But it's how these billionaires act after they get that wealth that continues to build the anger and resentment towards them. Just look at Mark Zuckerberg. Some billionaires blunder into their wealth, some (Putin) murder and steal their way to it, but these are single events, in essence. It isn't merely someone having billions of dollars that is the greatest threat, it's them using it not only to accumulate more wealth, but to do it directly through utilizing that wealth to leech power, agency, and resources from all those around them. And for what? That's the irony. These people become more vampiric after reaching a point where they have absolutely no need for for the resources.

I get why a starving man murders another for a loaf of bread. I get why a drug addict robs a bank. These are awful acts, but they make sense. Desperation and fear, they are the most powerful of motivators across the entire animal kingdom. But billionaires exhibit these behaviors at the top, and at a certain point, what they keep doing stops making any sense from any rational perspective.

Mark has more money then he can ever spend in his entire life. And he is continually getting dragged before congress and eviscerated in the media, he looks like fucking garbage, and all for what? For more money? To hold on to his shitty Boomer Brainwashing app?

He could quit this bullshit, leave it to middle men, and start a project to counteract global warming. He could try to build something new and useful to society, and people like that, too, he'll get more money the legitimate way. He could start a coding lab and hire the best coders to build crazy and fun shit and not even worry about whether it made money, he could just spend his entire life doing that and funding that lab while his fortune whittled away, because, why not? Or he could just buy an island, fill it with 1,000 bikini models staffing a luxury resort made only for him, and live the rest of his life in unimaginable ease and comfort and hedonism.

But what the fuck is he doing instead? Looking like an idiot and getting his ass handed to him on live TV by a 10-month old congresswoman. Getting memed and berated and vilified across the entire internet because he's an asshole. Going to god-knows how many speaking coaches and still coming out looking like a nervous little toad. What a disastrous waste of time and wealth. There is definitely a legitimate mental disorder that comes along with that much wealth. If they weren't so evil and destructive, you'd feel bad for these people that have more than nearly anyone else ever, and are trapped in a cycle of addiction and destruction. Money money everywhere, and not a dollar to buy happiness and peace.

Mark made billions inventing a tool that has made the world, and everyone in it, worse off for it. He will go down in history as a footnote, an awkward little joke of a man, stiff and robotic, propping up the dumbest President in the history of Presidents because he's scared a big mean lady will come and break apart the shitty, horrible thing he built.

These people are destroying the world and themselves for something they are so far beyond needing. It's absurd.

The discourse around wealth is preposterous. I hold nothing against people who inherit money or make more money. I believe everyone should be granted the ability to live in comfort, but some people strive for more and achieve more and they ought to be paid more for their talents and effort.

But I don't believe these people should have dramatically more voice and influence in a government that is supposed to, by design, treat all people equally. I don't believe that they should be permitted to make a hobby out of further exploiting and impoverishing other people for money they don't even need.

Sometimes I really marvel at how no one ever seems to ask why they do the things they do, or whether they even need to do them.

I look at Mark Zuckerberg and feel such waste. These people are like Walter White at the end of Breaking Bad. They have everything, everything they could ever need, but it turns out it's only their shitty, horrible, destructive empire that gives them any purpose anymore. So they keep digging, keep doing bad and worse things to hold on to something that they only use to validate their sad little lives.

All that fortune, and all so that weak, pathetic people can feel like whole humans.

Zuckerberg should have cashed out in his twenties and just lived his life. This sad little man is going to end up wasting his entire life aspiring to be a Big Boy that he never was and never will be, to build an Empire that no one gives a shit about and that sucks the joy out of the world like a cancer.

Just like so many of the billionaires of the world. If the vast, vast majority of billionaires are any indication, it's far more a curse than it is a gift. They're just sad, naked apes chained to the inertia of their own mountain of money, dragged along by it, following a script, forever apart from the rest of humankind, forever despised by and despising their fellow man.

Now, I have to tell you Kennedy isn’t making these rules up. They did become orthodoxy in advanced-economy treasuries in the 1980s. They’re the reason John Kerin’s budget of 1991, delivered in the depths of "the recession we [didn’t] have to have" contained zero stimulus, meaning the stimulus, when it came in February 1992, came too late.

