Conservation for the Home
"Death cleaning." Isn't that special. Assume your belongings have no value. Toss everything so you can die faster and make it easier for Big Government to sell your home.
In a civilized society we have a better way. We keep things that have value, on the assumption that our heirs will have enough sense to appreciate them. We avoid leaving anything to tossers. There are valid reasons to move things into storage rooms, like clearing a wheelchair-accessible path through a room where things have been stored on the floor, but there's never a valid reason to waste anything that might be useful. Belongings can be sold, if we need the money and can find a buyer, or handed down, if we know someone who needs them.
Don't toss. And don't let Big Government cast a covetous eye on your home. Buy a T-shirt that says "The Land Is Not For Sale" (I happen to have designed some at Zazzle). Wear it regularly.
Economics
Some charts and numbers for those who enjoy such:
Why is Cuba so poor? They certainly have productive land. The people certainly aren't averse to work as such. At least everyone in the Eastern States knows that Cuban-Americans do good work. Even if they sing that old sad song, "Nunca podre morirme, mi corazon no lo tengo aqui...cuando sali de Cuba deje enterrado mi corazon." I will never die here because I'm not alive here...I buried my heart in Cuba when I came here.
Handouts
Bit of a discussion of this topic at
The discussion touched on the question of whether food stamps, or their electronic equivalents, should be usable at fast food restaurant chains. I tend to say no, because electronic payment is always a sleazy move to benefit big chains over smaller, independent, more efficient businesses that need to be competing without impediments to allow the free market to correct its own shortcomings. Keep McDonalds and Taco Bell on their toes.
However, control freaks need to be reminded: You don't know how much access to a kitchen a poor person has. Do not assume that people have time to simmer dry beans and cook oldfashioned oatmeal. People who really are poor often don't. The working poor may depend for nourishment on what they can grab in fifteen-minute breaks during twelve-hour shifts. The homeless usually eat in alleys, and are easier to be around when they eat junkfood that can be inhaled out of the package rather than being picked up in hands that are then wiped on shirts. Food that is not ready to eat is not likely to be eaten because the beneficiaries of your bids-for-control-disguised-as-compassion don't have a safe place even to peel an apple. If these people are going to get the nutrients found in scrambled eggs, it's going to be in the form of fast food egg-biscuit sandwiches.
In a related development, control freaks seek to push people into using third party payment systems, not because those systems add value or because they don't inflate costs (they do), but in the hope of gaining comparable control over what everybody is allowed to buy. That has happened...in a dying country where both banks and government are about to collapse. People decide "black market" business is acceptable and the normal means of exchange become hidden gold and silver for big things, barter for little things, all traded in unregulated alleys and back rooms.
If we are a viable and vibrant country, we the people of these United States need to demand laws that establish cash as a valid means of exchange in any transaction whatsoever and legitimize fair collection of payments for the burden of tolerating third party payment systems. The small start-up businesses we need to encourage, if not subsidize, can't afford the time and risk involved in taking checks nor do they have the equipment to process credit cards. Those things cost money. We should be making those who use third party payments pay..say a flat fee of $5 per day for holding an item behind the counter while waiting for a check to clear, or a fee of 25% of the total if businesses spend the money to buy credit card scanners.
Nice people always carry cash.
But see some of the questions nasty people have raised--taking the elimination of pennies from our currency system as a pretext:
We need to act now to tell control freaks that cash, and anonymity, are unalienable rights and that attempts to control the country by pushing for more use of money handling services will cost the money handlers money. A lot of money. Any business that balks at cash payments needs to be shut down and the owner's name needs to be published on a list of Un-American Persons who should always be denied credit...so that the only way he can do business is anonymously, with cash.
And we need to do something about the problem of inflated, unrealistic property values. If you want to address the social problem of homelessness, a good way to begin might be selling a house for $1000 to the right person. This makes it harder for real estate speculators to buy houses for $75,000 and sell them for $175,000, and that makes it easier for people to keep their homes.
Poetry
Boondoggle commemorated in verse:
Television
If you do watch television on Thanksgiving Day, you poor kitchen-challenged dear, you might want to look for the Dobyns-Bennett Marching Band in the Macy's parade. DB is Kingsport's high school. (Kingsport used to have other high schools, but they've all been consolidated by now.) In terms of general overachievement DB has done fairly well at competing with Gate City. The school is two or three times the size, so when interstate competitions have been organized DB has generally been able to give GC a game. They've been banned from the Macy's parade, in the past, due to having been chosen too many times, due to being consistently one of the ten best big high school bands in the United States, but this being the centennial of both the parade and the school brings the kids back to New York City this year.
Here is a cell-phone-quality video splicing fragments of a past parade with a past halftime show by the DB band:
Verbal Self-Defense Update
My younger naive self would have thought you are painting too dark a picture of things. But particularly since the pandemic, I feel the shenanigans happening behind the scenes to keep exploitation alive and well are more and more blatant
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