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Hard Work and Liberty

"Are the Idle Rich and the Idle Poor Stealing from the Man in the Middle?"

Here’s your regular dose of matters of the US Constitution from In Search of Liberty. Today, let’s talk about wealth inequality and how the idle rich and the idle poor are stealing from the middle class. Read on and help spread the gospel of liberty and freedom.

I remember the excitement of losing my first tooth as a child. My hardworking teacher-father made a big thing about it using this experience to teach me about money. I was to give up my shiny, white tooth and the tooth fairy would give me something valuable. It was to be a simple transaction. I give tooth; fairy gives me a coin or a note.  My father carefully explained it to me: This is about exchange, kid.  Never a good idea to take something for nothing for that makes for lots of trouble; also not a good idea to give something for nothing, he added almost as an afterthought. This last point I didn’t understand, not then.

I was growing up during a time when America was still prosperous and it was easy to believe in a Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas and the big, benevolent State that took care of everything and everyone.  Now I realize it was actually Father giving me that coin. Father was a producer and that was why he was able to give money to me.  Father, like most Americans belonged to that vastly undervalued middle class, part of an undervalued group that drives the forward progress of America.

America can be divided into three broad classes: the rich, the producers and the poor.  There is some overlap; a few rich people are also producers.  Few poor people are producers, but there are some that try. I am defining production here as making a contribution to society; I define idleness as not making a valid contribution. To those people who just spin their wheels I tend to call them idle; like an engine idling with the car going nowhere.  I see that many in the investor class fall into this category. It is true that some rich people have earned their wealth. The real trouble is that production is no longer valued or rewarded. By observation, there are more rich people who have gamed an unfair system and been well rewarded, than those who rise to the top as a result of honest smarts or real hard work.

The idle rich are parasitic on society, yet it is they who call the shots. We have lobbyists, negative TV political ads and financial groups that think they are an individual, all throwing money after big, government contracts.  There are investors out there playing with futures, selling their stocks shares short, and having a good old time making an inordinate amount of funny money.  Is this not contrary to what was intended by the framers of the Constitution?

Let’s do this together: Take a good, hard look at Wall Street.  Idlers or Contributors?

For starters there is Fractional Banking: Hold off you say!  Forbes believes Fractional Banking is good and here to stay. Fractional Banking is the privilege that banks enjoy to lend out nine dollars for every one dollar that they receive in deposits.  In other words, Congress has given them permission to multiply their money supply, and this has also been approved by the Central Banks of the world.  So the big question is, is fractional banking and trading in futures and other sleight of hand investment malpractices really okay, or does is give us a class of idle rich?

Some may object to my using the term “funny, money”.  Well, let me ask a question, what happens if you default on a bank loan – given the bank only had one tenth of the value of the loan in deposit money? If they loaned you $5000 is it okay to pay them back only ten percent of the loan?  Tell that to the credit score agency or the debt collector! And what about all that compound interest on the loan? The banks are already making a ninety percent funny money profit.  Is that fair? Is that equitable?

AIG (Assholes in Greed) are back to their old dirty tricks with their sales persons making an inordinate amount of money compared to the man who makes a bridge or builds a house, bakes our bread, or provides customer support for a beneficial product for a good corporation. Note well: AIG has just sued the American Government for “taking too much of their money.” Hello! It was their job to insure the failing banks and keep them safe. Some of us, actually most of us in the middle, do our jobs and we don’t go crying to the government to bail us out. I saw a comment on Facebook last week. Someone in the Financial Sector was complaining that America should give Wall Street more money – why?  Because England was more generous with their bailouts!

Do you protest that I classify a lot of Wall Street as idle-rich?  Remember this is your call reader. My question to you is, are they idle?

Ask yourself, whenever there is a holiday, what institutions close their doors?  That’s right. Bankers.  Look at all the high-rise buildings in your local area; I bet there are bigger banking buildings than anything else, right?   Now who are the hard workers in your local area?  It is the small business owners, the holistic healers, the health care professionals, the farmers, the caterers, the educators, the auto shop owners and on and on. They keep their doors open, sometimes even seven days in a week and all government holidays. Something is awry here.

How is American money and debt created today and how does this relate to the Constitution and to Liberty?  Believers in the state welfare system rarely go far enough to ask this question: Where does the State get its money?  In the Constitution the coining of money was a job given to Congress, an elected body.  So if a politician were to accept a bribe, or if a politician were to reward a crony, the people could throw him out come the next election. It was important to the framers of the Constitution that the financial power stayed with the people. But Congress no longer coins money.  In 1913 they gave this sacred duty to the Federal Reserve (a privately owned corporation of international bankers). Yes, they lifted all this power up above and out of the checks and balances of the Constitution.  Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is why we have the checks and balances of the Constitution.

