For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Through soft and pathetically weak Trade agreements, the American Economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the World, while taxing ourselves. It is time for that to change. I am today announcing that I will create the EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources. We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade, and they will start paying, FINALLY, their fair share. January 20, 2025, will be the birth date of the External Revenue Service. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Good riddance to Biden, his bromides, and his bullshit. Finally a leader with ideas and the cojones to execute them.
How would a journo (my term of disapprobation for a leftist pseudo-journalistic shill for the despicable Dems) respond to this? By willfully ignoring the main point and drawing attention to Trump's odd capitalizations and less-than-elegant use of the English language. That tactic comports well with their inability to look past style to substance. You will by now have noticed their fascination with empty celebrities and such narcissistic pretty boys as Gavin Newsom and Justin Trudeau not to mention such airheads as the overgrown teenage girl, AOC, and that hilarious birdbrain Kamala.
If Trump accomplishes 10% of what he has planned, that will be 100% more than Kamala could do. (Riff adapted from Michael Savage, the wittiest pundit on our side.)
Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.
The business community is giddy with excitement about the @realDonaldTrump administration. I am hearing this from everyone, including from people who didn’t vote for Trump. Business confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Business leaders are becoming more confident about the country and the economy. This means they will be making more investments in our future which will drive the economy and the stock market, reducing the cost of capital and bolstering confidence further, catalyzing more investment and more growth in a self-reinforcing, virtuous cycle.
Spot at the moment sits at 2709 USD/oz. It will go up no matter who wins on the 5th, more with Kamala. Wait for a dip to buy? Buy now. You should have been buying steadily all along. But think for yourself and keep your own counsel. That's part of what I am trying to teach you people. You know enough to take my financial advice and predictions cum grano salis.
Interesting that gold should surge right after Kamala's embarrassing performance in the Bret Baier interview. How embarrassing? See here.
In this article, I will define what a Central Bank Digital Currency is by exploring its major categories. I’ll demonstrate that the US already operates with a form of CBDC, albeit without the flashy labels. I will also show that the Federal Reserve (the Fed) can introduce more dystopian elements into this system—such as programming restrictions on when, how, and where you can spend your money without requiring Congressional approval.
However, the fear of central bank control over your transactions is, in fact, a red herring. The real threat lies with our government, which has already perfected the art of surveillance. Adding programmability is just the next logical step. Ultimately, both Republicans and Democrats are steering us toward the same destination: total digital control. They may use different words and different propaganda, but their goals converge. While we can’t simply vote out of this predicament, we can opt out entirely.
Even though the U.S. government’s debt-fueled spending response began as a national emergency under former President Trump, excessive spending continued under the Biden-Harris administration. It continued long after the emergency faded and continues today.
By continuing it, the Biden-Harris administration squandered the opportunity to refill the U.S. government’s credit reservoir to restore its risk-free status. They could have reduced spending to sustainable levels after the pandemic ended, but instead, they failed this basic test of fiscal responsibility.
The national debt in relation to the U.S. economy has now reached levels not seen since the end of World War 2. It may be helpful to consider how politicians of that time tackled this challenge. After the war, they adjusted their spending habits and stopped investing money in a war that had already ended. This decision ensured that the U.S. government’s credit reservoir would be replenished for future generations.
It’s a history lesson that today’s politicians either never learned or have chosen to ignore. Because they haven’t heeded the lesson, debt issued by the U.S. government has become riskier to the nation’s creditors. Because it has become riskier for those who lend money to the U.S. government, that same debt has become much more costly to U.S. taxpayers.
Here we have yet another reason why anyone who supports Harris-Walz is a contemptible fool. Is it not one of the marks of the fool to be unaware of, or unconcerned with, one's long-term best self-interest, where such self-interest correlates closely with the long-term best self-interest of one's country?
Meanwhile the spot price of gold hovers around 2500 USD/oz. That says something, doesn't it?
. . . when we have none we are in danger. (English proverb)
A proverb whose pertinence is proven by recent developments. Gold hit 2400 USD/oz. a day or two ago, but has backed off some. Joe Biden and his shills lie their heads off about everything including the health of the economy, but, with respect to the latter, the surging price of gold suggests otherwise.
I received the bill for my 2013 Jeep Wrangler Sport the other day: $302.89 for six months. For the preceding six months I paid 274.09, and the six months before that 260.42. So yesterday I paid my agent a visit and reminded him of my stratospherically high credit rating, my lack of claims, my sterling driving record, my low mileage, my loyalty to the company, the whole shot.
He explained that rates had gone down during the Great Covid Scare (my term not his) due to less driving but now were headed up again; Biden-flation (my term not his); and because e-vehicles are much more expensive to repair than gas drinkers (my term again). All true. So I paid the bill and left.
On arriving home I flipped on Jesse Watters who had a segment on young people and how they are getting hammered on rates. His focus was on onboard surveillance technology. Now if old people are unduly cautious on the roads and dangerous for that very reason, young people are worse, being impetuous, reckless, ignorant of physics, bereft of a proper sense of their mortality, without experience of life automotive and otherwise, distracted by their devices, distractive of each other, etc. So they do stupid things at the wheel, the data gets sent to the insurance companies, and their rates skyrocket.
