Control What You Can
Our society does not make it easy to control what you can control.
One of the aphorisms to live by here at Of Two Minds is control what you can.We don’t control the erosion of our money from inflation, the state’s vast criminalization machinery, the nation’s foreign policies or the central bank’s free money for financierspolicies.
So what do we control? Amazingly enough, we still control a few things. We control what we eat (at least those of us who aren’t institutionalized do), what fitness/ stretching/ bodywork routine we do or don’t do, and we still control what we do with our surplus money: we can salt it away as savings rather than spend it, and we control where to invest our savings.
Here’s a couple of thoughts on productively controlling what we can control.
1. Don’t count on bailouts, debt forgiveness, debt jubilees, guaranteed minimum income or any other form of free money. The Federal Reserve, the Treasury and the Justice Department have made it very clear: free money is for financiers, banks and corporations, and bailouts are for too-big-to-fail banks and financial institutions.
As for debt forgiveness and debt jubilees: every $1 of debt that’s forgiven (i.e. written off) is $1 that’s removed from some investor’s balance sheet. If we jubilee $1 trillion in debt, that’s $1 trillion in assets that are destroyed.
As the saying goes, there’s no free lunch (except for friends of the Fed), and since every dollar of debt is someone else’s asset, don’t expect bailouts or debt forgiveness. If it happens, great, but there will will be catches–including Catch 22, 23 and 24.
2. It’s tough not to self-destruct in Our Impoverished, Pathological Society. We all know extra weight is hard on our bodies and health, even if we’re fit, and so the fact that 70.7% of Americans 20 and older are overweight or obese indicates just how difficult it is to remain healthy in our “salty, sugary, fatty treats are temptingly everywhere” culture.
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