped create), would not be manicured twice a week by the illegal Mexican gardeners, (illegals who are in the country because of the lacks border enforcement that their policies have created). Their children have grown up in a better country, and gone to better schools, before the education inflation drove colleges out of the reach of the middle class, schools the 3 workers who must now carry them will never be able to attend, in part because the technology that might have made continuing education available was not thought important by these now retired community leaders.
And Mr. Brinker knows that not only are there are no “trust funds” and that their “contributions” have all been spent, he knows the other side of the coin. He knows that these payroll deductions are coming from young workers, (only three for each retiree), who have come under intense competition from Chinese workers and others from around the world. Knows the down word pressure on their wages like at no other time in history. Knows too that the of repeated admonition that these young workers need to get a college education in order to improve their condition is illusory. Illusory because due to the bell curve distribution of cognitive ability only the top 16% to 25% of young workers even have a chance. Illusory too because the cartel operation of the colleges themselves, stifles competition and manipulates prices forcing them ever higher faster than general inflation, saddling young people with huge cartel created debt, which is not dischargeable for any reason, not due to unemployment, injury, or even death.
Mr. Brinker knows all this. Knows the unfairness of making young workers in the bottom 50% of income, (family incomes under $43,000 a year), pay for retirees with non Social Security incomes of over $75,000. Knows that these retirees have accumulated their homes, their accounts, their ease, over many years under far more favorable conditions than those being experienced by those who must now carry them, the 3 workers, who must struggle under these much more difficult circumstances, circumstances which themselves result from the failed policies conceived and carried out by these very same rich retirees.
Mr. Brinker knows these things more clearly than Rush Limbaugh, or Bernie Ward, and yet still these facts fail to register with him. He sees the unfairness, but he does not comprehend.
And this incomprehension? Is it not another example of alienation?
And see that if Social Security were truly a market creation we would not have to write about it, or discuss it, or consider how it works. The market would intermediate for us, between us. We would not have to weigh the relative conditions of being a husband and wife with two children with less than $35,000 a year compared to a retiree with over $75,000 a year in non Social Security income. What is just?
Considering the conditions for a man of 30 with an IQ of 103 and a wife and two children? Is it just that he pay 12.5% of his income to a man of 68 whose IQ even now is still 128, two degrees on his study wall, in his $1.5 million home, with no debts, a pension under the old plan before the ‘give backs’ of the 1990s, etc, etc. And all of this in a county from which economic activity has been systematically excluded since the 1970s, down zoned and down zoned and employers driven away, while the immigration laws have been dropped to supply the cheap labor that services the selfish old bastard. Illegals because they can not vote and disturb the hegemony of the Post Liberal elite. What is just?
All these relationships could have been worked out privately with voluntary choices. It is only because of the mandates, the taxes, the restrictive zoning, the state's distortion of the market by powerful elites, that we must find some way of considering all of these many issues.
But how can we? We have no common language anymore. No common ethic. We are each of us alienated one from the other. We have been betrayed.
You decide.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
Lecture Notes: 03-17-05 Betrayal III
A car was found on the Oakland Bay Bridge with a flat tire. Abandoned. Later the owner was found floating in the bay.
It was theorized that that had been it, the flat tire, that literally pushed him over the edge.
The people on the radio could hardly restrain themselves. It seemed so amusing to them; that over the edge.
Lieutenant: “Sire, he wants to know if you are going to make him walk behind your chariot tomorrow when we return to the capital?”
Emperor: “Let him decide.”
We all have our limits. (But when you have been targeted for a few weeks you start to get sensitive. Then after a few months you become ill tempered. And after a few years distraught. Over a decade withdrawn, isolated, ready to jump.)
I imagined there must have been others on the bridge who saw the stranded motorist climb the rail. Did they report what they saw? Or did they just drive on? And the flat tire . . . was it his first? Or had they done to him what they have done to me? What they did to Duane Garrett? Had he been followed for months, years, someone sabotaging his tires? Interfering with his employment? Conniving with his marriage counselor to betray him? Perhaps even repeating things he had said in private, when no one else was around?
“One man wants to remember the Holocaust because his parents and brothers and sisters were killed. Another man wants to remember the Holocaust because his aunt and uncle and cousins were killed. And another man wants to remember because of all those who were killed. And another person wants the Holocaust remembered so she can park her car in a red no parking zone.” (The leftwing journalist who repeated this line, on the radio, never came forward to give evidence.)
Now when I read about someone shooting a bunch of people before killing himself, I wonder: What did they do? Or I read about someone jumping from the bridge, I think, did Ron Owens or Michael Weiner have anything to do with this too? Is that why the people on the radio were so amused by “over the edge”? Did they know something?
At first over the first few years I had thought that someone, some how, justice would be done. Or not. Life goes on. Doesn’t it? Time will pass. If I only just stop writing those letters, in time they will forget. But even as slow as I am, after twelve years you start to see how it is going to be. It must just be me. Perhaps I should have done things differently. The exception that proves the rule?
But now I see that there is nothing exceptional about it. When I said earlier that I expected nothing some of you did not believe me. Bernie Ward keeps talking like he thinks I expect something from him. I do not. Gene Burns has felt compelled to repeat I do not know how many times, “Sometimes the answer is ‘no.’” One time, immediatley after a posting here, he actually began a show with that, --- started talking: Sometimes the answer is no.
Don’t you guys understand? I gave up on you along time ago. The Last Letter was fourteen years ago. I don’t expect anything.
This alienation is the norm. Don’t most people know it already or are they still as I have been: deluded? Living in a dream world? America. Justice. Freedom.
And those who do see it? What of them? Can they see the pitiful nakedness of humanity? And stay sane?
This is why I do not understand the leftwing hostility to markets. For most people, most of the time, this is their only connection. Without markets we would have no connection with one another. But then maybe they are deluded. Do they really think that there is anything else holding most of humanity together? Without markets we would be like the old Soviet Union or China under Mao.
It may not be much but it is all we got. And quite a bit of information is conveyed in the price: The cost of raw materials, labor, shipping, interest rates, taxes, the ability of entrepreneurs to satisfy consumer’s needs, on and on . . .
There is first their stomachs. Then their children’s stomachs. Then maybe they think about a spouse. From this core they reach out into society. The material goods ‘which are indispensable for all worldly culture’ as Weber put it. The whole of the interaction with the world, society, is this dollar for that, that for this, and so on. The narrow horizon of survival. Yet without this, this market, there would be no way for any interaction. You would let them starve to death, go without homes. Perhaps only those of us who have been truly alienated, destroyed, can see you for what you are, beasts, isolated in the herd.
After several Lecture Notes on zoning codes and state interference with the housing market in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Gene Burns felt compelled to explain that his “libertarianism” was not a “doctrine”. He for one recognized the need for zoning and building regulations to limit the supply of housing.
Yet without the market to inform you, to intermediate between the various people, buyers, sellers, yes, and all the others, the owners of land who had not thought about it, the builders who were otherwise engaged, the capitalists who might have invested in Shanghai as the Outer Sunset.
Without the market how would you know? What other possible way is there to allocate resources, to intermediate between all these people? Mr. Blair likes to talk about the “third way.” But this is a mere empty phrase. There is no third way. So far there has been the market which has been studied intensively for two hundred or so years. There has been the communist proposal to organize economic activity, but which did not allow for economic calculation, and failed as a result. There has not been a third proposal.
In Britain also government interference with the market has driven up the cost of housing in Southern England, where people want to live, have to live, because close to government, where all the important decisions are made. But this hardly constitutes a third way. Without the market to intermediate between them the British also each year become more and more estranged from one another, alienated.
The San Francisco Chronicle explained to its subscribers in a recent editorial that for some reason unknown to the editorialist market forces have simply stopped working in San Francisco. Everywhere else in the known universe markets work but not here not in housing. There is demand. Last year house prices rose 25%. In one year! 25% on a base several times the national average.
Inexplicable said the editorialist. There is plenty of capital. Just look at the interest rates. The city has zoned areas for building the editorialist assured us. Land, capital, labor, materials, and demand, demand, demand. Fortunes to be made. 25% in one year! (And that is not 25% on the invested amount, that is 25% on the selling price. It might be 50% on the cost to build the home. On a cash basis, return on actual dollars invested the return might be more than 1000% in one year! The Mafia does not get that kind of action!!) But for some unknown reason . . . no housing.
Bernie Ward also has no explanation. “I’m just a simple boy from the Sunset,” he says. Of course the British Prime Minister is clueless too. In Southern England, San Francisco, Boston, New York, markets have just stopped working. Remarkable.
After his father died Bernie Ward appeared on his late night radio show, sobbing. “It does make me feel better,” he moaned, “It does make me feel better. . . (sob) . . . to think of my father in heaven with my other (sob) family members, altogether . . . .”
