Take a day or two to read Free Lunch.

It will make you really, really mad....

...then it will infuriate you,...

...and you will understand more about who gets what and why in the U.S.


I assure you that your perspective in general, will change completely.


Nothing is as it seems, and the data support this fact.


The information is amazing and revealing.


What you think is happening in government and business is not what is really happening.


Here is the general concept, put in terms of my own example.
Three people are at a coffee shop and they all see the tip that someone left on the counter for the waitress. Nobody is around but:
1) an unemployed poor man reading the Job Ads in the paper.
2) a politician.
3) a super-rich man.

What Happens Next and why?
1) The unemployed poor man does not take the money on the counter because he knows it is wrong to steal.
2) The politician wants to take the money, but is worried that the security cameras might catch him.
3) The super-rich man grabs the money, in plain sight of the other two guys, and walks away since the money is just sitting there.


Result:
1) The unemployed poor man is disgusted.
2) The politician admires the rich man's nerve.
3) The rich man has no thoughts about the event at all.


Conclusion:
The waitress comes back into the room and sees that the tip is gone, and so she asks who took it. The poor unemployed man points to the super rich man. The politician, thinking that he may have found a way to get a campain contibution from the rich guy at some point, blames the poor guy. After all, the poor guy clearly needs the money. All the while the rich guy remains silent as he leaves with the money in his pocket.

The police arrive...and the politician is there with the waitress to perform a citizens arrest of the poor guy. The TV stations cover the heroic actions of the politician and the coffee shop gets free publicity. The poor guy tells the cops to look at the security camera footage, and when they see the actual event, the police chief arrives to put an end to the nonsense.

Newpaper Headline the following day:
"The unemployed have resorted to stealing tips, and a politican saves the day."

After all, the super rich guy owns the paper.

The poor guy is still in prison....


Welcome to the U.S. in the year 2009. We need to make some changes.


Final thought:
Most of the people that we admire in the financial world and in politics are self-serving bums who are living off of your tax dollars in ways that we cannot fathom.



(*NOTE: I asked the Mods to orginally delete my first post about this book because I wanted to finish it completely before posting more on the book. - Thank you Mods for helping me with that task.)

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What is a 'Free Lunch"?

Generally, it is a benefit (usually huuuge), wherein a person gets tons of money from the federal government (or any municipality) to perform a task that is worthless,..., or actually detrimental to society.

Here is an example:
My once favorite sporting goods store, Cabellas, gets many millions of tax dollars to build a store, with the understanding that the store will create jobs in excess of what would be created or maintained by local sporting goods businesses.

Seems fair, does it not?

However, these Cabellas locations ALWAYS result in a net loss of community jobs because they drop their prices so low that the local sporting good stores cannot compete, and then have to go out of business (costing jobs). Now, one would assume that those jobs would end up at Cabellas, but in every single case, the number of jobs created by Cabells is significantly lower than the number of jobs lost by local sporting goos stores.
THE RESULT - a net loss of jobs.

Now, one would thinkk of this as normal at capitalism work. However, the tax dollars used to build a Cabellas comes from those local sporting goods stores. So in essence, the local stores are building their own competition, thus paying to be driven out of business. What sense does that make?

Cabellas, like so many other big box stores (Walmart, Lowes, etc.) get paid by us to build their stores, all the while causing a net loss in jobs and higher local tax rates.

This really stinks because I used to like going to Cabellas.

Never again...

-Vic


P.S. One of the other benefits that these big box stores include in their agreements to build a store is that they get to keep the sales taxes and that they get to write-off all expenses for employees (including their benefits) - which means that we build them for free, we pay alll of the wages, they cost our communities jobs, and the jobs that they provide pay less per hour than the jobs that they eliminated from the community.