The Silver Lining of the Occupy Wall Street Movement
Yesterday the Occupy San Francisco Movement attempted to block shoppers from going to sales on Black Friday. This worked about as well as one would expect -- the naivete they demonstrated in trying to prevent Black Friday sales from happening is hilarious in and of itself. But they did manage to get Union Square, and by extension the upscale
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Let's look at "investors" these days. You have *very* few actual direct individual investors who buy stocks and bonds directly. Instead, you have mutual funds, who hold big portfolios, and corporations doing 401-K plans and such. These big groups are doing incredibly complicated investment trades and schemes to - in theory - insure themselves against losses. The big trading houses are more than happy to set these things up - and to make them even more complicated to hide the fact that there's no real way to actually judge the risk involved. Part of these trades is the investments individuals make in their houses through mortgages - and the mortgages being offered are mostly variable interest mortgages, with all kinds of fancy clauses that keeps the average home buyer from figuring out any real evaluation of the situation. Soon enough, the home owner is going bankrupt - but nobody's called them on it yet. And the banks encourage the trading houses to do these super-complicated derivatives and other swaps to help hide the fact that the mortgages are bad, were bad to start with, and had terms that were completely out of line with reality. Credit card debt is being used the same way.
Somewhere, we lost the idea that being in debt is a *BAD* thing - in large part because the big money people have told us that of *COURSE* we'll be able to pay it off.
Some *HUGE* fraction of the current generations will not have *ANY* inheritance from their parents.
And the people *MOST* responsible? The same parents who decided they could put that TV on the credit card, or that vacation trip, or whatever - and pay it back later. The same parents who looked at that variable mortgage, and never dreamed that the payments on it could double or triple, even if they acknowledged that the initial rate was lower than it really should be.
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Actually, the people most responsible for our national debt, both public and private, are those who decided that "government money" came from some magic fairyland source and that therefore voting for any and all amounts to be spent on any purpose of any merit whatsoever constituted "generosity," while refusing to spend constituted "stinginess." This gave politicians absolutely no reason not to push for as much spending as possible, save insofar as in said politicians retained contact with reality and loved their country more than themselves -- and such intelligent patriots will always be a minority, in all times and places.
Do you remember in the 1990's, when Newt Gingrich warned that we would face precisely the outcome that we face today, and tried to organize an effort to avert the collapse of our credit? He was termed "The Gingrinch," and called "mean-spirited" because he wanted the government to spend less?
This mammoth spending has consequences. Either we fund it with taxes, in which case we directly take money out of the hands of the more productive and hand it as a reward to the less productive -- which makes people less and less willing to attempt to be productive -- or we fund it by either issueing bonds or printing money, either of which ultimately reduce the value of savings and other investment.
When we massively reduce the value of savings, why is it irrational for private citizens to exchange their credit (earned from their productivity) for tangible goods? When taxes rise or currency devalues, you will still get value from vehicles, appliances etc. which you have bought on credit. And, if you ask "How will you pay back your debt?", the answer is that you never really intended to -- any more than did the US government -- and that you are fully aware that if everyone is massively in debt, debt collection becomes impossible both for political and economnic reasons.
Private citizens have learned to do this from public officials. Don't blame the private citizens in their capacity as producers.
Instead, blame them in their capacity as voters, for repeatedly refusing to vote out the big spenders.
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Oh, you're talking about the Occupy crowd. :)
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