Bernie Ward on his Sunday morning show, God Talk, regularly ridicules Americans who have “not continued their religious education after Sunday School;” Whereas he, Bernie Ward, had graduated from a Seminary School he likes to boast.
And what is his religious education? He believes in the “happy hunting ground”? So when Mr. Ward goes to heaven and embraces his father, what? They will want to embrace for an hour? A day? A year? A million years? A billion years? Eternity? You are glad to see him but . . . and how old will the gentlemen be? Will Bernie be older than his father? That would be weird.
Did they ruminate over these issues in the seminary? Workout all the details did they? And what is this but another example of alienation? Religion as another form of alienation.
It is true that Jesus taught that if you believe in him you can find eternal life. But do you suppose He meant you, as an isolated ego, and alienated individual? If you believe in what? A happy hunting ground where all the family egos get together in and eternal bear hug? The ego in perpetuity?
Jesus taught everlasting life not by identifying with your limited ego. You find everlasting life in the body of Christ. This is his body this is his blood. Identify with life. Believe in the life of the world to come. Life is with the people.
But Bernie Ward has completely missed the point. He has gone in the opposite direction. He identifies with his limited ego. And those figures immediately around him. Ancestor worship. The eventual reunion of these isolated egos, this family group, in the happy hunting ground. This is primitivism. It is also alienation.
And for him politics also is like his religion. He believes in things more out of desperation than due to reasoned argument. He really believes you can have progressive taxation and make the rich pay more, or ‘their fair share’ as he would put it, without wage and price control. You can explain to him that without wage and price control the rich will simply collect their “fair share” from the consumers, but it will make no difference to him. He is not really listening. For him it is not a subject for reason but belief.
Recently he was on the phone with the operator of a Contra Costa County soup kitchen, (the Lord’s work), and the budget shortfall of $500,000 was mentioned. ‘How could that be?’ asked Bernie Ward. Where, oh where is our common humanity? He did not stop to reflect that Contra Costa County is a blue county. That it is in a state that has been for years run by Democrats: both houses of the state legislature, the governor’s office until a movie star recently moved in, also they control the judiciary.
That this party, his party, has controlled the nine counties of the Bay Area for generations, for "hundreds of years" as Ralph Nader pointed out during his election campaign, does not signify to Bernie.
Whose party is in control? His! Whose budget shortfall is it? His! Being Post Liberal means never having to take responsibility. Then the soup kitchen operator mentioned that the County’s total budget shortfall was $50 million. Mr. Ward had nothing to say about this bit of news.
His party has controlled the San Francisco Bay Area for generations. Has down zoned and down zoned decade after decade, blocked development of every kind, including housing, managed the schools to ever lower standards, encouraged workers to abuse the workers compensation system, including a series of retiring police chiefs who have made huge claims just before retiring, (who will watch the watchers?), torn down freeways, the ones they did not allow to simply fall down in shambles due to lack of repair, allowed its bridges to deteriorate even faster than its roads, were even then planning on building the world’s largest single tower self anchored bridge, (Why the world’s largest? Because no one else would dare such a project, especially in a high earthquake zone such as the Bay Area with its two (2) major faults), and about all of this, and the taxes, and the regulations upon regulations, about all of this the fat Bernie Ward has absolutely nothing to say.
He knows that there is not going to be a happy hunting ground in heaven for his fat relentless ego. He knows this. He knows his party has controlled the housing, highways and schools, the taxes, the state, municipal, yes, and the county governments, he knows about the abuse of the workers comp system, the featherbedding at every level of government, he knows that if his party ever got its hands on the medical system they would soon set into that like maggots into dead meat, he knows and yet reason can not be applied to any of this. His belief is religious, i.e. utterly alienated.
He tolerates all of this, the same way he maintains his belief in the happy hunting ground with his father’s ego traipsing around in a cloud landscape: He simply wills himself to believe, all evidence to the contrary not withstanding.
But what is this but alienation? Alienation from community, from God? Alienation from reason itself.
And you might say ‘but this isn’t fair, Bernie Ward doesn’t know anything about economics.’ This is not fair? OK, Bob Brinker was on the radio condemning any reduction in benefits for the top 20% of Social Security recipients. A group whose non Social Security income is double (2 times) the national median income. Twice the income of a family that must buy housing at today’s prices, must send their children to schools, (and miserable schools they are), who must buy everything at today’s prices unlike the top 20% of Social Security recipients.
Bob Brinker hissed in his scalding way that “they will have turned all your Social Security contributions into an income tax.” Then he grumbled, “they never saw a tax they did not like.” (“Contributions”? Has Bob Brinker lost his mind? Contributions?)
