“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk
What do Musk and Edison have in common? They both got rich off of Tesla.
Wednesday is normally a day where we talk about wealth, economics, money, currency, and the state of the economy. But, it’s nearly Christmas, so I thought I’d take this time to give a different take on wealth. And no, it’s not Joe Biden appearing in a Marvel® movie where his superpower is to make vast amounts of wealth disappear, because he can do that on, oh, every Tuesday.
Don’t get me wrong. I love prices. Prices are a great way to allocate things in such a way that the most people win. I have my pile of cash and get to buy (within that limit) the things that make me the most happy. Does everyone want a really cool sports car? No, some people don’t want them at all.
Personally, I’d love to have a cool sports car, but I’d much rather not have a mortgage. So, I make choices. And then cry silently in my pillow at night because I’m dead inside because I decided I didn’t get that Mustang®.
Othello always would visit Sauron through the Moor Door.
Regardless, choices mean that I’m in control. I mean, if I chose to study theology and then move to Colorado after I graduated? My choices mean I could become a high priest. I am free to choose and try to optimize my life based on my resources, talents, and luck.
Combine that with a system of (more or less) private property, and the system allows for the sum of millions of individual actions as people try to maximize their happiness. This provides incentives to work to buy steak. Or starve. But owning property provides incentives to create wealth. So, in striving to get enough money to buy a Lambo® and a vapid trophy wife in a functional economy, a businessman works to create the most joy for his customers.
Boom. People who have never met, and will never meet, work together to create a complex economy. This economy translates information based on prices, and is fueled by incentives, and private property.
And yet . . .
What’s the fastest thing in the universe? Nic Cage accepting a movie role.
As much as I love this system, I have to mention again, this system exists to serve men. It does not exist for men to serve it. There is a richer experience of life than only the pursuit of profit.
Also, this system is one that optimizes without regard to morality or virtue. On more than one occasion I have heard a Wall Street billionaire exclaim, “this isn’t Boy (or Boy-Girl, or Trans, in 2021, I guess) Scouts®.”
That was a direct rejection of morality and virtue.
The result of that type of thinking?
If it’s legal and can pull money out of someone’s pocket, Wall Street will do it. If heroin were legal for sale, Wall Street would be looking to invest in the e-Heroin® mobile App. They’d sell underage . . . well, you get the picture. Heck, Wall Street would sell ghosts as supernatural slaves if they thought it wouldn’t come back to haunt them.
When money is their god, they will do anything to get it. Wall Street will do anything legal. The black market, we know, will do anything illegal, as long as they get paid. Wall Street and the black market have essentially the same morals. And, like Satan, Wall Street just has better lawyers and lobbyists.
If there is a fault in the system, that is it.
I hear Charlie Brown was suspended from school. Some kid was allergic to Peanuts™.
And Christmas is one of the best times to point that out. Christmas is a holiday that has been morphed over time into one that, if we were to go by commercials alone, was based only on the mass consumption of stuff.
I won’t go into the deep history of Christmas. It’s long and more complicated than the math that Nancy Pelosi uses to charge her vodka back to taxpayers. But the short version is that the Winter Solstice was a great place to put a festival if you were going to convince the Germans and the Vikings that this new Christianity thing would work out okay for them. To make it work, Christmas had to be a party.
And it was. And it is. Over time, though, the party aspect of Christmas changed to a focus on family and generosity, which seems to be well matched to the holiday’s stated purpose. The meaning of Christmas then, is giving, not getting.
Certainly, there’s a certain magic in the eyes of a young child being surprised when the gifts under the tree far exceed anything she could imagine. The delight in a boy’s eyes when he sees the BB gun that will probably shoot his eye out?
Priceless.
I pitched a movie to Alec. He shot it down.
That’s the magic of the giving. The Mrs. and I, however, are old enough that we like the peace and family aspect of Christmas far more than the “stuff” aspect. I’ve given her the same gift for Christmas for the last five years (hint: it’s expensive scotch). She enjoys it. The Mrs. generally gets me something small. I like the keychain fob that she got me a year ago, “Be careful, handsome, I love you” better than something large, or an expensive scotch I won’t drink because it’s too expensive.
This year, The Boy and Pugsley have also (I think!) surpassed the greed aspect of Christmas. It’s not so much about the gifts they get. Heck, it’s not so much about the gifts they give, either. It’s about waking up on Christmas Eve, getting together and sharing the few gifts we have for each other, having a nice dinner, and then . . . relaxing together.
