"Making" profits by committing theft

Rolf. A. F. Witzsche


page 01

Investors steal from society at the moment that the nation's financial resources are diverted from advancing the nation's productive capacity, whereby society is robed of its productive potential. By this kind of theft, applied intensively on a large scale, the American physical economy has been starved almost to oblivion. Nominally its physical output has been reduced by more than half, while the quality and usefulness of what is being produced has declined much more than that. Only the prices have been increased, and this dramatically so. It takes now three incomes in a family, instead of one, to make ends meet, and this at a lower quality of life. The regression reflects the financial theft that has occurred.

At the same time, the robbery hasn't accomplished anything for the investors either, though few will agree with me on this point. They will point to stock market indexes that have risen ten or twenty fold, and they will cite this as a sign of prosperity. But is their assumption correct? Do these indexes really measure prosperity? What do they measure? They really measure the astronomical price that investors are willing to pay for the little that is left of the nation's physical economy that doesn't produce much anymore. They are now paying now 15 to 20 times as much for shares in the physical economy than they once paid a few decades ago while they receive less than a third in value. In other words, dollar for dollar, their investment is now worth 60 times less in real terms than what it used to be, and is probably several hundred times less then what it could have been had their theft not strangled the productive development of society.

Of course the stock market is only a minute element of the total financial gambling area. This is a huge arena that is flooded with vast amounts of financial instruments, some 300 trillion dollars worth, which are all claims against a physical economy that has shrunk so badly, and has thereby become so unproductive that it can't even maintain itself, but continues to collapse. In other words, the huge claims that has been accumulated aren't worth anything, because there is nothing there to pay out those huge claims.

 

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