Zombie Nation

Large sections of the US population have been turned into zombies. Retirees. Medicare dependents. Food stamp recipients. Disabled people. They are not necessarily bad people. They are not necessarily dishonest or lazy. But rather than add to wealth, they consume it. And when you have too many of them, your society consumes more wealth than it produces and you are on the road to The Downside.

But the feds are not only creating individual zombies, they are also creating corporate zombies. An obvious example: “green” energy. Without subsidies, loan guarantees, tax benefits and direct giveaways, the industry as we know it would not exist. Nor would the ethanol industry in the Midwest. Nor the security industry in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.

The financial industry too, as we know it, would not exist either. Much of it would have been swept away in the financial storm of 2008-09. That story is well-known, but not well understood. Most people believe the authorities acted heroically, saving the nation from a depression. But what the authorities really did was to take the public’s money and give it to cronies on Wall Street in order to prevent them from suffering the losses they deserved. The government transferred nearly $2 trillion in various forms from the public purse to the pockets of the financial industry. With that kind of backing, most of the old investment firms survived. The new ones that might have replaced them never saw the light of day.

Industries need to be sustained by the government when they cannot sustain themselves. This is practically the definition of “malinvestment” — putting capital and energy into investments that don’t pay off. When an industry is only profitable with government backing it means that the industry uses resources — labor, energy, raw materials — and turns them into finished products that are worth less than the inputs required to make them. The more of these zombie industries the government supports, the poorer the society becomes.

“Rentier” is a French word that has leaked into English. It doesn’t mean zombie literally, but it describes people who have found a way to exploit the system for their own benefit — people who have legal entitlements to income streams. In other words, “rentier” describes a class of folks who contribute absolutely nothing to national prosperity — zombies.

Before the French Revolution, favored groups were able to secure special privileges and monopolies giving them the right to income. For example, the people from whom we bought our first house in France had a monopoly on the importation of tobacco from the New World. I don’t know who granted this monopoly, but typically it was the monarchy. And typically, such monopolies were given away either to appease a potential adversary or simply to raise cash for the crown by selling off a stream of future income.

The French crown was always short of funds. It found it could raise substantial sums by selling the right to earn a “rent.” It might sell the right to collect tolls on a highway or a river, for example. Or it might sell the right to collect taxes (thereby getting its own tax revenue up-front and letting the rentier deal with the hazards of collection).

Any official document needed an official stamp. Naturally, the crown sold off the right to stamp documents. If you wanted to make a business deal, buy or sell land, or get married, you had to pay the person with the stamp.

Over time, the rentier class grew larger and harder to support. More and more of the kingdom’s energy went to support what was essentially a group of parasites who produced nothing. This is part of the explanation for the French Revolution. The system became so inefficient and was made so fragile by waste that a relatively minor setback — a couple years of bad harvests — caused widespread hunger and revolt.

In modern, developed societies “rents” come in many forms. They are often granted to favored groups in exchange for political support. Old people vote, for example. Political parties seek their votes by promising ever-larger health and retirement benefits. Rich people make campaign contributions. Politicians typically grant them favors too.

By the close of 2012, there were zombies everywhere. Throw a cream pie from almost any street-corner and you were almost certain to hit one in the face. If the street-corner were in Washington, DC, you’d probably hit two or three of them.

A recent report in The Wall Street Journal confirmed that zombies don’t work very hard. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been compiling detailed data on how people use their time. Researchers tracked how many hours people slept, ate, watched TV and worked. And guess what? They found that federal government employees put in 3.8 fewer 40-hour weeks than employees in the private sector. Here, the cost of zombification is clear: if the zombies were forced to work the same hours as people in the private sector, the government would save $130 billion a year.

Meanwhile, over in the pentagon, R. Jeffrey Smith had his eye on the zombies too:

Of the many facts that have come to light in the scandal involving former CIA director David H. Petraeus, among the most curious was that during his days as a four-star general, he was once escorted by 28 police motorcycles as he traveled from his Central Command headquarters in Tampa to socialite Jill Kelley’s mansion. Although most of his trips did not involve a presidential-size convoy, the scandal has prompted new scrutiny of the imperial trappings that come with a senior general’s lifestyle.

The commanders who lead the nation’s military services and those who oversee troops around the world enjoy an array of perquisites befitting a billionaire, including executive jets, palatial homes, drivers, security guards and aides to carry their bags, press their uniforms and track their schedules in 10-minute increments. Their food is prepared by gourmet chefs. If they want music with their dinner parties, their staff can summon a string quartet or a choir.