For example, I'm 'hauling donkey' in the fast lane doing 75-80 mph and some punk in a compact death-trap is on my ass. I'm doing everything right, driving my Jeep as if it were a motorcycle: exercising due diligence, maintaining situational awareness, cycling through my mirrors and gauges, planning escape routes, staying out of blind spots, keeping my distance from other vehicles and especially from overloaded junk wagons. I am engaging in automotive profiling. So the punk in the crapmobile tries to get around me, endangering himself, his passengers, and everyone around him.
The punk's high rates are the just wages of his automotive sin.
Of course, this is a deep and vexing topic. I don't want to live in a Sino-styled, omni-surveillant, Stasi-redolent police state! Damn you Dementocrats! Liberty trumps security! If you don't agree you are axiologically unfit to be an American. Go live in China or board the next time machine back to the USSR. Or the DDR. On the other hand, when the people lack virtue, automotive and otherwise, and will not govern themselves, then the plutocratic-pathocratic-totalitarian thugs have a plausible justification for their clamp-down and 'plausible deniability' of their malfeasance.
There is a lot to discuss. Here is something that I didn't know but that comports well with the pathocratic scumbaggery of wokeassed leftards:
Not all states allow car insurance companies to take gender into account. These six states prohibit the use of gender when pricing auto insurance:
How unspeakably stupid can an unspeakably stupid reality-denying leftist be? But that is exactly what you would nowadays expect in the once great and golden State of Californication and the People's Republic of Taxachusetts.
During the Great Covid Scare, some restaurants stopped accepting cash payments for health reasons. Whatever the intention, that is a policy that aids and abets an incipient police state. Exaggerate some health threat. Inspire fear in a gullible populace of highly suggestible conformists. Ban cash in the name of public health.
Result? Everyone making payments leaves a paper trail. People can be monitored as to where they go, where they shop, what they eat and drink., what they read. Too many visits to Joe's Real BBQ for paleolithic vittles and your social credit score goes down. Get the picture?
Corollary: Cede control of health care delivery to the government and they can tell you how to live, what to eat, drink, ride. Ride a motorcycle? Dangerous activity! Government has a reason to ban them if they are picking up the tab for health care.
Addendum: Are we a gullible populace of highly suggestible conformists? Well, do you remember all the people walking around in the open air wearing masks? Or people driving alone in their cars with windows up wearing masks?
Where is the independence of mind? Are we Americans or obedient Germans?
Whether or not the U. S. dollar remains the world's currency of choice, money itself will always be the ultimate currency and criterion of human seriousness and human understanding. Money matters. "Money doesn't talk, it swears." (Bob Dylan) "When money talks, ideology walks." (Lee Iacocca) Just ask Traitor Joe.
As if in illustration of Lee's line, Anheuser-Busch walked back their Dylan Mulvaney wokery when their bottom line felt the sag.
Long-time donors are finally waking up to the wokeassery* of once-great universities that have for decades been transmogrifying into leftist seminaries. ('Seminary' is etymologically related to 'semen' and in the seminaries in question the origin of the jism is masturbatory: nothing productive comes from these seed beds.)
I predicted the donor revolt on 13 October about a week after the Hamas savagery of 7 October. Case in point: Leon Cooperman. He's given some $50 mil to Columbia but will give no more citing the cranial feculence (my polite phrase, not his) of the Hamas-supporting students.
What is astonishing to many of us, however, is how the Cooperman cohort could be so clueless for so long. Cooperman just now discovered what has been going on since the '60s, namely, the "long march through the institutions"? Only now you decide to stop funding the anti-civilizational scum?
Better late than never, but no fool like an old fool.
Copperman's 80. The elderly tend to live in the past. They tend to be fat, lazy, complacent, inattentive, and lost in the petty particulars of their self-centered quotidian round, even if they are not, like Joey B., physically decrepit, non compos mentis, morally corrupt to the core, and a disaster for the USA and the world.
___________
*A coinage of mine which I am sure has occurred to others. Modelled on jackassery, a word recognized by Merriam-Webster. The donkey or jackass is the symbol, an aptro-symbol if you will, of the Democrat party in the USA which, once respectable, is now hard-Left and destructive of our republic as she was founded to be.
And to add insult to injury, irony to outrage, the end of liberty is being ushered in by the mother country. Here:
The digital pound would be a new type of money issued by the Bank of England for everyone to use for day-to-day spending. You would be able to use it in-store or online to make payments.
This type of money is known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). You may also hear it being called ‘digital sterling’ or even ‘Britcoin’. We call the UK version of CBDC the digital pound.
The digital pound would be denominated in sterling and its value would be stable, just like banknotes. £10 in digital pounds would always have the same value as a £10 banknote.
If we introduced it, it would not replace cash. We know being able to use cash is important for many people. That’s why we will continue to issue it for as long as people want to keep using it.
And you can take that italicized paragraph to the bank! (Italics added.)
In a parallel assault on liberty, the Brits are going cancel-crazy. Dreher:
It’s a country that gave the world George Orwell, but now, it’s a ‘Brand’ new world for free speech in once-great Britain, which these days specializes in doling out the unwelcome gift of Orwellianism.
Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of a British Parliamentary committee, has been writing to social media platforms Facebook, TikTok and Rumble, asking them if they plan to follow YouTube’s lead and demonetize the accused sex pest Russell Brand. On committee letterhead, Dame Caroline wrote to express the committee’s concern that Brand will not be able to make money on the platform and thereby “undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.”
