System Failure...
Do you believe the financial system is closed?
What I mean is, do you believe that the billionaires can suck up every penny in the system like a vacuum because no new money can be generated due to the system being a closed system?
If you do, that will make you afraid of billionaires. That will give you a reason to worry about what they are doing.
However, the system is not closed. If it were it would have shut down a long time ago. We would run out of money a few months into every year. We simply don’t. New millionaires are created all the time. The bank always has the electronic cash to send you, even they don’t have printed currency.
The solution to this story, if you believe it, is to either tax billionaires heavily or to limit the profits of their corporations in some way, thereby limiting the profit of every other business in the country as well.
So let’s think this through. What happens if we limit the profits of these big corporations? Let’s think about how business functions. How do business owners think?
The goal of business is to increase profits yearly by some percentage. That percentage will vary business to business, but for the most part anything less than 10% to 20% is usually considered breaking even with little growth. If a business does that enough years in row, they will usually try to make some modifications, but often they just shut down due to lack of growth. A business won’t tolerate stagnation for long.
If we limit big corporations to a 5% increase in profits year over year, given what I can only imagine their current expectations are, I would expect to see most large corporations shut down almost immediately in that environment.
If we limit their income as a dollar figure, once the corporation meets that, it would simply shut down. No corporation would run in an environment where they had to control their pricing in order to manage their profit for fear of being shut down for making too much money.
Could they decide to stop being greedy? Sure. But greed requires healing. It requires a shift in perception. It would require a shift in how they see and do business. I don’t think those folks are going to change that just because the laws change.
The targets of these ideas are “front facing” companies like Walmart and Amazon. What about the suppliers, distributors, and manufacturers? Many of those companies are equally profitable. They don’t take the same heat from consumers because they aren’t front facing. Campbell’s, for example, is a manufacturer of condensed soup. They are a multi-million dollar, equally wealthy company. If you limit their profit they are equally likely to shut down. The trucking companies are also multi-million dollar businesses. If you limit their profit, they too are equally likely to shut down.
The anger that people have towards these big companies makes people okay with them being shut down for making too much money. But anger also means that people don’t consider the consequences of what they are suggesting.
The mom and pop shop can’t sell products that aren’t being made and distributed because all the big companies that would make and distribute those things are gone. If nobody is producing and distributing milk, the mom and pop shop can’t sell something they can’t get.
The only suppliers that really get any attention are the oil companies. But people don’t consider when they go to the store, that pretty much every product in there is made by some multi-million dollar corporation. Even the farm supplying the produce or the dairy has the potential to be a multi-million dollar organization, and many are.
In a world where we force all multi-million dollar companies to close because we think they make too much, we only hurt ourselves. We make it so that milk, bread, condensed soup, vegetables, fruit, wood, paper, fabric, clothing, household cleaners, cars, vacuums, mops, lightbulbs, all electronic parts and pieces, and so on are no longer available. We are willing to completely decimate the supply and demand chain we have because we are mad at companies that we think make too much money. The consequences of doing that out of anger are extreme.
The option that I see most likely occurring is a system failure. To be fair, we end up in the same place, we just get there a little differently. What that means is that I see there being only 2 classes of people – the very rich and the homeless, with 80% to 90% of the population being homeless and starving while the other 10% to 20% are rich. I don’t see this happening because the rich take all the money. I see this happening because prices simply skyrocket beyond what people can afford to pay, even with what we still consider to be a well-paying job.
Here’s the thing. If we scare off all the corporations so that there is no supply and demand of even the necessities (food, clothing, shelter), we end up homeless anyway. We get to the same place. Do you see that?
Anger makes you say “They shut down because they are greedy. If they are going to be greedy then they deserve to shut down”. But you don’t realize what you ask for. You’re only looking at Walmart, Amazon, and maybe Microsoft or Apple. You’re not looking at the wider impact because of the number of multi-million dollar companies that give Walmart and Amazon something to sell.
The stay-at-home mom down the street can’t crochet enough scarves to provide everybody with one that needs one. Those things need to be manufactured at scale in order to meet supply and demand. If the stay-at-home mom were to charge what she needed to in order to pay herself for the time it takes her to crochet said scarf, the scarf is suddenly $100 and not the $9.99 you pay at Walmart. You have a problem with the $9.99 Walmart charges because you say that’s too high, but you’ll happy pay the $100 the stay-at-mom has to charge. Why? Because she’s not a multi-million dollar corporation. That’s the only reason. It’s only anger that makes you say that even though it’s not a sustainable option.
