For Love of Money

Trading your Labor For Living Wages

1 Timothy 6:9-11

For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. But flee from these things, you man of God, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance and gentleness.

Growing up in a working class area of Ohio as I did, most of us kids were expected to eventually trade our labor for a paycheck. This is of course the worst way to get ahead financially in the world that we live in, but we didn’t know of any other way forward. So what were we going to do?

This guy is a hard worker. And screw you, Arnold.

The creative class that I knew mostly got bludgeoned into submission sooner or later. This would include all of the aspiring actresses, writers, models, artists, singers and the like. I’d dare say I’ll include my former stripper cousin in that mix, who has some interesting stories if you get her drunk enough to talk about it. The pretty and ambitious ones left Ohio for places like Los Angeles and New York. They were closer to the hub but still far removed from the spigot. It was sort of like a dog trying to lick water from the clamp on a leaky hose.

Those who became well known, especially in acting, seemed to be judged first on who they were, meaning family ties, then on who they knew, and next on how much they were willing to compromise themselves. Ability or talent came in a distant fourth. I noticed when I was shopping my artwork around galleries in Los Angeles that two styles were very popular at the time: one was these large, metallic, humanoid sculptures, and the other was gigantic canvasses where an artist had swirled a palette knife all over the place. Both representations were attractive only to rich buyers who had enough room to properly display them. They also required a lot of money from the artist to create them: hundreds of dollars worth of oil paints, or some polished chrome mufflers and welding equipment, plus dedicated space in rent intensive LA for drying and working. I still know people who sing their songs in bars, write or post videos, and those who sell their artwork. I don’t know any, save my brother, who ever made a living wage from their creative passion.

So of course there’s always higher education. That’s the ticket to a good job with money. Engage yourself in debt servitude, get some overpriced credential, and then the gatekeepers will let you in. It’s Squid Games: the Backstory.

The amount of money sloshing around at the top is virtually incomprehensible. To get to that stuff, you need to buy in and compromise yourself in many ways. A single Covid positive death at my cousin’s hospital was worth more than her entire salary for one year. Dark pools fund mass destruction of humanity. You don’t want to work at McDonalds, or do some demeaning, lowlife job like farming, do you?

That has been my problem with cryptocurrency this whole time, as detailed by Charles Hugh Smith in his excellent analysis:

The truly world-changing opportunities to improve human life with cryptos don't enrich the issuers of the currencies or the early investors: they are distributed to those who are performing useful work in their communities rather than speculating.

There are three false assumptions at the heart of blockchain/crypto:

1. We can all get stupidly rich while changing the world for the better. (The Internet model)

2. Blockchain/crypto is "open to everyone" because anyone earning fiat currency can use that to buy crypto.

Getting stupidly rich from being an early investor and front-running speculative bubbles doesn't change the world. Confusing getting rich with "changing the world" doesn't change the world.

As for "democratizing finance:" those without capital and no way to save up appreciable capital are left out of speculative assets. The already-wealthy have the means to jump on the bandwagon and so they end up owning the lion's share of the new hot asset.

In this way, cryptos are no different from all the other asset classes dominated by the already-wealthy. A relative handful of early investors and issuers of cryptos became billionaires, the already-wealthy piled in and the bottom 90% were left to trade high-priced crumbs.

3. Fixing finance will fix the world. Just as those holding hammers see nails that can be pounded down, those steeped in the abstract world of speculation and finance think their expertise in making "money" is all that's needed to fix whatever is broken in the world.

The reality is that finance has broken the world's ability to adapt by pushing wealth-power inequality to extremes that are breaking down economies and societies. Finance looks at scarcities--artificially created by cartels and monopolies, or the real-world scarcities of depletion--as "opportunities" for profiteering. Governance and regulation are "opportunities" to distort public policy to benefit the few at the expense of the public good.

It gets even worse when this is combined with pharma, as detailed in this post by A Midwestern Doctor:

The Current Protests In China Are A Pivotal Moment in History

Economic Feudalism in Medicine

Using financial incentives to enforce compliance has proven itself to be far more effective (and easier to implement) than any army ever could be, and as I have tried to illustrate here, our society has been structured so that the corrupting influence of money can take control of each authority figure in each important position of influence (e.g. see Who Owns the CDC). I believe medicine is one of the most important areas to examine the feudalistic model due to the enormous cost medicine brings to our economy (health care accounts for approximately one-fifth of all spending within the United States) and because unlike many other predatory industries, many people can’t “opt-out” of it as their lives often depend on receiving medical care.

In medicine, most of the bad practices conducted by everyone in the field (e.g. many of the unnecessary or harmful medical procedures, prescriptions, and tests such as those which direct hospital care) caught on solely because of how much money they made. In case after case, precise economic levers are implemented so that the desired behaviors by the medical profession can be guaranteed. For example, Medicare and insurance companies reimburse providers if certain thresholds are met for providing mandated medications to their patients (e.g. consider how much pediatricians lose if they do not push vaccines onto most of their patients). 