The elite regional commanders who preside over large swaths of the planet don’t have to settle for Gulfstream V jets. They each have a C-40, the military equivalent of a Boeing 737, some of which are configured with beds.

And then, even after they retire…the zombies keep feeding off the productive sector:

Updating a 2010 Boston Globe report that documented the practice, CREW found that over the last three years, 70 percent of the 108 three-and-four star generals and admirals who retired “took jobs with defense contractors or consultants.”

As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., put it during a 2009 hearing on Obama’s nomination of former Raytheon executive William Lynn to become the deputy secretary of defense, “it’s an incestuous business, what’s going on in terms of the defense contractors and the Pentagon and the highest levels of our military.”

During the Presidential campaign, Mitt Romney mentioned that 47% of American households now receive some form of support from the government. In a better democracy, none of those people should vote. They all have a conflict of interest. They should admit that they find it difficult to separate their own personal interests from those of the nation and abstain from casting a ballot. Instead, they “vote their own pocketbooks” — usually coming down on the side of diverting more resources from the productive sector to their own personal consumption.

The zombies corrupt the system. The march to Stalingrad continues. And the Downside takes over.

The term of a "Dumbed Down Society" is in no way intended to insult or demean the citizens of this planet, but is intended rather, as a call for a fast awakening and to point out a truth - a truth so insidious and real -- which is that we have been deliberately veiled, weakened, and propagandized -- that we only see and believe a "Truth" which has been carefully crafted for us by a group of people that are undeniable in power over the masses of society -- the "Powers That Be."

"In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present eduction conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen - of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
- John D. Rockefeller, General Education Board (1906)

Simple solution: Inflate the money—don’t inflate the checks given out to Leeches. When they cant afford to buy food or lodging—they will go back to work at humble jobs or die off. This happened in Russia—will happen here. With funny money (Also known as Obamabucks) we can pay off China with new paper. We will all be millionaires! Yes, a few riots and all but that means more jobs for guards and police. New growth businesses—bars for windows, security doors, Lawyers, Prisons, Graveyard workers.

This guy is a jerk.

Someone who has worked all his life and supported a family and sent them all through college and then has worked five extra years before retiring at 70—like myself—is not the equivalent of a single mother who produces children from 5 or 6 different fathers, collects welfare for all of them, and never does a day’s work in her life.

I put far more into social security over the years than I’ll ever get out of it. If I’d had it my way, I’d have put that money into a private retirement account, in addition to what I managed to save, and gotten far more income from it than the government will ever give me.

A retired worker is not the same as an illegal immigrant who gets social security without ever working for it, and votes a dozen times for Obama.

Same with medicare. I put far more into that than I’ll ever get out. It’s not the same thing as medicaid.

Chicago did this a few years back, selling their parking meters to a private company. Now in many parts of Chicago, parking meters have hit $6.00 per hour.

It conflates the issue to include retirees in the same category as the various moochers who are pure takers, many for their entire lives. Yet is is commonly done in articles like this in order to make some half truth sound like a reasonable analysis.

By definition a retiree is one who was a productive, contributiing member of society until they reached the age when they could, or had to, retire, in part or in full.

The legitimate retirees of today are the people who worked all their lives to build much of the country, the wealth and the economy that is currently being squandered by the liberal, moocher, Obama generation.

Those able-bodied people who managed to weasle their way onto disability or social security before retirement age are not retirees - they are moochers and there are millions upon millions of them. They are true Zombies.

Not sure if serious?

Inflation is an indiscriminate weapon. It hits the productive and unproductive equally. And it arguably hits the productive much harder by inflating away their paychecks, while the unproductive at the bottom have at least some protection in COLA increases. And the unproductive in the higher echelons benefit mightily, as they are in a position to play inflation hedges and carry-trades.

I wrote this, and then re-reading your post, the needle on my sarcasm detector started to bounce.

"Large sections of the US population have been turned into zombies. Retirees. Medicare dependents. Food stamp recipients. Disabled people." Regulators. Planners. Inspectors. Government-employed teachers. A bloated medical racket. Social workers. University employees. Administrators. Government-linked, government-funded service businesses. NGOs (environmentalist and many other creepy non-profits). Employees and administrators of too many state-owned lands. Government-funded psychs. Social workers. Federal funding to local governments. ...

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