You think the stay-at-home mom is trying to compete with Walmart or that Walmart is taking something from her, but that’s not true. She’s offering a custom, handmade product. She’s not trying to supply millions of people with scarves. She’s not trying to meet the needs of millions of people. She’s simply offering another option for those that want something custom and handmade and have that extra money to pay her.
The huge supply and demand chain needs to exist in order to keep the vast majority of the population fed, clothed, and sheltered. Doing away with it or trying to make it impossible for them to make the profits they want to make or earn the money they want to earn, only shuts down the supply and demand chain. In punishing them, we punish ourselves by removing our own access to the things that we need.
How do you want to end up homeless? Do you want to end up homeless because you destroy the system and cause it to implode? Or do you want to end up homeless because prices simply skyrocket to a level that 80% to 90% of the population can no longer afford?
We can’t put a rosy outcome on the decimation of every major distributor, manufacturer, and retailer in the country. The system will simply collapse. The idea that we can fix the greed by trying to artificially limit profit in some way, is just an avoidance of the reality. The system will collapse whether we create the collapse or it happens more naturally. It will fail. The more we interfere with it, the more painful that process will be. If we let things naturally progress on their own, they will actually balance out much quicker. Less human interference is best. Humans create far more problems for themselves than they solve. The financial system is a human created construct that causes more problems than it solves.
I’ve suggested for a long time that we just simply put the money into the system by handing it to people, without taking it away from anybody else. This causes people to worry about the value of the electronic money or paper and metal they trade for good and services. But since the whole thing is made up anyway, it really doesn’t matter. We can continue to trade products and services for paper and metal with no harm done to the system, no matter how much paper and metal is being distributed in the system.
Oh yeah, that’s another rather ironic outcome, isn’t it? If you destroy all major corporations, you also destroy the manufacturers of the money, the mints. You end the production of paper and the metal that is needed to make the money. So now, even if you could buy what you needed, you can’t because no money is being made, literally. Electricity in many places is also offered by major corporations. With no electricity, there goes your access to your electronic money too.
The value of said paper and metal is entirely fake. You print a number on a piece of paper and that gives it the value. There is no value other than whatever you’ve deemed the paper to be worth. So, print whatever you want on the paper and use it to continue to trade for products and services. The artificial value means absolutely nothing. It’s just paper and metal, or better yet, it’s just numbers on a computer screen.
The corporation can still claim it made $500 million last year, regardless of what the artificial value of the paper or electronic money they have is. If the computer says they have $500 million then that’s what they have. Everything else is irrelevant.
There is no harm done in a system that trades paper and metal by simply removing the artificial value of the paper and metal. It’s an agreed upon system. Even if it collapsed things like stock markets, it still doesn’t really make a difference. The monetary value of the company is now based on the actual value of the company, not the value of the stocks and bonds it holds. That makes the value more true, not less. That doesn’t mean we have to take anything away from anybody. To shut down the stock and bond trading system, just buy everybody out. No harm done.
Things like the stocks and bonds are unnecessary. They don’t offer anything to the system. They aren’t part of the supply and demand chain. They aren’t contributing to the system at all. But they do encourage greed. They do encourage theft. They do artificially inflate prices. Removing systems like stocks and bonds, while it might tank the artificial value of the money, it doesn’t tank the actual value of the paper the money is printed on. It’s only worth $5 because that’s the bill says on it.
The financial system, at its most basic level, does not change when you simply add more paper into the system. The $5 bill is still worth $5 because that is what’s printed on it. Period. That is the foundation of the financial system. If you print a bill that looks like what we’ve agreed upon and you print $1 trillion on it, that’s what it’s worth because that’s what we’ve agreed upon. It just has to look a certain way and have some value printed on it. Whatever that number is, becomes the value of that bill. That’s it.
All the other stuff like interest rates, stocks, bonds, and so on are fake. They don’t matter. They don’t offer anything. You can safely shut that down and still continue the system because a $5 dollar piece of paper is exactly that, a $5 piece of paper. Nothing more. Nothing less. The paper holds no value on its own, except that which you give it. As long as you don’t change the fundamental trade structure of money (i.e. I give you money that has a printed value equal to what you’re charging and you give me the product or service), then the system just keeps going. The artificial value of things does not matter.
The same is true for electronic money. If I give you electronic money equal to the amount you’re charging for the product or service and you give me the product or service, the system is working. The artificial value of the numbers on the computer screen doesn’t matter.
Here’s the reality. We can put millions of dollars into everybody’s bank account tomorrow with no effect at all, except that everybody now has enough to go around.
