{"id":40584,"date":"2018-11-16T09:01:17","date_gmt":"2018-11-16T14:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40584"},"modified":"2018-11-16T09:01:17","modified_gmt":"2018-11-16T14:01:17","slug":"does-any-of-this-make-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40584","title":{"rendered":"Does Any of This Make Sense?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does Any of This Make Sense?<\/a><\/h3>\n

Does any of this make sense? No. But it’s so darn profitable to the oligarchy, it’s difficult to escape debt-serfdom and tax-donkey servitude.<\/i><\/p>\n

We rarely ask “does this make any sense?” of things that are widely accepted as beneficial<\/b>— or if not beneficial, “the way it is,” i.e. it can’t be changed by non-elite (i.e. the bottom 99.5%) efforts.<\/p>\n

Of the vast array of things that don’t make sense, let’s start with borrowing from future income to spend more today.<\/b> This is of course the entire foundation of consumer economies such as the U.S.: the number of households which buy a car or house with cash is near-zero, unless 1) they just sold a bubble-valuation house and paid off their mortgage in escrow or 2) they earned wealth via fiscal prudence, i.e. the avoidance of debt and the exultation of saving.<\/p>\n

Debt has this peculiar characteristic: it has to be paid back with interest.<\/b>Depending on the rate of interest and the length of the loan, this translates into a mind-numbing reality: borrowing $100 can cost $200 once interest is factored in.<\/p>\n

One might reckon that people would be cautious about paying two or three times more for something by using debt rather than cash.<\/b> But consumer economies are based not just on debt, but on TINA (there is no alternative) and on the timeless seduction of getting something now and paying for it later.<\/p>\n

College students are frightened by scary stories of permanent impoverishment and social degradation if they don’t borrow a small fortune to buy a diploma (never mind if you actually learn anything remotely useful or wise; you’re not buying an education, you’re buying an accreditation of your ability to grind through a bureaucratic system without any unhealthy questioning if “higher education” actually makes any sense. Hint: it doesn’t, unless you’re skimming wealth off the poor students.)<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does Any of This Make Sense? Does any of this make sense? No. But it’s so darn profitable to the oligarchy, it’s difficult to escape debt-serfdom and tax-donkey servitude. We rarely ask “does this make any sense?” of things that are widely accepted as beneficial— or if not beneficial, “the way it is,” i.e. it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4365,127,195,431,587,599],"class_list":["post-40584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-borrowing","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-debt","tag-interest-rates","tag-of-two-minds","tag-oligarchs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40585,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40584\/revisions\/40585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}