Potentially illegal. This Conservative MP is using her powerful position to attempt to crush Brand’s ability to make a living, even though he denies the allegations, and they have not been subject to any sort of trial. This member of the British government is attempting to demonetize Russell Brand himself, based solely on allegations.
If this outrageous intimidation is allowed to stand, no one is safe in Britain. All it takes is for the right people to level fashionable accusations against you—ones having to do with racism, sexism, LGBT-phobia, ‘toxic masculinity,’ and whatnot—and you could see your livelihood evaporate overnight. You could even see your own government persecute you, as the committee headed by Dame Caroline, Baroness Lancaster of Kimbolton, is doing to Brand.
The Anglosphere is lost, and America is no exception. The push-back is too little, too late. But it ain't over 'til it's over.
We fight on in the gathering gloom. No defeatism! On the other hand, don't be a fool who sacrifices his life on the altar of activism. We have but one night to spend in this bad inn. But a night is not nothing. I'll leave it to you to figure out the right mix of commitment to the fight and Gelassenheit. And it is up to you to balance praeparatio vitae and praeparatio mortis.
Story here. To understand the issue, bear in mind that bitcoins are not literally mined, they are 'mined' using supercomputers which consume a lot of electricity.
Bitcoin threatens globalist/statist "green" agenda . . . and everything else on their to-do list. No monopoly on money via fiat central banking? Then no "democratic" imposition of lower living standards. With respect to achieving global decentralization, the spontaneous, market-based decentralization of money "moves the needle." It's happening slowly, almost imperceptibly so, but it's in a race with globalist countermoves.
He looks like a farmer because he is one. He invariably talks sense. No deracinated globalist, he is rooted, grounded, and 'based' -- to stoop to an unnecessary innovation in current lingo. He's my man, Hanson:
The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms.
This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery.
The culprit for the political wipeout will be out-of-control inflation—and for several reasons.
One quibble. Tactically, it is not a good idea to predict loss for our enemies. It makes our side complacent. It is better to assume that the fight is tooth and nail, bite and scratch, right up to the end.
Leftists are not likely to be intimidated or demoralized by our bold predictions. They live for the political. That is their sphere and for them it exhausts the real. That's all they've got and so they fight to the end by any and all means. We are at a disadvantage. I call it the Conservative Disadvantage. Not only are we hobbled by our virtues, we cannot bring to the fight the full measure of our enthusiasm precisely because we understand that the political does not exhaust the real.
And seriously, do you think the Dems are likely to abjure the electoral chicanery that contributed to their win in 2020?
Fifth, Americans know that our current inflation is self-induced, not a product of a war abroad, an earthquake, or the exhaustion of gas and oil deposits.
Biden ignored the natural inflationary buying spree of consumers who were released from being locked down for nearly two years unable to spend.
Instead, he encouraged gorging that huge demand by printing trillions of dollars of funny money for all sorts of new redistributionist entitlements, green projects, and pet congressional programs.
The Biden Administration eroded the work ethic. It kept labor non-participation rates high by subsidizing with federal checks those staying at home.
It nihilistically slashed gas and oil production by canceling federal leases, oilfields, and pipelines while pressuring banks not to lend for fracking.
In just a year, Biden reduced America from the greatest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization to an energy panhandler begging the Saudis and Russians to pump more of the oil that America needs but will not tap for itself.
Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.
Linked at my Facebook page. You may leave a comment there if you wish, or send me an e-mail message. I have come to refer to Facebook as Furzbuch because its suppression of free speech surely stinks to high heaven.
*"Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." JFK Inaugural Speech, 1961.
Of the four, tyranny is greatest threat at the present time, the tyranny of the deep state wokesters who control the Democrat Party and pull the strings of the puppet-in-chief, Joe Biden.
Senator Charles Grassley (R) was on C-SPAN this morning talking about Social Security reform among other things. He attributed the following quotation to Albert Einstein: "Compound interest is the only miracle in the world."
Did Einstein say that? I rather doubt it. It is too stupid a thing for Einstein to say. And there is no room in his worldview for miracles. There is nothing miraculous about compound interest, and there is no 'magic' in it either. It is very simple arithmetic. Suppose you invest $2000 at 10% compounded annually. At the end of the first year, you have $2,200. How much do you have at the end of the second year, assuming no additions or subtractions from the principal? $2,400? No. What you have is $2,200 + 220 = $2, 420. Where did the extra twenty bucks come from? That is interest on interest. It is the interest on interest on interest . . . that make compounding a powerful tool of wealth enhancement.
But there is nothing miraculous or magical about it. Words mean things. Use them wisely.
And don't look to Einstein for advice on personal finance.
A useful article on an intriguing topic. I take no position on its content, but merely note it for future reference, in keeping with my motto, "Study everything."
Did the Church’s change of teaching on usury constitute a doctrinal change? No. What changed was our understanding of the nature and function of money, neither of which has doctrinal status. Once the understanding of money changed, the sin of usury ceased to be identified in any simple way with charging interest on money. This is development, not substantial change.
