On Hatred: The Economic Argument

The whole US Government should file into the nearest theatre in Washington DC, and someone should play for them a cartoon that explains the economical situation of America better than any other. Duck Tales, specifically, this episode about inflation. Essentially, the more money is made, the less it's worth, due to supply and demand.  For instance, when Titanic came out on VHS, so many copies were made that Walmart couldn't give them away. They had so many, and so their worth went down. Another example... say you had one coffee cup. You couldn't get another one. How careful would you be with that coffee cup? It would be like gold to you, and the same example would apply to toys children had in years gone by.  Children had one doll, one car, one basketball, and if they got damaged or ruined, there just wasn't enough money to go out and buy another (and especially no credit cards by the handfuls) People were much more careful  about the things they had. Now, you break the coffee cup, you go to Walmart and buy one for $5.00, and you think nothing of it.  For that coffee cup is basically worthless.

Now, to return to the idea of evil, of the hatred that runs through people's veins like a germ.  That hatred must be exercised in different ways. One obvious, and relatively safe way, is through the playing of first-person shooter video games. My brother is really good at it, and I thought the game Carmageddon II was amazing, as you got to run over people with your car as you demolished other vehicles. And if you died or crashed, you just "respawned" in your home base. Just 100 coins, and you get a new life, to put it simply. The value of those lives is diminished as it matters little how many times you get killed.  The situation changes when there's something to be lost when death occurs, in video games, that is. If there are no consequences, then death matters very little.

Outside, in the real world, we experience the same thing.  I call it "population inflation," the idea that, as our population grows, the value of each individual life becomes less. You can see it everywhere. In the south side of Chicago, children are murdered daily, and you hear very little about it outside of the normal body count on the news. You've seen the videos where someone lays bleeding on the sidewalk, and pedestrians just walk around him or her, unwilling to help or to get involved. The value of that life just isn't worth them taking time out of their day. This is the value of human life now. We come a dime a dozen, and when it's time to throw the dead, useless bodies out of the hospice and welcome a new set of elderly in, why, that's the way things go. Squeeze out the last bits of money available, and move on.  Charge them for the Big Mac, the weight loss program, the Cardiologist bill, the increased health insurance premiums, and then be done with them, ready for a new generation to run through the mill.  And there are countless other examples, but those are for other blogs, other rants.

The prime example comes from Newtown, Connecticut  The shooter walks into Sandy Hook Elementary and guns down an entire class of Kindergartners  and then himself.  I would really like to know what he thought was going to happen to those children. Would they simply "respawn" at their houses, to appear the next day at school? Would the shooter and his mom do the same thing? What was the value of each child's life as he took them away? Nothing. He didn't even hold his own life of any value, as, I guess, he thought he would simply appear someplace else, ready to start the next day.

Likewise, the Radical Islamic Terrorists that have plagued the world recently (and let's be honest, they've existed for centuries, but now they have the weapons and we have the 24 hour news broadcasts to make each of them known. Postman: "The Medium is the Message.") have the same view of life as the Newtown shooter did. To them, Islam has taught them that all life outside of Islam is worthless, and people are to be turned or destroyed. Further, Jihad makes suicide a rewarding act, that in the next world, there will be riches for ending their lives after killing Christians (or any other "infidels." The Radical Islam sect encourages the spread of hate, the devaluing of human life, like no other religion on Earth. We have to see this, and endeavor to eradicate that hate anywhere we see it, online, in our prison system, or in the people that we love.  

Inflation and Values

At Borders, we recently moved around the shelves in the Children's section to allow for a lot more free space (presumably to put toys and displays in that area for Christmas, but that's another story). As I went into the kid's section last night to clean it up, I noticed that the kids (and their "adult" guardians) had strewn things all over that area. It was as if they didn't want to see the floor, were afraid of it. Open places and quiet spaces always get them down (Carpenters). Chaos seemed to be more familiar to them. Now whether the floor was a comparisons to the homes of the people that made the mess, I don't know. But it did bring about an interesting economics idea.

One of the biggest negatives about the Congress' bailout plan for Wall Street is the idea that flooding the market with that much money would cause inflation. Or to put it simply, adding more of something devalues its worth. To take a Duck Tales episode briefly, Scrooge found a place where bottle caps were prized as money. So when Launchpad dropped a whole plane full of them on the country, the bottlecaps soon became worthless. What would have bought a house would now have bought a stick of bubble gum. A simple and exaggerated definition of inflation.

