If you listen to the devotees of Ayn Rand they will be happy to tell you one of the greatest lies ever told. That lie is that only the wealthy investors have any worth because they create wealth and the rest of us are just worthless moochers and parasites who live off the creativty of the Rich. Of course besides convieniently leaving out the truth, they also leave out the part about how wealth is really created.
If an economic parasite is determined by who lives off the created wealth of whom, than the Rich are the greatest set of parasites going. You see the reality is that for most of us work is a pyramid scheme. Most of us work to create the product that our boss makes a living from, his supervisor makes a living from, the Board of Directors distributes dividends from and the company owner gets his millions from. The only ones who really work are the 99% of us who have gotten scant benefit from the riches our labor has created lately.
Since 2008, 88% of the wealth generated by our labor has gone to profits, only 1% to wages. Those of us who work for a living will in all liklihood die broke because no one gets wealthy working for someone else.
While the wealthy give themselves unseemly bonuses we are given massive debt from credit cards to student loans to supplement the gross underpayment of the value of our labor. Working hard and playing by the rules clearly has not paid off for a long time, if it ever paid off.
Those jobs we have are the real cause of a 65% divorce rate, suicides, drug use, domestic violence and a host of our worst social statistics. If you think I'm wrong just listen to this.
What are the three leading causes of divorce?
They are money, sex and lack of communication. I hypothesize that work is the major contributing factor to all three.
We already know that most of us clearly are not paid even close to what we are worth, particularly since if we don't create a product those in management above us have no profits to take their unfair share from. Who has much energy for feeling sexy after working at least one and a half jobs just to make ends barely meet. I remember reading about what the author called the curse of the double income. He called it double income no sex. Here you might find the real cause of affairs not all the tabloid trash.
Who among us feels like spending time talking after working all day under the stress of right to work that means you can be let go just because the Boss feels like it. We are all indentured servants if not out and out serfs in this global economy.
For many the suggested solution is the get into your own business. We all would like to be our own boss but someone has to teach school, fix cars, be police officers and the like. How do we create work that isn't just one step above legal slavery and kills us early to boot?
That will be our challenge moving forward as a nation with 23 million of us unable to even work because our economy is not creating jobs. This is why we need to fight to bring back unions. We have recieved much too little of the wealth our labor created, though it is looking like many of us are going to literally die on the job because we can't retire.What a scheme our self appointed aristocracy has created while pretending that Capitalism is some scientific principle. And to think our bosses tried to tell us Social Security was the biggest pyramid scheme ever created.
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