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Originally Posted by InformedConsent
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First, I completely agree that Social Security is a garbage deal. And I especially think its a garbage deal for poor men(since men and poor people tend to live shorter lives overall). But that doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people in this country overwhelmingly rely on Social Security for their retirement income.
If your argument is that the poor and middle-classes would be better off if they threw their money into retirement funds instead of being locked into Social-security. Hell, I would agree with you.
But then you have to ask the question, "Why?"
As I've said repeatedly. The Stock Market, for people who understand its complexities, is effectively an endless money-machine, tempered only by the willingness of the Federal Reserve to lend money. Which is itself only tempered by the desire to keep inflation at about ~2-3% annually.
The total value of a stock market is generally related to the total volume of capital directed into the stock market. If you increase the amount of capital(IE increase the money supply), you increase the total capital available to be invested. Now, it doesn't always mean that the money will be invested in stocks, or if it will be invested at all. But it normally goes in the direction of being invested(no one wants to sit on capital that is going to lose value if not invested).
Wall Street would absolutely love it if more people in the middle and lower classes would divert more of their incomes into the stock market. This new influx of capital, will cause the price of stocks to go up. If people pull the money out of the stock market, the price of stocks go down. If no new capital is available to invest in the stock market, then the prices will largely stay flat.
Now, part of the problem with the stock market, is that, the layman needs to stay out of investing. If he wants to invest at all, he will need to talk to a financial adviser, and he would be better off buying some sort of "mutual fund" or just sticking with his 401k, or some IRA. But, these funds aren't actually free. The people who "manage" these funds, either charge a fee, or take a percentage. Sometimes that percentage is considerable. And some funds don't even want to bother with you unless you're dealing with tens of thousands of dollars.
This makes the bar of entry very high, and is why the vast majority of the working classes either have their money invested for them automatically through their employer, or they don't invest any at all.
But, lets even pretend for a moment that the poor invested the same portion of their money as the upper-classes into stock investments. What does that actually change?
Lets understand, my complaint isn't about the existence of the stock market, or whether or not people make a profit off the stock market. I love the free-market. And I even think that being able to sell shares in your company is a good thing.
My complaint is that, the Stock Market, as a result of the machinations of fiat currencies, doesn't function by free-market principles. People like to claim that the Stock Market is representative of "capitalism". And that it has produced "wealth". But that is a half-truth, that masks a broader lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finance_capitalism
Any time money can be created at will, then those who control the creation of money, and especially, those who can get ahold of it first, and at low rates of interest, will create for themselves massive unfair advantages. The Stock Market should not be going up 5-10% a year into perpetuity. But it does, because of the unfair advantages built into the system. Which transfers massive amounts of wealth into the hands of the rich, at the expense of the poor.
But lets understand, I don't mean that the rich take money from the poor. That isn't the case at all. The actual mechanism is that the rich just hand themselves more money. And by handing themselves more money, they end up with greater purchasing power. Thus, the rich are able to buy a larger share of all the goods and services produced in society. Leaving the working poor(who actually produce a good portion of the goods and services) with a smaller and smaller share.
To give you an example of how the system works, I'll give you a rather extreme example.
You have to imagine that you literally just printed yourself up $100,000. You then take that money and buy goods and services all year long from the lower and middle-classes. The government decides they are going to tax you at 30%, and take $30,000 of your dollars from you. The government then transfers this $30,000 to the poor and middle classes, allowing them to avoid paying taxes altogether, and giving them some extra spending money.
In the mind of the working classes, they think they are getting a good deal, and they think they are screwing you, because they took $30,000 from you, and now they don't have to pay any taxes at all. And you can even rant about how awful it is that your taxes are so high, and what scumbags these poor people are before they don't pay any taxes.
But in reality, you did nothing to deserve your money, and whether you technically handed over part of your fake money or not, doesn't change that fact. Had you not existed at all, the others would have been better off. Of the $30,000 you supposedly handed to government, it may have been spent to build roads, or schools. But the labor provided for those things will be provided by the lower and middle-classes, not you. In essence, they actually taxed themselves to produce these things, because it was their labor actually used to create them. Yet, in their imagination, it was you that paid for it.
It is all an illusion. But, the vast majority of people are too dumb to realize it. And then we get a bunch of idiots coming to this forum whining about how terrible the poor are because they don't pay taxes.
If you find someone whining about how the working poor aren't paying their taxes, you can pretty much guarantee that he is completely ignorant of how the monetary system works.
As I said before, if the rich are actually getting hosed by the poor. Then why do the rich continue to support near endless immigration of the poorest people on the planet?
As long as you continue to close a blind eye to how these bankers manipulate the system to their advantage. Then we will be forced to continue having this stupid argument, over and over and over again. But I find these arguments pointless, because they mask and divert our attention away from the real problems.
Here is the truth, the bankers need to go. I'm so sick and tired of them.
Ron Paul may talk about ending the Fed. But that is just the start. This poison has infected the entire world.
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