system, we will turn our knife to our own sclerotic arteries and calcified joints – to see what has happened... FAMILY SILVER In a free, capitalist system, poor and middle- income people sell their time. That’s all they have. Then, if they manage their finances prudently, they accumulate savings and eventually have enough capital to retire comfortably... perhaps passing the house and the family silver on to the next generation. The rich typically have capital – either inherited or earned – in the form of stocks, bonds, or real estate. This capital is often a bigger source of income than their time. Even those without much capital of their own can get in on the action. They get jobs as managers – CEOs, for example – and benefit from performance-related compensation, far beyond the actual value of their time. A young man, right out of law school, for example, may help put together a merger or an acquisition... or paper over a share- buyback scheme... and earn a windfall. That’s why, for more than 20 years, every mother’s son has been urged to go neither into manufacturing, nor sales, nor mining, nor law, nor agriculture – but to Wall Street. Why? That’s where the money was! Is there anything wrong with that? Nope. It’s just capitalism in action. But what if the feds had queered the whole thing by introducing a new kind of money
that wasn’t real capital? A money that represented no savings, no invention, no output, no labor, no profit, no forbearance, no sweat, no innovation, and no real increases in GDP? And what if the feds loaned this fake money to capitalists at fake, artificially low rates? And what if they used this fake money – with $3.6 trillion added since 2009 – to buy the capitalists’ assets, but not the working man’s time? And what if, when the markets tried to correct the outrageous asset prices... in 2000, and again in 2008... the feds simply added more fake money, and turned Wall Street into a “heads I win... tails you lose” deal... a win- lose deal, where the capitalist insiders won big and the working stiffs were left with $13 trillion more in debt? Ouch! Now we’re cutting to the bone. In a free, capitalist system, poor and middle-income people sell their time. That’s all they have.
Bill Bonner is the underground news mogul and founder of The Agora publishing company. He’s written the NewYork Times bestselling book Empire of Debt and most recently published Hormegeddon: HowToo Much of A Good Thing Leads to Disaster . He is one of the great writers and minds in America today and also publishes a free daily letter, Bill Bonner’s Diary , which you can sign up for here: bonnerandpartners.com.
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