Our American government income is partly money created by the FED (out of nothing) and converted into debt, and partly money taken in, in taxes.  During the recent banking crisis, the FED gave away bailout money to 949 American institutions, a total of $475 billion and, in addition, $16 trillion to the bailout of foreign institutions. There was no consent by the people or even from Congress for this largesse, for it was done secretly. Some of this bailout money has been repaid, but little seems to have trickled down to the individual taxpayer or to small businesses.

This blog post examines whether the super rich are entitled to the privilege they enjoy, by superior ability and contribution to society or have they merely learned to game an unfair system?  It is a fair question...

Of great concern are also the crony capitalists. A swarm of unelected lobbyists now buzz around Capitol Hill, writing the bills, bribing and paying off politicians.  According to Popvox, 83 % concerned American citizens opposed the recent TPA bill (ObamaTrade) yet it was passed by Congress. Senator Ted Cruz changed his vote to “against”, in protest of all the “backroom deals”.

According to Bernie Sanders, in the last two years the wealthiest fourteen people in this country increased their wealth by $157 billion. That increase is more than what is owned by the bottom 130 million Americans combined.  Wealth inequality destroys the American dream; it is bad for business and it is bad for society as well.

In all of the FED’s history it is only in the last year that there has been an audit and this was only partial. Way back in 1913 together with the FED, the moneymakers created Income Tax.  The idea dominating Income Tax is to take from each citizen according to his ability to pay and to give to each citizen according to his need. The entitlement mentality can be traced back to the start of income tax as more and more people begin to think they have a right to something for nothing; Income Tax sowed the seeds of Socialism.

For several decades the world has been in free fall and the bailouts do not seem to have worked.  America is not as bad off as the rest of the world where corruption and domination have prevailed for centuries. There is still some hope for the USA. We in America have a tradition of hard-work and liberty and upward motion and a respect for the rights of the individual, rather than the autocratic domination that prevails in Europe, Africa and Asia.  If we can educate our leaders and straighten out the confusions of our time, we can still make it come out all right.

Congress has kindly enacted a food stamp program to help the poor get by. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act cost the nation $4.5 billion and was hailed as a compassionate victory for the Poor. The new law however gives rise to a few problems. You may well ask why a program to feed poor children should become a bonanza for a mega-bank. Hidden in the legislation is the mandate that all State agencies implement Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) and get it in place by the year 2020.  Eighteen of the 24 states with EBT have contracts with JP Morgan Chase. Since the downturn, JP Morgan has raked in a total of $560 million with more still to come. So you can bet your bottom dollar that even if the economy were ever to recover, food stamps are here to stay.

Now that we have the food stamps there is an escalation in illegal immigration as the rest of the poor world tries to slip illegally across our borders for a free meal.

Know that our politicians are not bad men; they are caught in a financial web where they have little wiggle room thanks to the high cost of TV election ads. They are not ogres and so they do what they can to level the playing field after they give privilege to their major campaign donors.  The result is legislation that favors the idle rich but also gives a benefit to their pets, the idle poor.

There are those who would rather live off the State than go to work but they are the minority. I talked not so long ago with a teacher who went to China and she confirmed that Chinese students are far more motivated to work hard and get ahead than American Students. This same fact was confirmed by a new friend who had traveled to implement training for AT & T internationally.  She too preferred her foreign students where they were respectful and did not spend the full lecture texting on their phones. Don’t get it wrong though, when talking about the poor, a man from Pakistan stated on Facebook that all Americans are rich.  We have lodging and a car, we have a washer and a dryer and many even have a dishwasher. He could not see that there were any poor people at all in America. This made me realize that what the rest of the world covets is the American spender, the American Marketplace. If not America whom would they sell to?  Yet they resent this dependency. What the other countries do not realize is that this wealth comes from 200 years of Constitutional Rule. We built it. Are the other nations willing to accept our Constitutional checks and balances? Are we willing to accept and honor the Constitution that has made us great and brought us freedom and prosperity?

Constitutional Rule is what is currently under attack as the idle poor and the idle rich fight to keep an unfair privilege…

What we need to realize is that producers are actually in the majority.  We have to rise up together, unite, organize and share with others that hard work and actual production is where it is at, and we need to make it clearly known that we will not be bullied.

It is time for all men of good will to come together to protect our Constitution and to fight to keep our Liberty and our Heritage.

If we bring back the Constitution, we will recover the magic.

Idle Rich and Idle Poor Stealing from the Man in the Middle?

This post is contributed by Lynn Verhoeff who has been writing for 20 years. More recently she chose to focus on matters of Liberty.  Lynn has published two books, "Politics IOU" and "Magic Money" both on Kindle.  

-To our freedom and liberty,
Norm Novitsky and the In Search of Liberty Team

Thank you for taking the time to be a part of our journey as we continue to work toward enlightening and helping Americans with this highly entertaining, informative movie for people from all walks of life on the importance of our US Constitution, and what it means for our freedom, our way of life and our continued prosperity. Learn more about our film In Search of Liberty.

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