I have posted several times over the years on the irrationality of playing the lottery and on the immorality of state sponsorship and promotion (via deceptive advertising) of lotteries. The following e-mail, however, raises an interesting question that gives me pause:
As I was reading this story of an impoverished young rancher who won $88 million net with a Powerball ticket, I was wondering whether you'd allow that a case could be made for the rationality of his gamble. The young man and his whole family were in desperate financial circumstances with no way to cover back taxes, livestock loans, etc. They faced foreclosures, eviction, etc. The young man bought one ticket. He was not a chronic heavy lotto-gambler. The one ticket did not make his situation worse. Arguably, the lottery gamble was his only hope of salvaging his situation. If you have only ONE way to save yourself, the odds don't really matter.
Actually, according to the account linked to above, the cowboy bought $15 worth of tickets. So he bought more than one ticket. But no matter. Let us assume that this $15 was the only money he ever spent on the lottery. And let's also assume that the cowpoke was at the end of his rope -- pun intended -- facing foreclosure and imminent residency on Skid Row. We may also safely assume that the young man will never again play the lottery. (For he seems resolved not to fritter away his winnings on loose women and fast cars.) The question is whether it was rational for him in his precise circumstances to spend $15 on lottery tickets.
Now one question to ask is whether the rationality of a decision can be judged ex post facto. I would say not. A rational agent agent is one who chooses means that he has good reason to believe are conducive to the ends he has in view. A rational decision is one made calmly and deliberately and with 'due diligence' on the basis of the best information the agent has available to him within the limited time he has at his disposal for acquiring information. A rational decision cannot be rendered irrational by a bad outcome, and an irrational decision cannot be rendered rational by a good outcome.
So I am inclined to say that our cowboy made an irrational decison when he decide to spend $15 on a chance to win millions. The fact that, against all odds, he won is irrelevant to the rationality of his decision. The decision was irrational because the chances of winning anything significant were astronomically small, whereas the value of $15 to someone who is down to his last $15 is substantial.
But I can understand how intuitions might differ. Suppose we alter the example by supposing that the man will die and knows that he will die if he does not win today's lottery. Suppose he has exactly $15 to spend and he spends it on lottery tickets. He now has nothing to lose by spending the money. It is perhaps arguable that, in these precise circumstances, it is prudentially if not theoretically rational for the cowpoke to blow his last $15 on lotto tickets.
Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. Here I discuss just one such feature, state-sponsored lotteries.
Any government that promotes lotteries is promoting behavior that is harmful to many and positively good for none, not even the few winners who are morally if not economically undermined by them. Sufficiently disciplined people can of course gamble without harming themselves economically. They gamble for diversion and they know when to stop. They have no illusions about it and they appreciate that in the long run it is a losing proposition. But even these people are not doing themselves much good by gambling: they are wasting time that could otherwise be used in some productive way. The undisciplined, however, positively harm themselves, and not only by going into debt. They wallow in irrationality and ‘innumeracy’ (the mathematical analog of illiteracy). How many gamblers could explain the Gambler’s Fallacy? They associate with people who are likely to have a bad influence on them. Since the virtues and vices tend to come in clusters, the gambler is likely to become a drinker, a glutton, and so on. In the words of the old song: "Drinkin’ and gamblin’, stayin’ out all night; . . . you're just livin’ in a fool’s paradise."
I am not saying that gambling should be illegal; nor am I saying that it is immoral. Some gamble for relaxation, and no ill comes of it. I am saying that gambling ought not be state-sponsored. Government should cause no harm. Primum non nocere!
Some will respond by pointing to the supplemental revenue that state lotteries generate, revenue that can be put to good uses. The tacit assumption seems to be that, if X is a source of supplemental revenue, then X is a good thing.
This assumption is false. State-sponsored prostitution would be an excellent source of revenue — there would be no lack of eager customers — but prostitution is not something a state should sponsor. If it is wrong for the government to promote prostitution, the use of tobacco products, the drinking of alcohol, and the taking of drugs, then it is wrong for the government to support gambling in the form of lotteries.
One can argue with some show of plausibility that governments should permit the aforementioned activities; but I cannot see how any rational and morally sane person could argue that governments should support or promote them.
Some of us from modest origins will end up with more money than we will ever need or be able to spend. The wages of our frugality will not be spent by us but passed on to benefit others. We credit our success to the old-time virtues. We understand that poverty is more a lack of virtue than a lack of money.
But to suggest that blacks could profit from these old-school virtues will get us branded as 'racists.' Apparently, to the mind of a leftist, a black who can defer gratification is like a black conservative, a 'traitor' to his race, as if race is a political construct.
Such is the real racism of low expectations fueled by 'progressive' reality denial according to which race is a socio-political construct.
Good advice. I learned the lesson back in '87. New to the game, I freaked out on Black Monday. Of course you remember the 508 point drop in the Dow. I got out, locking in losses, but then took too long getting back in. Now I am older, wiser, and if truth be told, a tad wider.
Here is an old post of mine from 2008 that stands up well: Some Principles of a Financial Conservative. Agree or disagree, but if you disagree you won't budge me from views only reinforced by my experiences since aught-eight. The main, thing, however, is to think hard, critically, and for yourself.
And another thing.
Don't say that money is the root of all evil. That's just silly. Say something that is true:
The inordinatelove of money is the root of some evils.