Now, let's apply this to something other than money. Let's look at stuff. Thoreau, in the first chapter of Walden, ranted about the amount of "stuff" that each person had collected with them throughout their lives. It would be an ideal image to show a person walking through life with everything he owned on top of his back, and eventually, it would be impossible to move at all. The worth of these things is also effected. Would a cup, being the only one that you had to drink coffee out of, be more valuable to you than a cup in which you had 20 just like it. Now break that cup. Do you glue it back together? If that was the only one you had...yes! But if it was one out of 20, you'd just go get another cup.

The same idea is carried over with children. The items they see throughout the stores... those items aren't owned by them, they have no intrinsic value sitting on the shelves. And if this idea is propagated by the parents, who would just as soon sit a book (or a pound of hamburger) on a shelf someplace, or on the floor (which wouldn't matter for a book too much, but it would ruin the beef), then the children have no need to take care of all the items they see around them. The value of these things is less and less, the more they see. In fact, most things that are sold today are quite worthless, in the eyes of people. They are things to be used, manipulated, and tossed away when it no longer interests you (the sad thing is that this can also be applied to looking at other people as well.  If a child, having only a few toys, was told to value these things, because they could not be replaced, they would be much less likely to destroy their toys, and when at the store, would see an increased intrinsic value in the items on the shelves. But if a child had a million toys, what would be the harm in breaking a few, or destroying a few toys in a store, for it wasn't theirs, and they weren't really a big deal anyway, he or she had plenty at home.

And I see it everywhere, from badly folded Yugi-oh cards, to books that, when read, the readers fold the spine all the way back so they can read it with one hand (which drives me absolutely bonkers), to naked Barbie Dolls (their hair won't grow back).

We don't respect or value anything anymore, because it can all be so easily replaced. This includes people, if you want to stretch the idea to the increase of divorces in America, or to the idea of "consumerism" that I've ranted about on previous blogs. There is, in business, a desire to create things that people will buy, that they desire, even if it harms them in the process. Double Cheeseburgers are offered, and so they are bought. And then we get high blood pressure and cholesterol and are sent to the doctor where we pay more money, and bloodwork (more money) and medications (more) and join fitness programs (wasted money) and finally have to buy a large coffin because the regular size won't fit our large bodies. This of course, is an exaggeration, but it's worth looking at. Because, in my opinion, there are some businesses that see customers as a resource, a renewable one, that can easily be replaced by the normal propagation techniques.

Take Credit card companies for example. Why is it that Visa or Mastercard doesn't fight you when you file for bankruptcy because you own them thousands of dollars? Because they know that there are college kids just waiting to fill out those forms and get credit cards. You're old news, bad meat, and they can get fresh meat any time they want it. People are numerous, and inflation states that they are now more worthless than they were in times past, when fewer people shopped and ran the economy of the nation. The list of examples is endless on this.

It's more than just simple supply and demand that drives this idea of inflation. People must also have a value for items, people, ideas...etc... There is a value to books, even though there may be a hundred or a million like it, because of the information contained therein. One could get damaged in the rain, and while you would have to buy another one, it would still contain the same valuable information. My assertion is that there is a value for everything that can be measure in such fashion.

I can only remember seeing a couple luna moths in my life. Gorgeous insects that glow in any light. Suffice it to say they are more rare than the common gray moths that fly around the porch lights at night. Now, what if that thing of beauty was as common as a sparrow, say. Would they be any less beautiful? Would you become blind to their beauty because of their commonality?

Take people for instance. A person should be valued as an individual, not for the money that he or she makes, or the items that he or she consumes, but rather for the thoughts and emotions that are inside of them. This is where the Borg got it all wrong. That an individual is more important as an individual, with memories and lessons and thoughts and feelings, not just someone who can by a cheeseburger. Is a person not considered valuable, even though there are millions of them upon this Earth?

If I were to teach children about value and inflation, I would teach them how to look at the value of an object indifferent to the number of them that are around. The toy to you is commonplace, banal, but to someone that has very few toys or treasures in this life, that toy would be just as valuable as a piece of fine jewelry. Separating the value of an object from the object is the best way to learn this lesson. Therefore, the books would be cleaned up, the meat put back in the freezer so someone could buy it, the person cared for, the college student warned of the problems of credit cards...etc... It is probably the most valuable lesson we could teach our children, because it impacts the way we look at the world. It brings things back into focus, and the important things of life become important again.