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Have to agree with this 100%. I think the designer clothes everyone wears are part of the bubble as well. $1200 and up handbags. I write this wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt, although I do buy them on sale.
My father claimed they had one pair of shoes and shared them among 3 brothers. He might have meant dressy shoes to go out in.
I've never quite understood this one.
Wasn't the aircraft carrier returning from a successfully completed mission? What was wrong with recognizing that?
Pride may well precede a fall....but stupidity assures it will be fatal.
But with pride comes complacency, and complacency and imagination are a volatile brew. Our best business minds still found great new opportunities and new streams of revenue — but this time it was about maximizing and displaying wealth instead of building industries and creating opportunities.
Most of this article is a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. These lines come closest to identifying the root of the current economic crisis.
Prosperity comes from productivity. To increase prosperity (in any form), it is necessary to increase productivity. Energy is the key to increasing productivity. From the beginning of time, real productivity increases resulted from harnessing one or more forms of energy, from the first cooking fire to the latest microchip. The developed nations bought into the idea that it was necessary to limit energy consumption and created impediments to the plentiful supply of energy. In so doing, they artificially limited increases in productivity and put a cap on prosperity. The smart and the greedy continued to chase wealth, however it became a paper chase leveraged on risk. The perceptible rewards to some increased as a result of that risk, but absent true increases in prosperity (via productivity), the chase was doomed to be fatal to the economy as a whole.
Talk about saving and investing all you want, but the current world economic crisis will not be solved until the powers that be recognize the true role of energy in the pursuit of prosperity. To achieve prosperity, energy must be cheap, plentiful and readily available. This does not preclude an environmentally friendly approach to energy production, but any talk of limiting the amount of energy available, actually reducing the amount consumed, or only being produced by costly methods dooms the world to a continued economic malaise.
Cheap abundant energy is the cure for our economic woes, not bailouts.
One of my Mom’s favorite sayings.
Pride is before destruction, haughty spirit before fall. And i before e except after c.
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:’
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:’
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.’
But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness?’
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’