I appreciated your post. I am on the other side of the coin: I am a server and I depend on tips to help get me through nursing school. So hopefully I can help bring some insight. I agree with your overall point that one ought to tip based on service. Bad service? Bad tip. Excellent service? Excellent tip. The restaurant I work at bases my tip out (my pay out to the bar, bussers, food runners for their help) on my overall sales (4%); suppose I sell $1000 worth of food and beverages on a particular night; this means I dish out $40 of my tips out to those who directly helped me. So when I don’t get tipped (whether justified or not), I am still paying the tip out. I had a table of Europeans last week and the bill was around $400. If I did my job well—and I think I did—then I ought to have earned an $80 tip. Well, they left me zero. It happens. But here I am paying out $16; so I essentially had to pay to wait on this table! It usually evens out because some people are generous and see me busting my ass and tip over 20%. And if mistakes happen—which they do—99% of the time a nice attitude and an apology fix everything and I still get the 20%.
Another important point is this: if you are nice to me (which is a low bar: just acknowledge I exist and have feelings), I will do everything within my power to get you free stuff. You asked me how my day was? I won’t charge you for that soda. You say please and thank you (embarrassingly enough you’d be surprised how many people don’t use these words at all)? I’ll get you that free dessert all on company moolah baby. I don’t expect a bigger tip when I do this, but you get my point.
I also notice this a lot: how you treat waitstaff directly correlates to a deep part of your character. It’s a good litmus test for first dates. I went on a date with a girl and she was rude/snippy to the server because our food was late. Guess what? 99% chance it was not the server’s fault. The kitchen is busy and things come out late during a dinner rush. Needless to say we didn’t go out again. How can you be rude to someone who is bringing you food and beverages? It blows my mind.
My personal rule is that I tip whenever and wherever I can. I rationalize it by thinking: how much will me giving this extra $1-2 actually affect me financially (*wink* famine and affluence)? The coffee shop? I tip like I would at a bar. The car wash? You bet. The dishwashers at my work? Certainly; they have the worst job in the entire restaurant and are not part of the tip out. And it’s nice because I know the money is going directly into their pocket and the government doesn’t see it (when it’s cash). Always tip in cash if you can.
While there might not be a moral obligation to tip, to me it does show something about your character if the service was excellent and you stiffed them. If you are opposed to tipping at sit down restaurants, then don’t go to them—simple as that.
Some points:
It’s dehumanizing when someone doesn’t acknowledge you or even looks at you in the eye. Be a decent person and say please and thank you.
Don’t be rude because of mistakes (again: the vast majority of the time, the person you will tip had no control over it).
Control your kids (most kids nowadays are sadly glued to phones or tablets so it’s not usually a problem).
Here, in no particular order, are my maxims concerning the practice of tipping.
1. He who is too cheap to leave a tip in a restaurant should cook for himself. That being said, there is no legal obligation to tip, nor should there be. Is there a moral obligation? Perhaps. Rather than argue that there is I will just state that tipping is the morally decent thing to do, ceteris paribus. And it doesn't matter whether you will be returning to the restaurant. No doubt a good part of the motivation for tipping is prudential: if one plans on coming back then it is prudent to establish good relations with the people one is likely to encounter again. But given a social arrangement in which waiters and waitresses depend on tips to earn a decent wage, one ought always to tip for good service.
2. Tip on the nominal amount of the bill, not the amount less a discount. You got the discount, you skin-flint coupon clipper, don't be so cheap as to demand a discount on the tip as well.
3. Tip no less than 15%. But when in Rome, do as the Romans do. In Turkey, 5% suffices and more might be perceived as ostentatious. And in some places, a tip is an insult.
4. Do not hesitate to leave no tip or a measly tip to punish poor service. The whole point of tipping is to reward good service and to encourage good service in the future. If I have to beg for a second cup of coffee at a breakfast joint, or am reduced to swiping silverware from adjoining tables, then I am not inclined to leave much of a tip. Lousy service, lousy or nonexistent tip!
5. Tip on the entire bill, including alcoholic beverages, unlike a cheapskate I once knew who tipped only on prandials but never on potables.
6. At buffets, smorgasbords, and other self-service establishments, one should also leave a tip depending on the services rendered. In such places I sometimes tip less than 15%. Why? Because I do more of the work.
7. What about tipping on a take-out order in a sit-down restaurant? My inclination is not to tip there any more than I would tip in a fast food joint.
8. Tip the bartender, but if he complains about the size of the tip, tell him to go to hell.
9. I always travel light and carry my own luggage. This obviates the tipping of bellboys and other baggage schleppers. But a hard-working maid who has just done up my room may garner a few bucks.
10. Tip the barber whose floor is now littered with your long hair. I exercise my frugality by having my hair cut only four times per year. I've been known to go to barber colleges for cheap haircuts. There I can play the big shot and leave a 100% tip. If you are ever in Mesa, Arizona, check out Earl's Academy of Beauty.
11. Discount Tire around here offers a great free and friendly service. They will check your tire pressure including spare and inflate if necessary. I always give the kid a $5 tip. They also fix flats for free. I tip the guy who does the work $5.
12. I tip my massage therapist $15-20 for a 90 minute session. More at Christmas.
13. Having driven cab, on the mean streets of Boston no less, I always tip taxi drivers unless they are surly pricks in which case they get zilch. I once tipped a taciturn Jamaican two bucks on a twenty dollar fare and the guy had the chutzpah to complain. I told him to shove it.