This view isn't wide enough and lacks all the details. The worlds entire global economy software was changed, not just ours, under the guidance of Milton Friedman.

1945-1980 - Computer software No.2:

After WW2, the world's economy would be restored with the USD. The policy target would be full employment as this was believed to stop the rise of fascists again (they need to look at this again). We had homogenous national economies, we all produced most of the same stuff, fridges, cars etc... There was restricted financial markets. Growth would be lead by wage growth, high taxes and transfers would be the government's steering mechanism for the economy, and the government kept much of the commanding heights of industry under democratic/national capital control - Telekom,TRT etc - again a steering mechanism to make sure this form of capitalism worked. No one gave a shit who ran the central bank and no one knew their name.

A lot of this came from the ideas of economist John Maynard Keynes, and his ideas are credited for getting the world out of the great depression when the Friedmanite types wanted to do nothing (let the market fix itself, it's magic!)

I've posted this quote from Keynes' book - The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - here before, but I'll do it again, as it's a good summarisation of the key concept behind the 1945-1980 era.

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."

As opposed to Milton Friedman's right wing capitalist fairy tale of the market will fix itself.

There is a bug in this post WW2 software, as is with all forms of capitalism (why people like Marx thought capitalism was always in a crisis), which led to the stagflation crisis - which led to the global software reboot. We are led to believe that creating money creates inflation. While this can be true in certain circumstances and if it is abused too far, it's not the key driver. During this post WW2 era, full employment and strong labour led to high wage growth. For capitalists to keep paying workers more and to see their ROI's, they needed advancements in productivity and they had to raise prices. Eventually, the bug hit and inflation rose so high they didn't want to invest - so they withheld their capital, a capital strike.

The stagflation crisis. During this post WW2 era, it was a debtors paradise. You'd borrow money for houses and whatever, and because of the inflation, it was easy to pay the money back. Boomers had banks eat half their mortgages in inflation. The problem arose when it went so high that capital didn't want to invest. Inflation can be a good thing, right now, we're in a private debt hole and inflation would help us get out of it. Inflation too low is as bad as too high. Today, it is too low. Money creation is not raising inflation, not even when many trillions were dumped into the global economy after 2008 - Milton Friedman and his laissez-faire hacks were wrong. Full employment and strong labour drove inflation, not money creation.

We see an immense amount of money creation today both through governments and through the financial system, and inflation is extremely low. I remember watching all the laissez-faire hacks screaming after the 2008 crisis that QE would bring hyper-inflation (and they urged you to buy their gold)... It of course never happened. Inflation didn't budge.

While something had to be done to fix the stagflation crisis, capital took advantage of the crisis and swung everything too far in their favour. We just needed to bring down inflation partially, not all the way. There's a few mechanisms for this and we didn't need to destroy labour in the process.

So we get to 1980-2008, computer software No.3:

The policy target changes from full employment to price stability. The value of capital is to be "restored". The mechanism is maximum global integration and deregulated financial markets. The price of money shoots through the roof to slow inflation. The welfare state is to be wound back. Labour markets would become "flexible". Growth would now be led by profits, not wage growth (any wonder why wages are going flat). The steering mechanism of democracy and national capital would be ended and this would be handed over to private capital. Suddenly, everyone knows who runs the central banks - because the price of money becomes so important.

There would be low taxes and low transfers (the redistribution). Inflation is brought to extremely low levels. Because wage growth no longer drove growth, it's now dependent on a credit bubble - and thus the bug of this Milton Friedman/neoliberal software hits. People can only borrow so much money, especially when their wages aren't rising and the low inflation isn't eating any of the debt. The extremely low inflation is a creditors paradise - until the debts can't be paid back. The whole thing blows up in 2008 and we're in a kind of limbo, transition phase.

It's near dead, but the capitalist class have put the system onto life support by dumping massive amounts of money into the world's economies (money that goes mostly to the top) while telling the plebs they need to live within their means.

