Our economy is based upon gambling – always has been, always will be. In the past, the gambles were based upon real economic, social, scientific, technological and political conditions and predictions of how things might change. Uncertainty was always present in widely varying degrees since no one is clairvoyant and hindsight is uselessly 20-20. All of life is a risk and risk minimization is only temporarily successful when sociopaths manipulate the overall system in their favor.
Today, our FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate plus energy-production and banking) really runs our politics and economics, dwarfing our old manufacturing, new high-tech, and most other sectors in fake profitability and overall influence. This group of corrupt crony capitalists constitutes America’s merged oligarchy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy in both Washington and Wall Street. They have created a rigged casino in which they and their friends win big but everyone else including the vast majority of Americans and most of the world’s people – lose – or at least are responsible for the losses while they reap all the gains.
This overall dynamic is not going to change and we’re on the delusional road to complete fascist feudalism as the American Empire will implode rather quickly over the next 10 years. Since the FIRE sector is principally based upon legalized gambling (i.e. betting on everything that can be of financial interest to a Harvard MBA) why not open up the economy to everyone else? Why not legalize all types of gambling that the vast majority of people already engage in and can readily understand such as sports betting, private lotteries, predicting the weather, the officially fabricated and hilarious unemployment rates, and the opening weekend box office revenues of new movies to name just a few viable options?
Such a legalization of most illegal activities would really not impair the profits or control over our society by the FIRE casino. Those who can play at the level of the FIRE sector have far more wealth than 90% of the population of the world and their bets are really large – often with borrowed money that the public sector will insure if things go bad. Legalizing all types of small-time gambling options that are currently illegal will not put the public sector in the position of covering losses. The only minor threat will be to a bunch of rigged state monopolies on various types of lotteries – all of which have such poor odds that they have seen little growth (and even revenue drops) that their assistance in overall state financing has greatly diminished.
By legalizing gambling, we would have a whole new set of poor and middle-income people to tax through their bookies – and at the higher earned income tax rates from which billionaire hedge fund owners are fully exempt. The bets might be much smaller (and not based upon large borrowing or leveraging) but taxing the millions of winning bets will create a nice regressive revenue stream for all the levels of government who have given up taxing the wealthy sector’s unearned incomes that arise from rents from real estate, interest and fee charges, royalties, and capital gains.
Due to the likely tax compromise in Washington, even investing in the domestic stock markets (directly or indirectly via mutual funds) might be fine for awhile. The extra money not taxed away from the wealthy has to go somewhere and one good place will be the stock market. Soon we’ll see all those trillions of dollars in cash that have been hoarded by large U.S. multinational companies start producing jobs – albeit all overseas via investments in new factories, plants, equipment acquisitions, technology transfers, new distributorships, and R&D facilities in Asia. Recent reports indicate Asia’s children now have the highest test scores (dwarfing American results) that will further indicate to America’s oligarchy that 90% of Americans are just too dumb on which to make any future investments or long-term bets.
Stock Brokers, bankers, investment advisers, hedge funds managers and others (who engage in high-velocity insider gambling in stocks) are collectively creating another stock market bubble. The only problem in chasing bubbles is knowing when to get out. It’s really easy to tell that point. It’s when all the “little people” start getting into the market and all the players who have inside information start dumping their holdings. Another good personal measurement is to be satisfied with getting a good return on the initial investing and just selling regardless whether the market keeps going up after that sale. (Remember that both bulls and bears make money but pigs are always slaughtered.)
The next decade will see domestic and foreign stock and commodities markets go up and down widely, following various bubbles and other gambling scams. (Prices will have nothing to do with the actual performances of companies, global supply and demand, or reality.) After the market went below 8,000 in 2008, many people sold and vowed never to return. Now the market is back over 11,000 and it will probably peak around 14,000 before it collapses again below 9,000. This will be pattern for the next 10 years – regardless of where real economies, businesses, employment levels, consumer spending, and other financial indicators move. The U.S. domestic stock markets are close to uncoupling completely from the U.S. economy as many large publicly-traded companies now get most of their income from overseas operations anyway and this trend will continue unabated as the U.S. consumer society will constitute a smaller part of the U.S. and global economies. Unemployment may double and Main Street may shut down completely, but the DOW, NASDAQ and NYSE will bounce along in another world.
Since the U.S. economy will not be creating any viable jobs for a large section of its population, regardless of education, skills, experience or age, these people have to turn elsewhere for income. Most new jobs in America will be temporary, low-paying service sector positions with no benefits. Whether or not governments legalize various activities, those illegal activities will continue to grow as viable income sources for those who have been permanently detached from any gainful employment and earnings from honest labor.
It did not help our overall society that those who committed the greatest financial crimes have not been prosecuted but instead financially rewarded. Thus the moral and ethical corruption at the top will seep its way all the way down through society (the only real trickle-down effect) and all moral and ethical constraints on the poor and former middle class will disappear with respect to engaging in illegal activities. The risks will always be higher since government tends to investigate and prosecute the small stuff while ignoring the big stuff that finances the existence of our political class, but that has always been the history of humanity. The only difference today is the size and scope of the corruption at the top.
So my advice to everyone is to just ignore the laws and your consciences. You should do anything now that our society has degenerated into a dog-eat-dog subsistence level dominated by sociopaths. Go ahead and engage in every illegal activity imaginable since most honest work has completely disappeared. Just put some of your ill-gotten earnings aside for future bribing of police and prosecutors and always keep your passport current. The law is only for fools – and we’ve been taken for fools for far too long.
Submitted by Marc Pascal in Phoenix, AZ on the 69th Anniversary of the Day that would have lived in infamy had not most Americans completely forgotten. Those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.