The most I ever tipped a cabbie was 20 semolians on a short airport run to McCarran in Las Vegas. He was an interesting character and his conversation was scintillating. I asked him to name his tip. He said 'twenty' so I gave it to him. It is worth remembering that there are people out there who actually work for a living. We can't all be men and women of leisure.
People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects. When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing. In the end he swindles himself.
How is it, for example, that Bernie Madoff 'made off' with so much loot? You have otherwise intelligent people who are lazy, greedy and vain: too lazy to do their own research and exercise due diligence, too greedy to be satisfied with the going rate of return, and too vain to think that anything bad can happen to such high-placed and sophisticated investors as themselves.
Or take the Enron employees. They invested their 401 K money in the very firm that that paid their salaries! Now how stupid is that? But they weren't stupid; they enstupidated themselves by allowing the subornation of their good sense by their vices.
The older I get the more I appreciate that our problems, most of them and at bottom, are moral in nature. Why, for example, are we and our government in dangerous debt? A lack of money? No, a lack of virtue. People cannot curtail desire, defer gratification, be satisfied with what they have, control their lower natures, and pursue truly choice-worthy ends.
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 38, written in 1940:
155. The worst of poverty — today at any rate — the most galling and the most difficult thing to bear, is that it makes it almost impossible to be alone. Neither at work, nor at rest, neither abroad nor at home, neither waking nor sleeping, neither in health, nor — what a torture — in sickness.
Money cannot buy happiness but in many circumstances it can buy the absence of misery. Due diligence in its acquisition and preservation is therefore well recommended. The purpose of money is not to enable indulgence but to make possible a life worth living. Otium liberale in poverty is a hard row to hoe; a modicum of the lean green helps immeasurably.
Boethius wrote philosophy in prison, but you are no Boethius.
Things being as they are, a life worth living for many of us is more a matter of freedom from than freedom for. Money buys freedom from all sorts of negatives. Money allows one to avoid places destroyed by the criminal element and their liberal enablers, to take but one example. And chiming in with Haecker's main point, money buys freedom from oppressive others so that one can enjoy happy solitude, the sole beatitude.
Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it. It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyper-romantic and heart-felt rush of the unforgettable On the Road. Since how 'beat' one is in part has to do with one's attitude towards money, which is not the same as one's possession or non-possession of it, I'll for now just pull some quotations from Horace and Sloan Wilson. The Horace quotations seem not to comport well with each other, but we can worry that bone on another occasion.
Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.
Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.
The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."
The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)
I have a little disagreement going with the Dark Ostrich. He asserts, "Relative poverty is all about status." In an earlier entry, I quoted him as maintaining that
We are born with a natural inequality which soon turns into economic inequality. The reason it turns into economic inequality, I believe, is that humans have a natural desire for status.
I replied,
Yes, we are naturally unequal, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. But I wouldn't explain this in terms of the desire for status. Status is relative social standing, and depends on how one appears in the eyes of others. But this is relatively unimportant and has little to do with money and property which are far more important. I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without a modicum of material wealth.
It is not desire for status that [primarily] explains economic inequality but the desire for money and property and the sort of material security they provide.
I would guess that no one who reads this weblog is absolutely poor, i.e., bereft of life's necessities, and that every one who reads it is relatively poor, and significantly so. What do I mean by 'significantly so'? Suppose A has a net worth of four billion USD and B a net worth of 3.9 billion. Then B is poor relative to A. I will call this insignificant relative poverty. But the Ostrich and I, though we have far more than we need, are significantly relatively poor as compared to, say, the late Fidel Castro, that man of the people and hero of the Left.
The Ostrich tells us that relative property is all about status. I take that to mean that it is the drive for social status alone that brings about economic inequality and with it relative poverty. That is empirically false. I am the counterexample: I live wisely and frugally and my net worth keeps going up. But I don't care about status, which is relatively unreal, being mainly a matter of what's going on in the heads of others. I carefully husband my resources because I want to be in a position to take care of myself and others when the inevitable disasters occur and not be a burden on others. What others think of me, though of some importance, is of less importance to me than my material well-being.
But let's be charitable. Perhaps what the Ostrich means to say is that it is the lust for status that mainly brings about economic inequality and relative poverty. I concede that that might be so. It is an empirical question and cannot be answered from the arm chair.
But there are a couple of normative questions in the vicinity and these are what really interest me. One is whether it is morally permissible to pursue loot and lucre, property and pelf, for social standing. The other is whether it is rational to pursue these things for social standing. I will leave the moral question for some other time.
As for rationality, it can be understood in two different ways.
An agent is instrumentally rational if he chooses means conducive to the achievement of his ends. A rational agent in Phoenix who intends to travel to Los Angeles by car in eight hours or less will head West on Interstate 10. If he were to head East he would show himself to be irrational, at least in respect of this particular goal or type of goal. This says nothing about the rationality or irrationality of driving to Los Angeles. Indeed, there are those who will say that it makes no sense to speak of ends as either rational or irrational, that such talk is meaningful only in respect of means.