There is little effect to the financial system because the basic system of trade is still intact. We’ve agreed to trade paper for products and services. That continues. But what about the job market? How many people would quit their jobs if you suddenly handed them a few million dollars?
So, do we have the potential for businesses to shut down because nobody wants the jobs they are offering? Yes. Could we collapse the system that way anyway? Yes. This is the only risk to the idea of removing the artificial value of money while simply dumping huge quantities of money into the system. The risk is that nobody works.
Our system of supply and demand requires workers in order to function. When prices go up it forces people to work harder or work more jobs. This keeps people in their jobs. It creates a fake sense of stability in the system. It requires people to work to live. We want to keep the system going and so we need everybody to do more to make that happen.
The fear of everybody quitting comes from a negative viewpoint that people are lazy and won’t work if they don’t have to. It places too much value on the idea of work. We’re human beings not human doings. The goal is not to work, the goal is to enjoy your life. Find something you love and do that.
We place a lot of value on the struggle and on the idea of work. That’s why this idea of dumping huge amounts of money into the system is scary. We have this fundamental belief that we all have to do things we don’t like. Working might be one of those things.
There’s that fear factor that keeps you bought into the system. It’s a false idea. It’s not true. You don’t have to do anything you don’t like. You just have to find people that enjoy it to do it for you. If you don’t like cutting the grass, find somebody that does and pay them to do it for you. If the system were predicated on that mentality instead of a need to work mentality, life would look very different. Nobody would work a day in their lives because everybody would do what they enjoy.
Who would clean the toilets? Somebody that actually wants to clean the toilets. Who would empty the garbage? Somebody that wants to empty the garbage. Yes, there are people out there that want to do these things.
Walmart has the ability to incentivize their jobs. They can create jobs that people want. What if people could work the hours they wanted to, within the operating hours of the business? What if people could take the time off they wanted to? What if a new mom could take the time off she wanted to after birth? What if there was more flex? Would more people work at Walmart willingly if they knew that they were going to be paid well, have the time off they wanted, get the schedules they wanted, and have the flexibility they wanted? Yes.
Could companies like Walmart and get stubborn, allow all of their employees to walk out the door, and simply attempt to hire new ones without changing anything? Sure.
The difference here is that this isn’t a politically motivated shift. We’re not taking anything away from anybody. We’re not limiting anybody. If we’re buying everybody out then nobody has a reason to complain. If we’re not taking anybody’s perceived value away and we’re not limiting anybody, then there is nothing there for them to be bothered by.
When we artificially try to limit profit or income, we are taking perceived value away. When we heavily tax people, we are taking money away. That’s what upsets people – it’s the perception of limitation.
Can we create a system where people get to create lives they enjoy and aren’t forced into anything because they are fully supported regardless? Yes.
Will people ultimately work anyway? Yes.
The reason we have this idea that everybody is lazy and won’t work is because we have a large segment of the population that doesn’t enjoy their jobs and are stressed about money. They work to live. If we remove the stress about money and we give people some time to recover, eventually they will all go find something to do because they want to. Most people will get bored at some point. They will go find something to do. Over time, that will rebound the supply and demand chains, if those chains can survive the initial crash and they are willing to create jobs that people actually want.
Can they survive the initial crash? Maybe. If they are willing to find ways to hold onto their employees. Some people won’t let go of the value of work. There is a group of people out there that will continue to work anyway, that won’t let themselves stop working. Is that enough to keep the system going? Who knows.
Does it matter? Not really. If it’s going to crash anyway, then what’s the difference?
The financial system is just a system of trade. Currently we trade paper for products and services. That doesn’t have to change. What does have to change is the artificial value of that paper, the artificially forced need to work, the balance between work and life, the fake need for survival, the inequality in our distribution system, and the unhappiness of the individual and the population as a whole.
Those things change when we get back to the basics of trading for products and services, while making sure that everybody has something to trade for those products and services at all times. Nobody ever needs to be unsupported or do without. There is more than enough to go around. All we have to do is be a little bit more willing to share while also removing all of the artificial structures that create the perception of lack.
We have the ability to create a life that everybody enjoys without taking anything away from anybody. Potentially, we don’t even have to crash the system to do it. We just have to be willing to get over the fear of “what if?”. Until then, we are on the road to collapse. It’s not a matter of if, it’s just a matter of when.
If you’re on the path, healing in such a way that you can untie yourself from the fear of the outside world and “what if” will give you the best chance of being able to manage the bumpy ride within yourself.
Love to all.
Della