Together. And for me, that’s the biggest gift.
It’s that spirit that makes me look forward to Christmas. We’ve long been a “Christmas Eve” gift giving family, because it defuses the emotions associated with gift giving and leads to a very quiet and family-based Christmas Day. Plus no one wants to get up early if the presents are all already opened.
That’s the opposite, really, of the advertising that pelts us on a regular basis. The ads are all based on more and bigger. Time to give your loved one a $75,473 car with a big red bow, because nothing says love more than massive consumption.
Die Hard is not a Christmas movie. It’s a Christmas Eve movie.
Just like in most of our lives, we have choices. We can live the choice and have the Christmas that the media wants to sell us which is a holiday based almost entirely on creating the most economic activity possible.
Or? We can enjoy our family, and choose to place emphasis on giving, and choose to understand that the Nativity itself was the greatest gift that could be given. Even if you aren’t a Christian, understanding the promise of redemption in that gift of a child to mankind is one of supreme optimism.
That optimism is based firmly not in economics, since it promises exactly zero economic prosperity. No, this gift is not money – it was a gift based on virtue and morality.
I love prices, and incentives, and the creation of wealth. But there are things that are more important than money. You know, things like all the stuff . . . .
And when you buy “stuff” from China, you send money to them. Then they get to spend it on anything THEY want, whether it be US soybeans (making your food more expensive), US real-estate (making your home more expensive), US chemistry professors (one of whom was convicted this morning), or US politicians (making everything more expensive). But the chances that they’ll buy something from YOU is minuscule.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-convicted-making-false-statements-and-tax-offenses
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re — headline ‘lieber lied!’
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The press-release fails to mention witnesses nor evidence… leading an astute observer to wonder if the dear teacher was set-up and tossed.
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And leading an astute observer to conclude lieber is the warning, quietly instructing all the other ‘partners’ (and potential partners) to ‘keep the faith’.
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But what of his ill-got gains?
No mention of seizures…
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Based on an astute observer’s lifetime of declining trust in the veracity of anything involving either:
a) TheMainStreamMedia and
b) the government agents (‘some overlap’ as Kim Du Toit says),
there are reasonable doubts:
a) any such ‘lieber’ person exists outside the press-release, and
b) any separation exists between the chicoms and anything ‘harvard’ in the first place.
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An astute observer is led to suspect something fishy.
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And the other ‘why?’:
* Why Convict Just Hours Prior To A chicom-despised Holiday?
It is indeed. But on the bright side, they took made-up dollars for real stuff . . .
Pure capitalism fails for the same reason as pure communism, it just does it a lot slower.
Communism requires force to initiate, at which point whoever had the power to initiate it also has the power to simply make himself the boss. Which is why True Communism lasts the 0.003 seconds it takes for the revolutionary leader to make that realization. Evil bad cynical people might even think that leaders of communist revolutions had that realization before they became leaders of communist revolutions.
In capitalism wealth accumulates over generations in families or corporations due to people being free to make rational(ish) decisions about economics. Eventually, enough wealth is accumulated such that those entities can buy or rent politicians so as to take away that freedom for people to make rational(ish) decisions, allowing the capitalists to accumulate even more wealth. Which is why True Capitalism fails 0.003 seconds after that amount of wealth is accumulated in a small number of entities.
Yes – the only things that can stop that failure are morals and virtue. Stop that, it’s over. Rome taught us that . . .
An excellent column for a time when, over the past two years, many many hearts have grown two sizes too small.
The message of Christmas is one of optimism and hope because Someone gave a Gift to all of humanity, and any reason for optimism and hope are something we can all use these days.
Speaking of hope, I am hoping for a successful launch of the Webb Space Telescope at 7:20 AM Eastern Time on Christmas Day. It’s launch is fifteen years behind the original schedule (2021 instead of 2007) and $8 billion over the original budget ($10 billion instead of $2 billion) because building this thing was WAY more complex than anybody imagined. It could still fail spectacularly – even if it survives launch (its rocket has had 83 previously successful launches) the Webb still has to perform over 300 critical “unfolding” steps to get into its operational configuration. It gets just one shot to work; at its assigned station a literal million miles from Earth, it is out of reach for any attempt at repairs.
