Free-market Parasites
The crypto economy can’t get here fast enough.
In addition to writing, I manage businesses. And as I review the financial records of these businesses every year, I see corporate parasitism biting them worse and worse. But if pushed, the bosses of these outfits would claim free market justification. After all, they didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head!
But they do hold the proverbial gun. More precisely, they arrange for government guns to do their bidding. For example, one of my companies made monthly payments to an internet faxing company for years. We tried to cancel the service over and over. We changed the debit card it was being charged to. And yet the charges came through every month. And I can guarantee you that it was all very legal and that they were “compliant with all banking regulations.”
Such companies are simply parasites, and they know exactly what they’re doing. In fact, they’re just like my first serious boss.
Jack was an old man when I went to work for him in the early 1980s, and his model of commerce was to take advantage of everyone he could, any time he could. And if those people were stupid enough or weak enough to get ripped off, that was just the natural order of things.
Needless to say, Jack and I had a lot of arguments. He ripped off his customers, his workers, his suppliers, and anyone else he could. That was just the way he did things… for more than 50 years.
And that’s the same model that many companies are using these days. It’s very clearly true of the healthcare sector of the US economy, where paid-off politicians prepare incomprehensible legislation that bleeds the US public dry. It’s all done legally of course and is dedicated to “helping the middle class” or whatever BS they’re spewing this year. But in honest terms, it’s simply a mass fleecing.
It’s also done by the banks and financial companies. After all, they can comply with all the thousands of government regulations, which keeps them free of competitors and leaves you and me with no practical alternatives. How many types of bank charges are you paying every month? And if your business takes credit cards, how much are you paying them every month? Is what they do really worth all that money, or are you simply stuck with them?
And this list could go on at length, reaching down to small companies like the one I began with.
Crypto doesn’t directly protect us from criminals of course, but since it hasn’t yet been regulated (read strangled) by the state, crypto gives the parasites no good way to point government guns at us.
Those who steal via crypto are straight-up thieves, and as vile as they may be, I’d rather deal with them than parasites who hide behind “free market” and rip people off by manipulating government force.
The whole situation reminds me of a quote from the great historian, C. Delisle Burns, explaining why Rome crashed:
Great numbers of men and women were unwilling to make the effort required for the maintenance of the old order, not because they were not good enough to fulfill their civic duties, but because they were too good to be satisfied with a system from which so few derived benefit.
In like manner, great numbers of us will make no effort to save the existing financial system. Not because we don’t care about commerce, but because a system that services parasites isn’t worth saving.
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Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com
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