On a second way of thinking about rationality, one can coherently speak of ends themselves as rational or the opposite. Consider social status and material security. Which is a higher value? Which is more choice-worthy? Which would it be more rational for a being of our constitution to pursue? To me the answer is obvious. Material security, which includes wealth well beyond what one needs physically to survive, is a higher value that social status. Modifying slightly what I said above,
I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without material wealth in excess of what is needed for necessities.
Given how benighted human beings are, it may well be instrumentally rational to pursue wealth for the sake of status. That's an empirical question. But no reasonable person prefers status to wealth, just as no reasonable person prefers transient sense pleasures to long-term physical health.
So the Ostrich and I may be at cross-purposes. I am making normative claims while he remains at the level of the merely factual.
Now suppose someone asserts that the good is whatever satisfies desire, and that there is no way of ranking desires as objectively higher or lower, and their objects as more or less choice-worthy. Could I refute such a person? I don't think so. Contradict yes, refute no. For it all comes down to whether one has correct value intuitions. Some of us do and some of us don't. Just as some of us are color-blind, some of us are value-blind, wertblind in the terminology of Dietrich von Hildebrand. While color blindness is a defect in the eye of the head, value blindness is a defect in the 'eye' of the soul.
Since the day Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, the Dow Jones industrial average has risen by some 35 percent, making the last 14 months one of the greatest bull market runs in history. Some $6 trillion of wealth has been created for Americans -- which is very good news for the 55 million Americans with 401(k) plans, the 25 million or so who have IRAs, and another 20 million with company pension plans and employee stock ownership plans.
The left was certain exactly the opposite would happen with a Trump presidency.
[. . .]
3) "It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight." Paul Krugman of The New York Times, the day after the election.
I wonder: Did Krazy Krugman liquidate his stock holdings?
Krugman is living proof that a Nobel Prize (outside of the hard sciences) means nothing. I'm a Dylan fan from way back, long before most of you whippersnappers were born, but the Nobel Prize for Literature?
I'll presume it fraudulent until it is proven not. Here:
Bitcoin is an old fashioned fraud clothed in the new age wonder of technology. Promoting bitcoin is not so much about a new asset class as its is a class of felony, yet civil authorities have so far been unwilling to shut it down. Bitcoin is perhaps the most impressive speculative bubble in modern history and one that will tolerate no contradiction since it gains credibility as the price soars ever higher.
I don't know if that is right or not. But I do know that greed, like lust, has a preternatural power to suborn a man's good sense.
Here are ten theses to which I subscribe in the critical way of the philosopher, not the dogmatic way of the ideologue.
1. There is nothing wrong with money. It is absolutely not the root of all evil. The most we can say is that the inordinate desire for money is at the root of some evils. I develop this theme in Radix Omnium Malorum.
2. There is nothing wrong with making money or having money. There is for example nothing wrong with making a profit from buying, refurbishing, paying propery taxes on, and then selling a house.
3. There is nothing wrong with material (socio-economic) inequality as such. For example, there is nothing wrong with Bill Gates' having a vastly higher net worth than your humble correspondent. And there is nothing wrong with the latter's having a considerably higher net worth than some of his acquaintances. (When they were out pursuing wine, women, and song, he was engaging in virtuous, forward-looking activities thereby benefiting not only himself but also people who come in contact with him.) Of course, when I say that there is nothing wrong with material inequality as such, I am assuming that the inequalities have not come about through force or fraud.
4. Equality of outcome or result is not to be confused with equality of opportunity or formal equality in general, including equality under the law. It is an egregious fallacy of liberals and leftists to infer a denial of equality of opportunity -- via 'racism' or 'sexism' or whatever -- from the premise that a certain group has failed to achieve equality of outcome. There will never be equality of outcome due to the deep differences between individuals and groups. We must do what we can to ensure equality of opportunity and then let the chips fall where they may. This is consistent with support for government-run programs to help the truly needy who are in dire straits through no fault of their own.
5. We the people do not need to justify our keeping of what is ours; the State has to justify its taking. We are citizens of a republic, not subjects of a king or dictator or of the apparatchiks who have managed to get their hands on the levers of State power.
6. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. Socialism and communism spell the death of individual liberty. The more socialism, the less liberty. "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." (D. Prager)
7. The individual is the locus of value, not any collectivity, whether family, tribe, race, nation, or State. We do not exist for the State; the State exists for us as individuals.
8. Property rights, contra certain libertarians, are not absolute: there are conditions under which an 'eminent domain' State seizure (with appropriate compensation) of property can be justified. This proposition tempers the individualism of the preceding one.
9. Governments can and do imprison and murder. No corporation does. Liberals and leftists and 'progressives' have a naive faith in the benevolence of government, a faith that is belied by that facts of history: Communist governments in the 20th century murdered over 100 million people. (Source: Black Book of Communism.) Libs and lefties and progs are well-advised to adopt a more balanced view, tranfering some of their skepticism about corporations -- which is in part justified -- to Big Government, especially the omni-intrusive and omni-competent (omni-incompetent?)sort of governments they champion.
10. Our social and political troubles are rooted in our moral malaise, in particular, in inordinate and disordered desire. It is a pernicious illusion of the Left to suppose that our troubles have an economic origin solely and can be alleviated by socialist schemes of redistribution of wealth.