This should all sound really familiar to people across the world. It wasn't something that was just done here. For some reason, we're in a global economy and people still view the system through a national lens. Just as in the past, we'll change our software when capitalist power changes theirs. We seem to be unable to deal with it democratically and nationally, with a neoliberal media filling heads with bad ideas.

From a capitalist perspective (I don't even consider myself a capitalist, I think the world has to do better for many reasons - especially environmental sustainability), we need to bring back some of the 1945-1980 software. We see fascism rising across the world today, and full employment is what deals with that, just as it did in the past. We need higher inflation and wage growth, just not too high. The problem is capitalism is near impossible, perhaps impossible to manage well. It always falls into a pile of shit. Albert Einstein did not call capitalism "economic anarchy" for no reason.

In a globalised world, it won't be possible to go back to completely homogenous national economies, but we can partially do this. The key is the policy target. Full employment and wage growth over price stability and profit growth. There is also another key. Stop listening to the cheerleaders of free-markets. They believe in 18th-century fairy tales about what capitalism is and what it can achieve. They are ideological and frankly, religious about markets. Their economic models have numbers that stack up on paper, but they don't reflect the reality of capitalism. They've never been taught anything critical about capitalism.

Professor Richard Wolff is an economist who has degrees from Harvard, Stanford and Yale, and he says it clearly - I was never taught anything critical about capitalism, just a big song and dance about how perfect it is. If you want to understand the flaws of capitalism, you need to hear its critics, not its cheerleaders. Some capitalists are rational... Business Insider recommends their viewership to read Karl Marx - so they can better understand the flaws of this system. They don't play a childish propaganda game that Marx was Satan himself.

I am by no means a Paul Krugman fan. Krugman's idiocy (and most of the economist class) is what led us down this hole. But I'll give him this. Eventually, he saw that his globalised, neoliberal capitalist fairy tales from the 90's were wrong.

“Economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” - Paul Krugman.

His most recent book is called Reaganland and it came out in 2020. As with all of his other books, I am listening to it on Audible because I am a lazy young whipper snapper.

The books are amazing, and they really go a ways to explaining what has happened to our economy and why the members of the older generations are morally opposed to recognizing the reality of it.

The economic realities of our parents' and grandparents' world rested on the solid foundation of the New Deal, and of the economically liberal philosophies that underpinned it - that if the economy is getting to a point where regular people are unable to afford the standard of living, the government can and should intervene to assist such regular people, even if large corporations and the very wealthy people who administer those corporations scream that such assistance is communism and usurps the prerogative of the nobility. Also that labor unions are a good thing and should be supported and encouraged by the government.

The idea was that, broadly speaking, the weaker aspects of the economy should be the greatest direct beneficiaries of state intervention because otherwise, these people will get no help. The corporate class will not assist them, because that class short-sightedly sees poverty among the masses as good because it keeps labor prices low, and makes wealth more exclusive and thus more prestigious. The corporate class does not see that this commitment to poverty eventually hurts even the rich, as the poor become less invested in society as a whole and thus more willing to detach from and rebel against it - possibly by electing the kinds of governments being seen in Europe during the New Deal, which Roosevelt hoped the New Deal would prevent in the States.

Although this system worked magnificently and created the strongest and broadest economy in the world by the 1950's, one in which people working factory jobs that once allowed them to live in one room tenements were now owning homes, buying cars and saving for their children to go to college, the corporate class was never very enthusiastic about it. However, the New Deal rhetoric had so successfully painted laissez-faire conservatism as thinly veiled corporate greed and the main cause of the Great Depression, that there didn't seem to be anything they could do about it.

That is, until a younger generation of conservatives began to develop an exciting new breed of conservatism called the "New Right," exemplified by William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. This version of laissez-faire emphasized the "liberty" aspect of reducing regulation of corporate interests, and vilifyied government assistance to the working class as a big government scheme to crush the freedom of the free market.

The New Right took all of the resentment that the New Dealers had piled onto the corporate class and transferred it to a heretofore allegedly unrecognized shadow class of "permanent bureaucracy" (what Trumpism would term "the Deep State"), whose oppression of corporate interests was just the first step in eventually forcing all "regular Americans" into Soviet gulags.

