What’s wrong with this picture?
Here are two factoids drawn from yesterday’s evening news (Tuesday, June 9, 2020).
Hawaii News Now reported that Hawaii Foodbank distributed 2,500 boxes of food at Aloha Stadium.
The depth of the need is suggested by this sentence: “Vehicles tried to get in place before dawn over two hours before the official line up began and four hours before gates even opened. Packs of groceries ran out by noon.”
And in yesterday’s financial news, the stock of Apple Inc. and Amazon stock both closed at record highs.
What does that mean? Well, let’s say you decided to invest (gamble?) just over $3,000 in mid-1981, not long after Apple’s stock began trading on the over-the-counter stock market. You could have bought 100 shares of the company’s stock with your money. In inflation adjusted 2020 dollars, that would have been about $8,770.
But if you held on to those 100 shares, through the ups and downs of the stock market, and through a series of stock splits over the years, your Apple stock would now be worth $1,926,344. That’s right, nearly $2 million.
I had to double check those figures, and I’m pretty sure they’re right.
These seem to be describing two different worlds existing simultaneously.
And that’s the problem. They are.
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Bingo! If you want to know why Wall Street was surging while Main Street was burning, it was because the investment class understood that the racial protests mean that Americans are going to forget about the class war (that they are losing) and now be fixated on racial justice issues, instead.
Wall Street *loves* that because all they have to do is have Biden choose a black VP and tinker around the edges and call that “police reform” and the masses will be placated for another decade or two while the rich finish amassing the rest of the nation’s wealth.
Wall Street is no longer a reflection of the American economy. It’s a reflection of the degree to which the rich are winning their class war.
Two different worlds, indeed. Here’s what I’m trying to figure out: Hawai’i has one of the lowest rates of Covid so for some reason more military personnel are being sent here and don’t have to follow any safety protocols. I’m not aware that the military has a low rate of Covid – inf fact, I thought the opposite. So is personnel being sent here to raise our infection level because it’s too low? And while I’m at it, why is there so little info about the findings from the contact tracing that’s been done? Surely there must be some analytics that could give us a general idea – beyond racial groups – of who/where the most susceptible people/areas are.
Ian, this is part of human life. Capital investment grows. Human need remains, recurring, finite, pathetic. Private property shelters our locus of neediness from the eyes and grasping of the rest of the world, and good stewards of private property reap the increase. For everyone who bought some ‘Apple’ stock back then, dozens of others bought companies that went nowhere, or went broke.
Without private property, in ‘socialism,’ EVERYONE, (except “some are more equal than others” George Orwell) stands in line and goods are scarce. In capitalism the goods are plentiful, and are lined up, waiting for us. The thing to notice about the long lines is: we don’t hear about the food running out, do we. Before modern industrial capitalism, virtually everyone was, all the time, ‘food insecure.’ Now there is plenty.
Luke 19:26 He replied, ‘I tell you that everyone who has will be given more; but the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.’ It’s a hard saying. This world was not made a heaven, nor was it made a hell. We mature, discover we’re mortal, that earthly paradise is guarded by an angel with a flaming sword, and we must wrest our bread from the earth in the sweat of our brow and in contention with brambles, rocks, robbers, floods, and drought. Modern atheistic ‘scientific socialist’ movements tried to break into the earthly paradise of equality and plenty – and the totalitarian swords cut millions down, the censorious ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ put everyone else in a gigantic outdoor prison. Thank God for a society of ordered liberty, under law, where charity can provide for the ones ‘who have nothing,’ and for the Judeo-Christian tradition pervading our society still. Without it charity would be entirely private and warlords would use the food to reward their followers and withhold or dole it out slowly to punish the others.
Ooh, the “Socialism” bogeyman… again. Fortunately, most, if not all, of our reform-minded would-be leaders are pushing for Democratic Socialism, a much different thing. Works great in many countries, but rich folks don’t dig it, for obvious reasons.
For Boyd- the passage is not referring to material possesions but the spirit and consciousness of those. Those who possess the holy spirit and accpet Jesus will have more those who don’t shall go to hell. Where those “who have not go”.Given this was the period when he drove the bankers/money lenders from the temple we can get a pretty good idea who is going to hell.
Thanks. Insightful. You honor the conversation.
