The Toecutter
100 kW
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2015
- Messages
- 1,467
Dauntless said:
FWIW, I wasn't trying to compare anyone here to Martin Shkreli, just pointing out the thought processes of the type of person that Martin Shkreli is, and that the proposal made by MJSfoto1956 could enable the abuse committed by the Martin Shkrelis of the world even further.
The comment I made was:
I did not say anyone here is a person similar to Martin Shkreli or that thinks like Martin Shkreli.
These sorts of people that act and think like this will put a dollar value on things that money alone cannot buy, and charge you everything you have for something you need and deprive you of it if you disagree with those unreasonable terms, all while calling it "market forces" and the price "the market will bear" when you part with everything you have for it. This is what monetization of everything leads to: the lack of money on part of someone serves to function the same as bureaucratic red tape, depriving them of the ability to work for what they need and want as well as stamping out their freedom.
Those Amazonian tribes in Brazil have a level of freedom and self-sufficiency that the vast majority of Americans cannot comprehend, precisely because they don't need money to live. The existing society and economic paradigm deprives us of this, and it is truly heinous. More monetization of more things further entrenches this paradigm.
I was trying to, in a roundabout way, ask something along the lines of "What's the price of a new planet Earth to live on once it's been trashed and/or rendered uninhabitable for human life as the result of a tiny power elite consuming everything it has like a biblical plague of locusts on a wheat field?"
You might convince a fiscally responsible person not to buy a home they can't afford if you take the rent-seeking landlords out of the picture and let them live somewhere for free, or at least find some way to cut down the amount that the rent seeking parasites can take as unearned profit margin. Truth be told, well more than 90% of the population can't afford to buy a home outright, even a modest fixer-upper, which is why people take out loans on them over the next 30, 40, 50 years, or are forced to rent and cannot ever save the money up to buy it outright. Then, during that next 30, 40, 50 years, they pay more on interest on that home than the purchase price of the home, plus property taxes. Not everyone is a crazy anarchist like me and willing to go live on the street with $20k in the bank rather than blow $100+/night on a motel or hotel, and people do in fact need shelter and generally are not allowed to provide it for themselves by just setting up a tent or a car on uninhabited land or abandoned building(owned or not) without the legal system shoving unwanted/manmade consequences their way enforced at the barrel end of a gun. I was rolling the dice during that period of lacking shelter, and I got lucky. The vast majority of people that do lack shelter don't have the money to access it, at all, and close to half of them have jobs and work.
During that time I was living and working in Texas, after I did get off the street, I found a way to keep my rent expense down by splitting a slumlord special in the hood with roommates. I was making $60k a year and saving everything I could to get rid of my student loan and eventually buy land outright, without all that mortgage bullshit to feed off of me for most of the rest of my life. But, considering I was single without children, AND made an income well within the upper quarter of individual earners, well less than 10% of the working population would have even had that sort of opportunity anyhow, but I took advantage of it and did save my money up while paying down my student loan. And there WERE some very glaring downsides to that arrangement. There was no getting rid of the rats. There was no insulation. The insects had free passage in and out. There was no hot water and the landlord didn't fix shit. Gunshots would go off every now and then. Someone once tried to carjack me and I got a black eye out of it. Multiple burglaries where I lost valuables(all of the videogames that were stolen from the three of us, are now of such value that they'd be worth thousands of dollars by themselves). But on the whole, all three of us came out ahead financially of where we would have been had we spent more on a nicer place(although my roommates would have been priced out of that nicer place anyhow, as their incomes were much lower than mine, this is ALL they could afford).
Jello Biafra had some wise words on this subject of rent and shelter, even if a bit tangential:
[youtube]aCiYmCVikjo[/youtube]
I remember family members telling me to buy a home because it made financial sense. And on the surface, it actually did. Instead of money going to some Wall Street landlord thousands of miles away as rent, it would build up equity. That said, had I bought a home, even a very modest fixer upper in a slum priced in the $50,000 range, I'd have certainly lost it by now during those 17 months I was unemployed and living off of the savings I worked so hard to build up. At best, had I hypothetically been able to sell said home, I'd have about broken even, coupled with the hassle of having to find a buyer before I went broke making payments on it, as MOST of what I'd have been paying on it would have been interest. Of course, I could have also done far worse than just breaking even on buying and selling a home... and could have very easily ended up with no savings to live off of these last 17 months.
Greenspan's policies are very much part of the reason homes are overpriced. He entered the picture long before the decision to buy a house could even have been thought of on part of the younger potential homeowners, and is in part responsible for for setting up the initial conditions that force the existing dynamic of shelter and other necessities being greatly overpriced relative to wages. If it wasn't for Greenspan(or those like him gaining access to the reins of power), we may not even be having this conversation today.
As for a fiscally irresponsible person, they will ALWAYS squander... No shortage of examples even in my family. There's no helping that demographic. You and I both know it, and it falls outside the scope of what I was referring to with my comment.