Although this vision of the evil deep state crushing our freedoms on the pretext of helping the poor is just common sense reality to today's rank and file conservatives, in mid-century America it went hard against the general grain. Thus, to bolster the popularity of this bold new philosophy, the New Right tied their argument to any sort of resentment against "newfangled values" that it could find.

Thus, resistance to gay rights became "the self-appointed bureaucratic nanny state wants to force us to let our sons learn how to be gay, just like it wants to rob hard workers of the money they earn in order to spend it on frivolous government welfare programs aimed to encourage things like homosexuality," or "government assistance is part of the overall liberal scheme to empower the lazy and undermine the strong, in order to weaken America for an eventual union with the Soviets, which is what these liberals really want," etc.

In the late 1970's, our economy was really struggling - not because the government was choking the ingenuity and work ethic of the corporate class, but because our post-war virtual monopoly of international production was over, and because we had become highly dependent on foreign oil whose price could be dictated by the whims of strongmen.

The New Right jumped on this apparent crisis as proof that what they had been saying since the 1950's was true, and that if we didn't act quickly to get the government out of the economy, we would soon be taken over by socialists using the crisis they had intentionally created in order to finally fully crush American freedom.

The man who won the White House in 1980, who had been pushing this philosophy since the late 1950's, was swept in on a popular tide of approval for this formerly laughable philosophy. And it continues to be the religion of the Republican party to this day.

The mechanisms in place in the world that our parents grew up in to distribute wealth more fairly are no longer in place. They are no longer in place because our parents' generation was fooled into believing that these mechanisms were responsible for economic problems in the 1970's and 1980's that were actually largely unrelated to our New Deal economic system and philosophy. They therefore elected people who destroyed these mechanisms, and they cheered for the rebirth of American freedom while it happened.

They cannot admit they were wrong. Therefore, if things are shittier for our generation than for theirs, it must be due to our laziness and sense of entitlement. Far from admitting that the philosophy of the New Right is responsible for the explosion in cost of living, and the resultant decrease in quality of life for a broader and broader section of the American population, they claim that any economic problems are the result of lingering liberalism, and cry that the only way to full prosperity is more economic conservatism. And they've taught many of their children to believe this as well.

Thus, even many members of our younger generations seem perfectly willing to pick up this misguided torch. God help us all. \n

He spent ink on paper like he blew through lines of cocaine in between shots of Jameson and packs of Dunhills. Prolific, vicious in his capture of human perversity and thorough in his description of a mind pushed past the edge of sanity; what a lifetime of drug abuse will do to a man. As destructive as a force of nature in the ferocity with which he expressed his abhorrence for square society and the powers that be.

Hunter personified the American Dream in the way he lived, despite his endless pursuit of it, and rode the crest of the high and beautiful wave of West Coast hippy radicalism and rebellion only for it to peak, break, and roll back as America gradually surrendered to decadence, excessive consumerism, and narrow-minded patriotism beneath its government’s continued persistence at playing God.

Hunter loved his superbikes and drugs and guns, namely his Vincent Black Shadow, high-powered blotter Acid and Smith Wesson Model 27 the latter with which he would occasionally engage in gunfights with his neighbor.

Despite his death on the 20th of February 2005, this author likes to believe he is still out there, gunning his 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L Bean cargo shorts and a Butte Shepherds jacket, booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond with a head full of acid at 3 in the morning, on his way to score some mescaline from the hippies who camp out in Buena Vista park in Haight-Ashbury.

He lived life to the fullest, accomplished all he set out to and then some, had a loving family that understood his character and died by his own hand, all according to his plan of what he conceived to be happiness. It is this author’s personal belief that it was the best fitting end for him rather than grow old and pathetic or die from accidental overdose as he often could have.

Hunter S. Thompson killed himself, because he’s the only one who deserved to kill Hunter S. Thompson and end a life of Fear and Loathing, a life of destruction and creation, a life of insanity and violence, a life of depravity and perversity, a life well lived for a madman like him.