Let me show you how much they’ll steal from you this month
My wife and I are cozily ensconced in Oxford, England, for a glorious autumn week, happily forking over exactly zero dollars on overpriced hotels or home-devouring Airbnbs thanks to a house-swapping service.
My first order of business was to re-book a table at a fabulous pizza restaurant in an 800-year-old former monastery, but I was saddened to learn it recently closed down after more than a decade of smashing success because the land-lorder jacked the rent beyond what they could bear.
My second order of business was to get a straight-razor shave in a gorgeous little barbershop. As a ridiculously-skilled Kurdish barber slid hot steel across my skull and sculpted my beard to Greek god proportions, I asked how things were going. He replied, “Well, rent is killing us” — he is bleeding the equivalent of over U$13,400/year for less than 100 square feet — and if our landlord puts it up again I’ll have to shut down the shop and just… I don’t know… bicycle to people’s houses.”
My third order of business was to begrudgingly accompanying my longsuffering wife to a shopping center where she wished to purchase a new pair of hiking boots. We arrived at the store to see it emblazoned with “Going out of business — 50% off sale” signs. I asked the manager why they were shutting down and he said, “The bank upped the interest rates, so the landlord upped the rental rates. The math doesn’t make sense anymore.”
My fourth order of business was to take my wife and little son for lunch at a posh experiment cocktail bar — you drink at noon when you have a baby — and when our bill arrived, I was dismayed to see that it not only included the usual (and eye-watering) 20% VAT, but a 12% “optional” tip, plus a “green fee” to “offset the carbon emissions of your meal.”
To be clear, I’m not against paying taxes, voluntarily tipping, or offsetting my carbon emissions — I’ve been doing all of these three things for years — but I absolutely hate it when these completely unnecessary added costs are foisted upon me, jacking the cost of my family’s holiday meal.
But at least the cocktail bar was honest enough to itemize the bill.
Sadly, the same can’t be said for the feudal parasite rentier class that preys on the real economy in order to extract wealth into the anti-economy.
There are two main classes left today:
- The impoverished contributor class, which applies their time and energy to natural resources in order to create real wealth.
- The parasite class, which monopolizes the natural resources and uses this immoral power to extract wealth from the contributor class in the form of interest, rents, and monopoly profits.
For instance, a team of dozens work and sweat all month, expending thousands of hours to turn flour and tomatoes and milk into award-winning and mouthwatering pizza, only to have the lion’s share of their profits stripped away by the land-lording monopolizer of the building… and every bank and land-lorder and monopoly who eats their individual paychecks.
Or a pair of Kurdish barbers can work seven days per week to apply time and creativity and unfathomable skill to turn hairy Neanderthals into presentable homo sapiens, only to turn over the lion’s share of their profits to the person who worked zero days per week but happened to hoard their building.
It’s the same formula with every member of the parasite class:
- Banksters have an undemocratic and immoral monopoly on credit-money, so that gives them the “right” to extract hard-money interest.
- Land-lorders have an undemocratic and immoral monopoly on property, so that gives them the “right” to extract rental profits and capital gains.
- Multinational corporations have an undemocratic and immoral monopoly on the means of product, so that gives them the “right” to extract monopoly profits.
But I’m sure you can see how this entire system is literally and completely mathematically unsustainable.
Banksters, land-lorders, and monopolies don’t create any new wealth. They simply monopolize capital in order to steal wealth.
A bank creates $100 in credit and expects back $110.
A land-lorder loans a $300,000 house and expect back $330,0000 and some unearned capital gains.
A monopoly buys a chokehold on an industry for $100 billion and rakes in $110 billion per year.
They all want more than they give.
But play out this global corruption to its conclusion for a moment:
All the thousands of monopolists want to get paid back with unearned shareholder profits…
And all the hundreds of thousands of banksters want to get paid back with interest…
And all the millions of land-lorders want to get paid back with rental profit and capital gains…
And they all want their profits to compound larger and larger every year…
All the parasites want to get paid in real wealth despite not creating any new wealth… but where the devil is all that extra money supposed to come from?
As we know, there literally isn’t enough money to pay back all that’s owing, because it was an unfair lop-sides trade in the first place.
All the debtors owe more money than was borrowed.
All the renters owe more value than was borrowed.