You mean in places like the slums of Bangladesh or Indonesia where people work 16 hour days, 7 days a week, and still starve? Or perhaps closer to home, like Gary, IN, where one will live paycheck to paycheck IF they are lucky enough to even have a job, living in close to 3rd world conditions, not even having access to anything but junk food? Or that malnourished toothless redneck lady working at the corner store in Hebbronville, TX? Well, of course not... but that's what I meant. Not much high living in those examples. And those people are all quite hungry, even though they work...
I've seen THAT type of behavior as well. And it is stupid. And those people deserve what they get. But that isn't what I was referring to.
I've seen plenty of people who work 2, 3, even 4 minimum wage jobs. Nearly all of their take home pay goes to rent, utilities, mandatory "health insurance"(that they can never meet the deductible on), and transportation. They and their offspring eat ramen noodles and peanut butter sandwiches all the time because that is what they can afford, and with little time to exercise coupled with such a limited diet, they KNOW why they have health problems but are powerless to do much about it because they need money to change that, which they never have enough of no matter how much they work. They live paycheck to paycheck, with nothing available to save. No drugs, no drinking, sometimes even no AC in baking Texas summers to stretch that budget, no eating out, no cable TV, no vacations, no credit cards, sometimes being forced to take out the occasional payday loan to make the rent if they fall short(and then there goes the money for the kids' Christmas presents). Just a constant get up, go to work, go home, go to bed, over and over and over, as their life passes them by.
You see, that above existence is bleak. People take on debt to seek reprieve from it even for brief periods, such as that trip to Disneyworld. It does work, which is why some people foolishly never learn their lesson. My own dad squandered his money in a most epic fashion, and explained to his wife that buying the nice things he couldn't really afford made him happy, even if only for a brief period. But the bill always comes due. As stupid as it is, people do have the audacity to attempt to reward themselves for their hard work, even when they can't afford it.
Not all Americans squander, or even most. Of those that actually live within their means, the majority find out that they can't afford ANY high living, no matter how hard they work. THIS is why taking on debt is so popular. If people actually COULD afford nice things as a result of hard work, I'm sure their lives would be much less stressful and they'd probably be inclined to treat their finances better, because they'd have more skin in the game and more to lose than nothing.
I lived within my means. I also made $60k/yr, which is more than most jobs pay, and only got a small taste of this "high living", in a very limited form: I got to take an electric car conversion I designed waaaay back in high school to about 90% completion, I spent a few hundred dollars a year on liquor/drugs, bought the occassional book or videogame once every few months(the collection of the latter which got stolen), and built an unfinished but usable velomobile. That's about it. I still wear the same clothes I had from high school, I very rarely ever ate out, had a 20+ year old used car I paid cash for, I drove very little when I used a car at all(mainly for long road trips where a bicycle wouldn't cut it), I always paid any bills on time to avoid fees, never used a credit card, never had cable TV, split the internet bill with 2 other people, and generally kept to a very basic level of living. This basic mode of living that I kept to was one that some of my engineer peers at work joked about while they lived paycheck to paycheck and had no savings to support their pretend "middle class" existence of modest suburban homes, cheap new cars, meals out 2-3x a week, smart phones, new clothes every year, 7-day vacations, and children they really couldn't afford either in spite of making more money than most(one of them whom I lent $400 and I never saw him or that money again, who I found later had planned all along to move away and not pay it back... grrrr....), a "middle class" existence that a solidly working class burger flipper or janitor of 50 years ago could have afforded on one income and still have been able to save for retirement(minus perhaps, the smart phones, which didn't exist then). Had I not been forced to pay interest to student loans for more than 10 years as a consequence of finishing school to get a permission slip called an Electrical Engineering degree to work that job in the first place, I'd have been able to buy property with those proceeds by now, but alas.
In order to engage in the task of money management, first there has to be money to manage. I had spare money to manage, and while it wasn't much, I did just that, and I managed it well. While jobless for 17 months, that money eventually saved my mom's house and kept my ass off the street, but by doing so, I lost all that progress I made working towards my goal of getting my 10 acres in the boonies and couldn't finish my prototypes. Most people do not have money to manage; they go into debt on just the basic necessities, and/or work 2, 3, or 4 jobs and still never have nice things. There are also those that squander, and I'm not justifying their actions, BUT when the squanderers look at the responsible people around them that work hard for what they need while the hard workers still never have anything to show for that hard work, while the same squanderers see people on TV or in the upper echelons of their workplace who don't really work at all that have all of these nice things, just what are the squanderers supposed to conclude? Does this dynamic encourage responsible behavior, or does it discourage it?
This existing economic paradigm is so, so that a very tiny minority of the population can own everything without ever having to work a single day in their lives. This is not just. This is not rational. And mark my words, because it is not sustainable, it WILL collapse.