Brinker knows perfectly well that nothing has been contributed. All those taxes were spent on other Social Security recipients, a long time ago, decades ago. Contributions? What a liar. And those taxes were paid when there were still ten, eight, five tax payers for each recipient. Now we are down to 3.
Limbaugh was on the radio explaining that “Social Security is not a welfare program.” And then he repeated that observation a few more times. Then he explained that “Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.” So what was his point? Not welfare? What is he saying? How does Ponzi scheme aid our understanding?
It is true that if a private entrepreneur were to put forward a “benefit plan”, a “retirement plan”, a “savings plan”, in which “contributions”, would be “deposited”, in a “lock box”, and these “individual accounts”, would be held “in trust accounts”, for the “beneficiaries”, etc, such as the Social Security System, he would be arrested for fraud.
But why the “not a welfare program”? Of course it is a welfare program! What point is Mr. Limbaugh trying to make? He has no point. He is not moving his audience to explore some new area, to expand the general understanding. He is not trying to explain anything. “not a welfare program” are just some words he has strung together. He is making no distinctions.
But then neither is Mr. Brinker. He knows that the Social Security funds were not invested but spent. Spent to keep the old out of poverty. A maintenance income for most of them. But not all.
Some Social Security “beneficiaries” bank their checks. If they did not get the check they would only be able to take one or two cruises a year instead of the five or six they now enjoy. Their homes, paid for before the real estate bubble, (a bubble their own restrictive growth policies helped create), would not be manicured twice a week by the illegal Mexican gardeners, (illegals who are in the country because of the lacks border enforcement that their policies have created). Their children have grown up in a better country, and gone to better schools, before the education inflation drove colleges out of the reach of the middle class, schools the 3 workers who must now carry them will never be able to attend, in part because the technology that might have made continuing education available was not thought important by these now retired community leaders.
And Mr. Brinker knows that not only are there are no “trust funds” and that their “contributions” have all been spent, he knows the other side of the coin. He knows that these payroll deductions are coming from young workers, (only three for each retiree), who have come under intense competition from Chinese workers and others from around the world. Knows the down word pressure on their wages like at no other time in history. Knows too that the of repeated admonition that these young workers need to get a college education in order to improve their condition is illusory. Illusory because due to the bell curve distribution of cognitive ability only the top 16% to 25% of young workers even have a chance. Illusory too because the cartel operation of the colleges themselves, stifles competition and manipulates prices forcing them ever higher faster than general inflation, saddling young people with huge cartel created debt, which is not dischargeable for any reason, not due to unemployment, injury, or even death.
Mr. Brinker knows all this. Knows the unfairness of making young workers in the bottom 50% of income, (family incomes under $43,000 a year), pay for retirees with non Social Security incomes of over $75,000. Knows that these retirees have accumulated their homes, their accounts, their ease, over many years under far more favorable conditions than those being experienced by those who must now carry them, the 3 workers, who must struggle under these much more difficult circumstances, circumstances which themselves result from the failed policies conceived and carried out by these very same rich retirees.
Mr. Brinker knows these things more clearly than Rush Limbaugh, or Bernie Ward, and yet still these facts fail to register with him. He sees the unfairness, but he does not comprehend.
And this incomprehension? Is it not another example of alienation?
And see that if Social Security were truly a market creation we would not have to write about it, or discuss it, or consider how it works. The market would intermediate for us, between us. We would not have to weigh the relative conditions of being a husband and wife with two children with less than $35,000 a year compared to a retiree with over $75,000 a year in non Social Security income. What is just?
Considering the conditions for a man of 30 with an IQ of 103 and a wife and two children? Is it just that he pay 12.5% of his income to a man of 68 whose IQ even now is still 128, two degrees on his study wall, in his $1.5 million home, with no debts, a pension under the old plan before the ‘give backs’ of the 1990s, etc, etc. And all of this in a county from which economic activity has been systematically excluded since the 1970s, down zoned and down zoned and employers driven away, while the immigration laws have been dropped to supply the cheap labor that services the selfish old bastard. Illegals because they can not vote and disturb the hegemony of the Post Liberal elite. What is just?
All these relationships could have been worked out privately with voluntary choices. It is only because of the mandates, the taxes, the restrictive zoning, the state's distortion of the market by powerful elites, that we must find some way of considering all of these many issues.
But how can we? We have no common language anymore. No common ethic. We are each of us alienated one from the other. We have been betrayed.
You decide.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
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