I recently read that the economic crisis has given a new meaning to the old notion of indentured servitude. So what's new? Almost half of what you earn goes to pay taxes on everything from income and property to food and clothing. Federal, State and Local, add it up. This has the effect of working from January through May for nothing. Seen another way, going in at 8:00 in the morning, your day is done around noon. Sticking around until 5:00 in the evening is for naught. This continues until the age of 65...assuming you can afford to retire.
Spending most of your time doing things you don't really want to do for somebody else is not a lot of laughs. And, when you come right down to it, what do you really have besides time? Perhaps your most precious commodity, it's the first thing taken away as punishment...from the child's Time-Out to the felon's years behind bars. And it gets worse. Consider the high cost of working. From the clothes you have to wear to the car you have to drive it all adds up. Then there's the cost of lost opportunities while on the job, while traveling back and forth and while sitting in traffic.
So after all that, wouldn't it be nice to at least keep half your money? Forget it. The insurance industry, like the government, is in for its share. Years ago, the market set the price for such things as health care. If a doctor charged $800 for a visit, his office would be empty. Then along came the insurance scam. Doc could charge his crazy prices, his office would be full and he would get paid. It was like a free lunch until everybody got hooked. Suddenly, the patient is paying crazy premiums and Doc is collecting only $80 of his $800 fee...if he's lucky.
Automobile insurance is yet another painfully obvious scam. In the old days, you decided what your life and limbs were worth and got insurance to cover the same. Then this seemingly sensible arrangement morphed into a monster. Now you're responsible for the lives and limbs of everyone else. A simple way to fix this would be for you to self-insure after figuring what your sundry parts are worth. Lose them and you get what you decided in advance. Period! But with the enormous contributions made by the insurance industry to political campaigns, I wouldn't expect this to change anytime soon. And let's just see your license, registration AND insurance card just to make sure your wages have been adequately adjusted.
Next come interest payments. Here again, there was a time when the market set the price, a fair value for such things as a place to live. If you didn't have a few thousand dollars saved, you couldn't buy a house. It was simple. Then along came the mortgage scam. You got the money up front but had to pay twice as much over the next twenty years...with the first ten going mostly towards interest. Seeing buyers flush with easy cash they hadn't earned, sellers began asking crazy prices. For a while it worked. Sellers asked ever crazier prices and buyers moved to twenty-five and thirty year commitments. Once again, everyone got hooked. A roof over one's head can now cost more than a worker will earn (less taxes, insurance and interest payments) during his lifetime of 40-hour weeks. Then the insanity spread from houses to consumer goods and services as easy money became a way of life. The average person now carries a credit card debt of over $7000 at what was only recently considered usury rates.
LOOK AT IT THIS WAY
Please believe that I didn't start out to ruin your day but unless the status quo is pointed out it tends to go unnoticed. In the space of only a few generations, the average man can no longer hope to ever make enough money to buy a significant amount of free time. Perhaps the current economic crisis will draw attention to the less than rosy conditions that existed even before the bottom fell out.