But if it works, JWST will hopefully image the literal beginning of the universe, until now hidden from us with its distance and dimness and “color” of its infrared light that cannot penetrate our atmosphere or be seen by the previous Hubble Space Telescope. Next the JWST will hopefully detecting oxygen in the atmospheres of extra-solar planets, a gas that is a undeniable fingerprint of photosynthesis and plants.
And after Seeing Creation and Discovering Extraterrestrial Life, JWST will get down to business and Discover The Unknown, finding something new and utterly mind blowing that we can’t even imagine today.
It’s as much an astounding triumph of technology as it is an astounding failure of project management.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aICaAEXDJQQ
Please spare a though and wish it well on a day that is all about miracles.
Agreed – it’s one of the most complex missions ever tried . . . (fingers crossed)
True fact: Many Scottish homes have a moor door.
And Die Hard wasn’t a Christmas anything movie, it was a Harry Potter prequel:
John McLane skulks around a tower at night, making bad guys disappear, and avoiding Alan Rickman.
QED
Second true fact: If Harry Potter had gotten his hands on a machine gun, The Deathly Hallows would have been a lot shorter, but Voldemort would have been the one in two parts.
Ho!-Ho!-Ho!
Bazinga!
Sadly, Mr. Aesop, that is funnier if you know nothing about Harry Potter but the memes.
Ha! If only Bruce had played Bilbo in Lord of the RIngs – then we could have said that old Hobbits Die Hard.
That are often painted red. Like my own.
https://www.npdodge.com/blog/2015/10/the-tradition-of-painting-a-front-door-red-what-does-it-mean/
And the Girl Scout clubhouse had a S’more door . . .
I am mostly looking forward to Christmas day because I can sleep in and spend the whole day with my wife. Gifts? Not really all that important.
Agreed. Some coffee, a quiet living room, life is good.
“…what color Ferrari…”
Ferrari? Nonsense. A Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport for me.
Silver.
Jaguar.
Or better yet, a pony.
But who has *that* kind of money?
Okay, I like that. Buy why not two of those and a Ferrari for casual driving? (suspecting lamont is secretly Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Hammond)
Okay, the Tesla joke was priceless. But why was there no mention of a Happy Festivus? I shall add this to my list of grievances.
Ha! I watched Seinfeld back in the day, but actually missed the Festivus episode and that was before DVRs . . . I’m betting your list just got longer . . . .
*** delete after reading ***
Fixed – thank you, Large Marge! – JW
I try to often remind myself the reason for the season, because of consumerism.
I am still looking for the Die Hard Tree Topper dangit.
Here it is . . . as long as you have a printer . . .
https://screenrant.com/die-hard-christmas-ornament-diy-instruction/
What’s put the final nail in the coffin of Capitalism is the 2008 “Too big to fail” bail out of Wall Street and Banks. That more than anything set a precedent to where we were creeping into Corporate Oligarchy, but since this year, we have been racing into it.
If you can’t tell, I’m a big fan of creative deconstruction. When a business gets too big and quits innovating, it should fail as smaller more motivated businesses overtake them. That all came to a screeching halt in 2008.
Here’s wishing you a Mustang for Christmas!
The problem is that when you hold back failure for too long, sometimes you bring down the whole tree . . .
About 200 AD, Christians had settled on March 15 as the big holy day of The Annunciation: yuuuuge deal. That’s about WW2 folks settling on sone Revolutionary War celebration.
Then 50 years later, (round about Y2K for our example) some pool noodle decides to co-opt the Christian party to give some bennies to his imperial status, and we get Sol Invictus. Another 100 years and the tables are turned: The State joins the winning team (So about 2100*) Now anything or anyone remotely fun gets baptized and re-booted with the creepy bits (fake gods, child sacrifice, temple prostitutes) cut out.
Christmas fun for everyone! Music, art, services, feasting, the joy of delighting our loved ones with gifts!
See? Not so complicated I could even draw you a bikini pie chart, but it’s just going to have cartots. Or maybe a yam.
*So there’s our timeline for TEOTWAWKI recovery. Heh.
2100! I’ll mark it in Pugsley’s kid’s calendar . . . ! (Assuming people still know how to write then)
The things I “want” for Christmas have gotten more simple (and, of course, more expensive: “Honey, can I have another training sword? A longer one? I neeeeed it to be a better swordsman”).
I honestly believe we will look back on this Christmas as the last almost “normal” one for some time.
I think that may be correct. I only have the one battle axe and one broadsword. Prolly need a rapier . . .