All the customers pay more wealth than was purchased.
There simply isn’t enough money in the whole world to pay back all that is owing. This is obvious even to a third grader. Sure, the government can always print more money, but that just destroys the purchasing power of the contributor class with inflation.
So what is the parasite class’s “solution?”
For the contributor class to create more real wealth.
In other words, they want every wealth-creating person to work harder and longer, for less money and fewer benefits, cutting quality, destroying the planet, doing everything in their power to practice austerity and slash their lifestyles to the bone in order to free up margin to fork over in rent, interest, and profits.
They want us to be slaves.
As we’ve discussed before, there comes a point when a healthy pond can become so covered in parasite lily pads that they block out the sun and eat all the nutrients, leaving a dead bog in their wake.
Banksters, for-profit land-lorders, and corporate monopolists are doing the same thing to our real economy.
The “only option” is for all of us to work harder and longer for far less real wealth — the rich love inflation for this reason — paired with the end of public services in favor of even more corporate monopolies.
The plan is to drain you of everything, literally everything. On the current trajectory, you will owe nothing and they will own everything in our lifetime.
They want all of your time, all of your money, all of your partner’s time and money, all of your children’s attention and future. From birth to medically-prolonged old age and death, we are nothing but profit centers — cows for milking. Our job to slave our lives way to pay rent, interest, and monopoly profits. That’s it. That’s our purpose. That’s why we exist.
Imagine if all the rents, interests, and monopoly profits were itemized on every receipt:
$7.00 The actual real cost of your pizza
$13.00 The added-but-unnecessary costs of your pizza:
- Rent on the restaurant building (which in turn are mostly just paid by the land-lorder as interest to a bankster.)
- Interest to a bankster for all the financed pizza ovens and walk-in freezers.
- Monopoly profits to the restaurant’s energy provider (which in turn are mostly just paid by the energy provider as interest to a bankster who created credit to finance turbines.)
- Monopoly profits to the restaurant’s heat provider (which in turn are mostly just paid by the heating provider as interest to a bankster who created credit to finance the fossil fuel refinery.)
- Monopoly profits to the restaurant’s water provider (which in turn are mostly just paid by the water provider as interest to a bankster who created credit to finance the water treatment plant.)
- Monopoly profit to the majority of the food suppliers.
- Having to overpay staff so they can all afford to pay rent to their land-lorders or interest to their banksters, plus pay taxes to mostly go to overpriced services, monopoly profits to their energy provider, monopoly profits to their heat provider, monopoly profits to their water provider, and monopoly profits on nearly everything they need to survive like groceries (which is in turn paid in rent to the owner/monopolizer of the grocery store building, which is in turn paid as interest to the bankster who created the credit to finance the development of the grocery store.)
Companies wouldn’t necessarily have to break it down this thoroughly, of course.
We could just add it as a line called “Parasite Tax.”
It would comprise at least half the bill.
And that parasite percentage will continue to rise — after all, real wealth only grows incrementally, while credit compounds exponentially.
Eventually, this parasite tax will destroy our economy. My beloved Oxford pizza place is already gone. The boot shop will be gone by Christmas. Soon the barbershop will be no more. Then the cocktail bar where parents with babies drink at noon.
Pretty soon we’ll live in a world where the “lucky” ones get to be underpaid workaholics for corporations, and spend their money on delivered restaurants, delivered groceries, delivered entertainment, delivered numbing from the thing we once called “life.”
The rest of us will join the growing masses of homeless people who for some reason haven’t yet started occupying the tens of millions of empty Airbnbs and second homes and other properties hoarded by the rich. We’ll have no access to monopolized resources, and therefore no way to create real wealth. Our overlords say they want “growth,” but it’s certainly not the kind that leads to widest-spread human flourishing.
That kind of growth would require the eradication of the parasite class — of making interest, rent-usury, and monopolies illegal or taxing them out of existence.
And that’s not going to happen.
At the very least, they should start being honest. Itemized the parasite tax.
Pretty soon, people would wake up and realize how truly useless and non-contributing the parasite class truly is, and how much they steal from us and our friends and family and humanity.
Then they might actually do something about it.
If you believe more people need to understand how parasites are robbing civilization, please share this article on social media. I’m @jaredbrock
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Author Jared A. Brock