Like many things in holy writ there are multiple meanings. Marxists treat ‘capital’ as a sort of ‘spiritual’ power in that it is abstract (money is whatever we use and call it money, it is a concept giving quantitative substance to what two parties to an exchange consider (think, conceive as) ‘fair’ or ‘equal’ for that exchange at that time). Other passages in scripture, as the parable of the talents, the ‘render unto Caesar,’ or the faithless steward who writes off his masters’ debts without permission, view dealings in money as shot through-and-through with spiritual meaning – and often are counter-intuitive for a simple view of charity, and often do not treat wealth as inherently unfairly unequal. Yes,
the wealthy young fellow can’t give it up – so wealth is a huge obstacle to entering the kingdom. But ‘rendering unto Caesar,’ and the view in the letters that earthly authorities are to be obeyed even unto death, do not call Christians to proletarian-style revolt. It takes atheistic ‘scientific’ socialism to do that: for the hordes of Christian doubters to feel that self-righteous millenarian spirit justifying violent outrages on their fellow citizens. Ian Lind’s provocative ‘why is this – huge wealth alongside numerous in immediate want’ is what I’m responding to – and I think the mathematics of the ‘rule of 72′ and the scriptures’ talents’ parable ‘you could have put it with the money lenders’ shows that the laws of money are a perennial part of life, just as seeds produce a harvest – God willing and the rains don’t fail.
In answer to your question about investing I think your adjustment for inflation is wrong. At 352.84 , 100 shares would be worth $35,284. A 2020 dollar is equivalent to 30 cents in 1980 dollars, so in constant dollar 1980 dollars the 100 shares are worth $10, 585.20 which you can compare to the cost of shares in 1980, around $2,000. You inverted this for some reason. if you had $35,284 in 1980 it would indeed be worth the amount you stated in 2020 dollars, but that is not your point. Buying 100 shares at $352 is beyond almost anyone today. Which says something about who is buying today. A second point is the rise of the S & P is driven by like five stocks, Apple is one of them. About 60 percent of the stocks are in negative territory and haven’t recovered. There is this quasi religious way of interpreting the stock market that is like “Mr. MARKET SEZ”. It doesn’t say anything, its a market. Right now its totally disconnected from the economy and this rise is fueled by low interest rates. Which has been going on throughout the 2000s. It doesn’t really even serve to translate sayings into real investment, meaning machines, factories software etc.
Here’s what I did…I took the original $3,100 or so and applied inflation adjustment from the consumer price index calculator (https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=3100&year1=198106&year2=202005). That’s what yielded the figure that I used. Then I glossed over the subsequent changes–that 100 shares split 2 for 1 on three separate occasions, and then 7 for 1. So the 100 shares turned into 5,600 shares after this series of splits, each share valued at $343 on Monday.
Lawrence – Your calculation is incorrect because it doesn’t take into effect several stock splits that have occurred. Ian’s number is probably closer but I haven’t confirmed it.
On the subject of the long lines for food – I wonder how many were people who have yet to received unemployment funds because of the overwhelmed DLIR system and personnel.
Yes, I added a comment to Lawrence’s which explains in more detail the stock splits, as well as my reasoning.
Boyd-Why bother defending the Bible from Marxism? It’s topics are spirituality, religion, and God. While I thought your comments are edging towards sanctifying our current ludicrous and terrifying moment, with religious authority, A careful reading of your comments suggest otherwise. As to render unto Ceaser…Recall the Caesars were deified, and worshiped, something Christians never did. They did render taxes, of the material world. What I have always found fascinating is the collection of individuals Jesus collected. I mean he palled around with tax collectors and prostitutes. Tax collectors In Judea were justly despised by the population of Judea. So the homily might be pay your taxes and support the state, and hope you don’t end up with a clown as emporer.
Well the market took a dip 6/11 Thursday for Kamehameha of nearly -7%…easy come easy go!
Paper value is never as good as a pice of the Pohaku for stability. You can always quarantine in your investment.
Lawence – thanks for the reply.
The idea that holy writ is circumscribed within a sphere of ‘spirituality, religion, and God’ leaves a whole lot out. We are embodied, living beings in a created world, fallen, yes, but really living in it, and the resurrection is a bodily one, whatever that means. Christ was witnessed, resurrected, by hundreds, ate and drank, walked and talked, and Thomas touched his scars. There is much in there that is true of human life, politics, war, nature, and history – in fact there is no ancient book so closely aligned with ascertainable historical fact and documents- much more so than any of the Greek authors. … As for why discuss it in relation to Marxism? The Cold War was won militarily, but the propaganda war was lost. The Gramscian long march through the institutions is culminating in neo-segregation, effectively secessionist city politics, and the Stalinist’s hope to pile up the embers and eventually spark a ‘race’ war (as they had to give up on our ‘proletariat’ in their scientific plan), appears to be coming to fruition with a Maoist ‘cultural revolution’ twist. The background idea that wealth and penury should not ethically co-exist is a fundamentally Marxist notion that now pervades society. It is not possible to make everyone wealthy (though we have made virtually everyone prosperous with respect to bare necessity), but it is very possible to make everyone poor, and the envy of the rich is the path to power for those who would do so.