Material plenty allows the leisure to contemplate one's moral and intellectual and spiritual poverty. So money, far from being the root of all evil, is often conducive, and sometimes necessary, for the uprooting of some evils.
Related: Radix Omnium Malorum. This is one of my best entries. It definitively refutes the widespread notion that money is the root of all evil.
I have never made a budget in my life. Never having made one, I have never had to adhere to one. The budgeter is involved in a negative enterprise: he essays to control and curtail spending. He allocates so much money for this, and so much for that, and strives to stick to his limits. But positive methods are often superior to negative ones. If you want to lose weight, for example, it is better to exercise and burn more calories, while holding your caloric intake constant, than to eat less while holding steady on caloric expenditure. (Aside from the optimal course which is to do both at the same time.) Part of the reason for this is that it is harder to break an old habit than to begin a new one.
Similarly with budgeting. To budget is to approach your personal finances negatively when a positive approach is superior. Instead of setting limits to spending in various categories, specify target savings and investing amounts, and aim high. The Wealthy Barber has a chapter entitled "The Ten Percent Solution." As I recall, the author recommends investing 10% of gross income for long-term growth. That's chickenfeed to my conservative mind. We save and invest far more than this. The best way to do this, of course, is by automatic payroll deduction. You arrange for your employer to direct deposit some percentage of your income into the account of your choice. You then live on what is left over.
Why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and of course you will never ever use a credit card for its credit feature. You will use it only for its float, record-keeping, rebate, and convenience features. Allow me to brag so as to make a point that is very important for everyone. I have never paid a cent of credit card interest in my life, and in the last several years, each year I have received $400- $500 cash in rebates for the use of a couple of cards which charge me no fee for their use. The credit lines are huge but I go nowhere near them, and the interest rates I could not care less about. Not only that, but the 'float' makes me even more money. Let's say I have the use of $2,000 for six weeks. During that period the goods are in my possession but the money is at my disposal in a cash reserve account earning interest.
Suppose you are a leftist knucklehead who hates 'corporate America.' What better way to stick it to the credit card companies than by becoming a free-rider?
So I ask again, why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and if you are not self-disciplined then you will lack the discipline to adhere to your budget. Or is this a false alternative?
When I was a graduate student, 'back in the day,' I lived on 2-3 K per annum. That was in Boston, one expensive town. And then I got a job which paid for starters the princely sum of 12 K per annum. I said to myself: "Surely, I can save and invest half of that!" But attitude is everything. Attitude and will and good judgment. For example, if you are inclined to become financially independent, then you would be a fool to marry someone whose idea of Nirvana is a wallet full of charge cards with unlimited credit lines.
The moral side of the economic problem is paramount to a conservative like me. Those who can deny themselves and defer gratification can become financially well-off in a stable political and economic environment such as we enjoy in these United States. But of course people will not deny themselves and defer gratification. So they must suffer the consequences. The problem is akrasia, weakness of the will. The fundamental problem is not predatory credit card companies, subprime mortgage scammers, and the payday loan sharks. For if you are self-disciplined, cautious, and diligent, they will not be able to get a handle on you.
First off, hats off! to the Brits, or at least to those of their number who voted Leave.
But now what should we do financially speaking? Expect turmoil in the markets. The stock market was down when I checked it a few hours ago. But gold and other precious metals were up. Good news to those of us who had the foresight to buy the stuff, and who held it, even when we could have made a pile by selling. ('Lead' is also a precious metal these days, and not just for the protection of gold.)
But of course you understand that running political campaigns costs money. What you object to is the buying of influence. What you object to are candidates who will do the bidding of their deep-pocketed donors, whether corporate or individual. Now along comes Donald Trump who funds himself and is beholden to no one.
Has he not gotten the money out of politics? He has, in the only sense of this phrase that means anything.
Why then are you bitching? I assume you are not a benighted lefty in the tank for Hillary. Why won't you support the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the people's choice, the only one who can beat Mrs. Clinton?
You say your conscience won't allow a vote for a man with his many deep flaws? But your conscience will allow four to eight more years of leftist infiltration of the government, including the loss of the Supreme Court for the rest of our lives?
Are you NeverTrumpers even trying to think clearly?
If religion is the opium of the masses, then OPM is the opium of the redistributionist.
Bernie Sanders, the superannuated socialist, "and his wife, Jane, paid an effective tax rate of 13.5 percent, or $27,653 in federal taxes on an adjusted gross income of $205,271." This is for 2014. That is less than Mitt Romney paid, percentage-wise, in 2011. But Romney paid more dollars and thus did more good than Bernie, if you assume that Federal taxes do good for 'the people' and not just for state apparatchiki.
For Sanders, a legitimate function of government is wealth redistribution so that the government can do good with other people's money (OPM). So why did Bernie take so many (legal) deductions? Why didn't he pay his 'fair share,' say, 28% of his AGI? Why didn't he fork over 50%? Surely an old man and his wife can live on 100K a year! Why doesn't Bernie practice what he preaches?
Because he smokes the opium of OPM: it is the other guy's money that is to be confiscated, not his. By any reasonable standard, Sanders is a 'fat cat.' But he doesn't see himself as one. And no doubt he thinks he earned his high senatorial salary when he produced nothing, but merely spouted a lot of socialist nonsense while acting the pied piper to foolish and impressionable youth.
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