The recent COVID-19 scandal where hospitals chose to withhold effective treatments from COVID-19 patients and only treat them with the incredibly lucrative remdesivir and ventilator protocol has, fortunately, brought some attention to this long-standing issue. For those interested, this book concisely documents many examples of how perverse financial incentives have distorted the practice of medicine both within and outside of hospitals for decades.

In short, the corruptive force of money within healthcare has resulted in the sad situation we observe today where often the only unifying principle that can be found within medical ethics is that whatever choice makes the most money then becomes the agreed upon ethical standard (a longer discussion on this topic can be found here). 

However, despite all these factors, there are still many highly ethical physicians in the profession who prioritize the wellness of their patients over financial incentives. Unfortunately, those same ethical standards are rarely held by corporate executives (or even clinic managers) who will instead ignore the advice of their physicians to maximize revenue (a key reason why economic feudalism requires widespread impoverishment is that as people are more financially squeezed, they will become more compliant towards small economic “incentives” for the desired behavior). 

When I observe this entire medical system, I can only marvel at how remarkably effective precisely targeted economic levers have been for controlling large swathes of the economy. Similarly, it is for this reason that one of the rules I live my life by is “don’t sell your soul to the eye on the back of the dollar bill.” 

The Midwestern Doctor continues:

I think all of this is an immense shame because technology has finally advanced to the point that our world is now producing enough to offer almost everyone a decent life (provided everyone practices environmentally sustainable consumption). Unfortunately, making that life available to everyone would take away the key incentive (the need to work to survive) that maintains a feudal economic system.

Here’s a thought experiment that I came up with. Let’s just assume that the debt bubble explodes and a gigantic debt jubilee is declared globally. All government debt defaults and while the credit markets try to reset to something new, every good or service must be purchased with cash or tangible goods or bartered on.

A man approaches Normie Hospital wheeling his frail 80 year mother to the door. She has the dreaded Covid. He’s been taking care of her at home but now she’s turning blue and says she can’t breathe.

“Please help my mother!” He begs at the front.

“I can’t breathe!” His mother wheezes and coughs though her facemask.

“Does she have Covid?” The attendant asks.

“Yes she does! I’ll do anything to save her!” The man begs.

“Our standard course of treatment is remdesiver. But with the new regulations you must pay cash upfront for it. A course will be $3500.”

“I’m not sure I have enough to cover it!” The man begs, taking out his phone. “Are you sure it will save her? Will there be other costs?”

“There could be, if the treatment doesn’t work..” The attendant states.

“Well how likely is it to work? I thought it must be some miracle drug for that price.” He calls his brother asking if he has more money for their mother’s care. “My brother is asking how many people recovered after a full course of this stuff.”

“I can’t breathe!” The frail 80 year old coughs again, trying to remove her facemask.

“She can’t do that!” The attendant yells. “If she’s already Covid positive we might have to move her straight to a ventilator. That will be around $2000 per day.”

“Per day!” The man exclaims. “How many days would she need it? Will that save her?” He tells his brother this over the phone. “My brother said that killed like 95% of the people in her age range! Are you sure nothing else can be done?”

The attendant no longer has armed guards to wheel the frail sick mother into the bowels of the hospital, because the paychecks had stopped. She was hoping to pocket some of this money for herself. She sighs as another customer walks away.

The distraught man wheels his mother up to a new wellness center that had sprang up across the street from the Normie hospital. “Please help my mother she is sick with Covid and can’t breathe!” He exclaims.

“Get that stupid facemask off her.” The attendant says. “Why would you restrict breathing in someone who can’t breathe already? We don’t even know the long term effects of those things over the next several decades, but they’re horrible already.” The attendant listens through a stethoscope to the woman’s labored breathing. “She’s going to need supplemental oxygen right away.”

“How much is this going to cost?” The man asks warily. “Will it help?”

“Your mother should notice a difference right away. The first treatment is $50. We have some cocktails of repurposed off label drugs we’ve been working with. And some vitamins too. We will have to run a few scans. But all in a treatment course in her case will cost around $500. We’ve had a lot of success with it, in over 99% of patients. We’re glad you brought your mother in now though. Of course we’d like you to stay with her the whole time. Keep her comfortable and ask any questions you might have.”

How long could the Covid standard protocol model have possibly lasted in a free market system? It would have evaporated in a day. People pay a lot more attention when they see a price tag and are making a purchase for themselves versus some hypothetical bundled per month reality flung far out into the future. Yet some might have squandered their greatest asset in their own body. God help us all.

The horse has long bolted from the barn. Is there a way to get it back in the stable? What kind of world could we live in if actual supply and demand and market forces were all we had to deal with?

Buy me a ko-fi