The Wealthy Also Have a Dream

The Good Olde Days

Shedding the shackles and scourge of oppression is never easy.
Just ask the wealthy.

Never have so few had so much taken from them under the guise of helping so many inferior and ungrateful peons. Why, they’ve been down so long, they don’t know which way is up.

But, you say, aren’t they rich? How hard can being rich be, and might their sense of oppression be all in their heads?

The answers to these questions are yes, harder than you think and of course it’s all in their heads. That doesn’t make their oppression all right or even a little right—or them all wrong or even a little wrong.

Charles Dickens didn’t know the half of it when he wrote in 1859, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” He could have also added, “And you ain’t seen nothing yet.” The decades just ahead would be recognized for both the unfathomable accumulation of wealth by the very, very, very few and the unspeakable poverty experienced by the many, many, many millions of workers. 

There was a time—and you may find this hard to believe—when the wealthy controlled everything. Captains of Industry, sometimes irreverently referred to as Robber Barons, had it all—money, power, Congress and presidents in their back pockets—not to mention the hatred of almost every American worker. This hatred was more telling than you might imagine as any CEO will tell you: if the workers don’t like you, you must be doing something right.

Another Approach to Immigration and Social Security

Ponzi Schemes,

Can’t live with them,
Can’t live without them

 In a lot of ways Charles Ponzi got a bad rap. In the first place he didn’t invent the Ponzi scheme, he only improved on it. Charles Dickens, albeit from book sales rather than venture sales was profiting from Ponzi schemes before they were even called Ponzi schemes.

What makes a Ponzi scheme criminal is one thing and one thing only—deceit.

Promising someone that they will realize a profit from an investment based on the investment’s value when in fact the profit was only coming from new money is where Ponzi and those who imitated him made their mistake. Telling them that their return will depend on getting more people to invest would have been the more honest approach.

That said, even today the stock market’s supposed reliance on real value rather than fabricated value is really dependent on more people putting more money into stocks they hope are worth it. When people pull their money out of the stock market it goes down; when they put money in it goes up. That my friend is all Charles Ponzi was ever selling the public. He just wasn’t telling them that.

Life is a Ponzi scheme in almost every instance. What makes everything all right is transparency. As long as people know what they’re getting into we tend to accept the consequences.