Morality and Economics in one, can a price tag be put on a life, or a lifetime? It sure can.
The “free world” doesn’t look so free when the debt is shown its numerical value. Maybe someday, in the not-so-distant future, the slave pens and slave auctioning tables will be reopened.
The “free market” is an oxymoron. Everything is for sale, sooner or later it seems.
This is true but if we disrupt the flow too much, we might shoot ourselves in the employment foot.
I think we should stay the course in most products other than the meat industry that is really screwing up the environment. If you have a chance, google the movie Cowspiracy. It is an eye opener.
I think we should continue to consume other non-neat products but bump up the price so that we can reduce our pollution.
We mostly never work those into our ego, especially men, who seem to have forgotten their duty to family and the future and the honor of thinking of others that will follow us.
Nowadays I’m linking debt and money with blood, “blood-debt”. It’s not just money. It’s many other factors and choices, consequences and responsibilities, that parents and ancestors pass-off or dump upon further generations. Kicking the can down the road. A woman sluts around and has different children from different dead beat men. Those children grow, suffer, and want somebody to blame in their lives, but remain unfulfilled. The pollution flows downstream. Eventually it will be recycled, but by who and when? Who will pay the final price? Who will bear the final suffering and death, for other people’s irresponsibility?
Blood is the ultimately currency of life. All debts can be reduced to it. All mistakes accounted for, by anybody, anytime, for a lifetime. People do pass on their debts to their unborn.
The ignorance and weakness of every parent, becomes the burden of every child.
Speaking pragmatically, leaving an inheritance for children is the goal, to allow “Privileges” to your children that you-yourself never had but always hoped for.
Absolutely, but we should also pass up the sense of duty and honor that most of us do not seem to have much of.
Take the duty of men to their wives and children. We presently have half of all households manned by single women who mostly end in having to chase deadbeat dads. That is not exactly giving the young men a high bar to reach.
Debt isn’t all bad. If I own a million dollar house on which I still owe $200k, leaving that house and that debt to my children is a net gain for them. If I own a business that produces millions in profits but also has millions in debt, that’s still a net positive inheritance for my children.
Similarly if a nation or society borrows to pay for infrastructure, research, defense, they may produce a net surplus inheritance for the next generation.
Plenty of very wealthy people carry debt. Plenty of very wealthy people take on debt to buy stock and other investment assets. It’s often a financially sound decision, and leaves them (and their descendants) better off.
The attitude of the poor towards debt is understandable, given that they often don’t have access to the kind of borrowing that will yield positive returns. They also often borrow not to invest, but to make ends meet, which is virtually guaranteed to leave you less well off. But that’s just misusing debt, it’s not a problem inherent to debt.
You would agree that leaving more value to your descendants is better, right? My point is that there are situations where the way to maximize the value you will leave to your children is to also leave them debt. If that’s so, if there are cases where you must take on debt and leave that debt to your children in order to do the right thing by your children, then debt can’t be inherently bad.
Sure, if we aren’t getting anything for it then debt is bad, but that’s an implausible scenario. Most debt is produced in exchange for valuable goods or services. Most houses aren’t on quicksand.
You seem to be missing the point. The fact that gain might require the acceptance of necessary evil does not mean that it alone isn’t evil. The total is acceptable because the good outweighs the evil. But the evil portion is still the evil portion. One would have been better off if the evil was not there and yet the good still was. And in this example, “debt” versus gain, is the “evil”.