Ninja Homer
10-09-2008, 03:42 PM
I originally posted this in this thread (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=161991), but thought this deserves its own thread since the other one was wrong from the start, and has been completely shat upon.
Any time an invention comes along that makes production faster, it will give people who produce those products more money and free time, and it will also help people who use those products save money because the product will be cheaper. We have lots of inventions that do this already, such as computers and robotics, so the real question people should be asking is, how come we aren't all richer and working less right now than we were before these things were invented?
There are 3 things that work together to continually make us more poor, depite all our technological advances: inflation, taxation, and corporatism.
Inflation of the money supply makes most of us more poor, because the government gives out the money to certain people. If it was given out to everybody at the same time equally, inflation wouldn't be nearly as big of a problem. It is first given to corporations with government contracts, banks, etc. Eventually the new money reaches the rest of the population, but by that time it is worth less, and people who received money first have used the money to increase their wealth. Inflation makes any savings worth less.
Taxation takes away almost half your earned income. I've heard it said that one of the reasons for such heavy taxation is to keep the money supply low. With so much inflation, if they didn't have taxes to take money out of circulation, there would be so much money that we would have had hyperinflation long ago. A large chunk of the tax money (some have said ALL of it) goes to the Federal Reserve. It is kept a secret how much of the national debt is owed to the Federal Reserve for their awesome service they provide for us, but I guarantee it's trillions of dollars.
Corporations make us more poor in many ways. One of the original reasons for creating a limited republic was to keep out corporations. Over time, corporations have infiltrated the system, and have gotten laws passed to make themselves legal, shut down any competition, and profit regardless of damages to property, environment, or lives. Corporatism must NOT be confused with capitalism or the free market... they are almost complete opposites.
We should all be much wealthier and have much more free time, but those 3 things have held us down for the last century. Without those 3 things, an average family could probably live pretty well with 1 parent working 20 hours a week. We wouldn't have as much moral decay or crime or corruption. We would have the resources to educate, create, and progress more and more rapidly. We would probably already all be running off some alternative clean energy source. These are just some of the things that have been taken from us, and this is the reason we must fight on until we are victorious.
Yes, new technologies can some times take over people's jobs. But then, the products that they helped create are cheaper, so everybody has more money. When everybody has more money and more time, whole new fields of industry are created, which result in lots of new jobs. Look at all the jobs in the entertainment industry! Movies, music, sports, tv, radio, theme parks, resorts, cruises, etc. That's a direct result of the inventions that were created in the late 19th century. Everybody suddenly had more free time and more money, and new fields emerged to fill their needs.
When people have more money, they will want to spend some of it on nicer things. Rather than cheap, robot-built furniture that is mass produced and looks the same as everybody else's, they will spend money on one of a kind furniture made by skilled crafters. So the production line furniture factory workers may have been replaced by robots, but now skilled crafters are more in demand. Those production line workers can now be a crafter, or they can find something else that they'd probably much rather be doing anyway.
I hope this makes sense, and I hope people understand this... so much has been taken from us, and we must continue to fight to get it back. It isn't just a bit out of our paycheck, it's years of our lives spent working and getting nowhere.
Any time an invention comes along that makes production faster, it will give people who produce those products more money and free time, and it will also help people who use those products save money because the product will be cheaper. We have lots of inventions that do this already, such as computers and robotics, so the real question people should be asking is, how come we aren't all richer and working less right now than we were before these things were invented?
There are 3 things that work together to continually make us more poor, depite all our technological advances: inflation, taxation, and corporatism.
Inflation of the money supply makes most of us more poor, because the government gives out the money to certain people. If it was given out to everybody at the same time equally, inflation wouldn't be nearly as big of a problem. It is first given to corporations with government contracts, banks, etc. Eventually the new money reaches the rest of the population, but by that time it is worth less, and people who received money first have used the money to increase their wealth. Inflation makes any savings worth less.
Taxation takes away almost half your earned income. I've heard it said that one of the reasons for such heavy taxation is to keep the money supply low. With so much inflation, if they didn't have taxes to take money out of circulation, there would be so much money that we would have had hyperinflation long ago. A large chunk of the tax money (some have said ALL of it) goes to the Federal Reserve. It is kept a secret how much of the national debt is owed to the Federal Reserve for their awesome service they provide for us, but I guarantee it's trillions of dollars.
Corporations make us more poor in many ways. One of the original reasons for creating a limited republic was to keep out corporations. Over time, corporations have infiltrated the system, and have gotten laws passed to make themselves legal, shut down any competition, and profit regardless of damages to property, environment, or lives. Corporatism must NOT be confused with capitalism or the free market... they are almost complete opposites.
We should all be much wealthier and have much more free time, but those 3 things have held us down for the last century. Without those 3 things, an average family could probably live pretty well with 1 parent working 20 hours a week. We wouldn't have as much moral decay or crime or corruption. We would have the resources to educate, create, and progress more and more rapidly. We would probably already all be running off some alternative clean energy source. These are just some of the things that have been taken from us, and this is the reason we must fight on until we are victorious.
Yes, new technologies can some times take over people's jobs. But then, the products that they helped create are cheaper, so everybody has more money. When everybody has more money and more time, whole new fields of industry are created, which result in lots of new jobs. Look at all the jobs in the entertainment industry! Movies, music, sports, tv, radio, theme parks, resorts, cruises, etc. That's a direct result of the inventions that were created in the late 19th century. Everybody suddenly had more free time and more money, and new fields emerged to fill their needs.
When people have more money, they will want to spend some of it on nicer things. Rather than cheap, robot-built furniture that is mass produced and looks the same as everybody else's, they will spend money on one of a kind furniture made by skilled crafters. So the production line furniture factory workers may have been replaced by robots, but now skilled crafters are more in demand. Those production line workers can now be a crafter, or they can find something else that they'd probably much rather be doing anyway.
I hope this makes sense, and I hope people understand this... so much has been taken from us, and we must continue to fight to get it back. It isn't just a bit out of our paycheck, it's years of our lives spent working and getting nowhere.