Only a Game

Greetings good citizen,

The markets seem poised to drop below the 10,000 mark (again,) maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but soon.

Some of the ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth’ is coming from the (badly mis-managed) housing sector where an extreme dearth of ‘qualified buyers’ has intensified an already disastrous situation.

Worse good citizen (I know, things are already bad enough without throwing ‘worse’ on the pile) is the recent, how the hell do you phrase this? ‘Gobbling up’ of competitors, originally touted as the ‘green shoots’ of economic recovery, properly called ‘Mergers and Acquisitions’ has produced the same ‘end results’ it always produces. Once the separate entities are ‘joined’, the ‘redundancies’ are eliminated, making the over all pie that much smaller.

Why moronic economic analysts fail to see/report the inevitable consequences of this activity remains a mystery (albeit a shallow yet opaque one.)

We are left once again to ponder just who is the moron?

Worse, we are left to ponder just who is ‘stupid’ enough to have been buying equities while the crazy train was clearly headed off a cliff?

Could the ‘obvious answer’ be as close as the nearest mirror?

Yes, good citizen, there is very little difference between forgery and counterfeiting.

Which is to say theft is theft (and yes you can still be ‘ripped off’ even if you don’t believe in ‘private property’! This blows the Libbie’s mind because they are unable to differentiate between personal property and communal property. They KNOW the difference but they CHOOSE to be ‘dense’ on the subject.)

We have once again veered off to the dark side of the hoary rock we know as capitalism. I am tempted to go Henry C K Liu on you and launch into a ‘history lesson’ about the, er, strategy behind ‘trust busting’ but it is difficult too draw proper parallels from that situation to our modern problems…although they are highly relevant.

So, against my better judgement, I’ll attempt the ‘Reader’s Digest’ version.

As you may not know, capitalism has been on the brink of collapse since it’s inception. While the market crash of 1929 is widely known a the start of the ‘Great Depression’ there was a similar severe economic upheaval shortly after the Civil War (just as the Great Depression followed WWI.)

Totally ignorant historians gloss over the true forces behind all three ‘economic collapses’. What were those forces? The ‘inevitable’ consolidation of ‘market share’ that caused all of the money in the economy to flow to the top and stay there.

What was the ‘solution’ to this economic imbalance? Trust busting! The government stepped in and broke the stranglehold of the Robber Baron’s by ‘forcing’ competition into the marketplace.

Where are those laws today? You’d have to sift through the scrap heap of history to find them and if you did find them they would be ‘irrelevant’, they are US laws that don’t apply to ‘global trade’.

Which is to point out that today’s ‘Robber Barons’ merely kicked things up to the next level…there isn’t an effective ‘international government’ to regulate them so they can engage in the highly profitable (for them, destructive for everyone else) ‘global race to the bottom, unhindered.

This may not be apparent to the average Joe in the street but our idiot politicians (obviously) lack the mental horsepower to recognize what they have failed to prevent.

Figuring things out isn’t what politicians do well.

Understand, by the 1880’s the Robber Barons has a stranglehold on ALL commerce via their control of the nation’s transportation system. Automobiles were still rich man’s toys, oil was just beginning to replace coal as the fuel of choice in Marine applications and this nation’s commerce moved on rails.

The largest ‘cost factor’ of any given item had become the cost of getting it to market. A trivial amount you think? This factor alone funneled most of the ‘free cash’ in our society into the purses of a handful of businessmen…who were already richer than they needed to be.

No irony should be lost on the fact that capitalism keeps creating exactly this situation, over an over again!

All of the money keeps flowing (and subsequently gets stuck) at the top, causing the rest of the economy to collapse!

To ‘rescue’ capitalism (from itself) the ‘trust busters’ seized the monopolies and broke their stranglehold on the nation’s economy. (Once they had competition, prices had to come down.)

This is one of the ‘beauties’ of globalization, the multi-national ‘parent’ corporation is invisible to the national regulator who only sees the shell created specifically for the host nation.

Just because they don’t ‘look’ co-joined doesn’t mean they aren’t.

Bottom line good citizen, what is the ‘objective’ of the board game Monopoly?

Your mission is to ‘bankrupt’ all of the other players.

While it is a ‘fun’ intellectual exercise, it is not particularly desirable in ‘real life’.

Yet modern business majors have no problem with executing socially dangerous/disastrous strategies to maximize their bonus pool!

It is not a ‘game’ but the fools in charge fail to recognize the ‘consequences of their actions.’

These will be the same people who will loudly proclaim they were just ‘serving the shareowners’ as the rope is slipped over their heads.

It’s ‘only a game’ until its not.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner