Crawley Economic Maxim #34

Crawley Economic Maxim #34

I was watching the Fox News Report with Bret Braeher and I found it amazing that a farmer, who was being interviewed, and very incensed at Washington, wanted Washington to kowtow and come around to his viewpoint. Absolutely ridiculous. Here is an individual who is receiving some of the highest “goodies”, i.e. highest subsidies, that of agriculture, and actually expects his masters to listen to what he has to say. If he doesn’t realize it already he will in the not too distant future be paying the proverbial “Merchant of Venice” price. Not only does anyone who takes from the government in any way, in any minutiae, in any facet must, not maybe, give “his pound of flesh” but the blood that goes along with that proverbial pound of flesh. And unlike “The Merchant of Venice”, the government wants it from the cardial pulmonary part of the body. Why? Because when they take that, metaphorically, they kill the individual. If there is no heart, there is no individual. Why is it that the American people don’t understand this very simple concept, this maxim.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that the government ‘gives’, to an individual, that is ‘a break’, much less free. It is a lie. And the strings that are attached are huge. The interest rate that must be paid back is real and great. Just ask anyone with an SBA loan. Not only that, the interest rate, but the government wants everything for collateral including your wedding ring. For some, that may not be a bad idea. Being in the mortgage market for the past twenty plus years and another example, FHA has not only a huge premium that must be paid for borrowing the government’s money (currently one and half percent of whatever you need to borrow—and that’s up front but they’ll gladly finance that and will receive interest on it from whomever borrows), which is actually our money, but mortgage insurance that lasts for as long as you have the loan no matter if you have initially or ever built a twenty-percent equity position for that particular property.

I look at my children. One is an MD and the other two are or will be attorneys. I admire them greatly. They take after their mother. But they, especially the attorneys, have borrowed to the hilt, mainly from the government and supported by the post graduate institutions who say, ‘that with this degree the job market will grant you an open portal…that the red, or gold if you prefer, carpet goes all the way to Oz’. And just like Oz, the wizard, the government, in bed with most of the academic institutions, is lying. Recently we attended on of our son’s graduation exercises. There were four to five hundred newly minted lawyers. The president of the class proceeded to get up and give a speech about how they had been lied to by the very institution that they had attended. His entire speech was about the less than five percent of the graduates who actually had jobs waiting for them. And that is a microcosm of what is happening across America.

I have told the kids that whatever your passion is, direct your efforts towards that passion. In the end it will be worth it. The sacrifice may be great but the end results will be greater—that of autonomy, of freedom. Maybe it is I who am in the wrong in that I have never had that kind of passion for a ‘job’ or ‘occupation’, other than a particular lady and three children, and to provide for them. I learned that from my parents. And that particular lady’s parents. And it is has served me well.