An annoying attitude. I spend 2 dollars on a box of crackers. Here's the rough process:
1. Farmer takes out a loan at Wells Fargo.
2. Loan clears, Farmer buys seed, etc.
3. Farmer grows 2000 acres of wheat.
4. Summer passes, farmer harvests wheat, and it travels 1000 miles to be processed.
5. Nabisco (Altria) buys wheat for a pre-agreed price (determined months ago by the Chicago futures exchange--a bunch of speculators who took risk on themselves so Nabisco and Joe Farmer could get to business.)
6. Nabisco puts the wheat (plus 10 other commodities) into its industrial mixers, ovens, packaging machines, fleet, etc, until it winds up at Walmart.
7. Walmart (which did 1001 separate things in order to make the deal go down) puts a $2.00 electronic price on the crackers.
8. I show up, put some plastic through a device, some digital numbers go through 2 thousand miles of wire to 5 different financial institutions, and then I get a box of crackers. Game over.
I've participated in 500 billion dollars worth of business without even realizing it, getting a day's worth of calories for a tiny percentage of my daily income. That's "evil" somehow?
Where exactly did I say anything about evil? The goal of business is to fleece its customers of their money. Some do it in nicer ways than others but they all do it, poor money management skills on the customers part is always good for business. Our entire consumer economy is based on that fact; we spend all of our excess money rather than saving it like we should.
I didn't directly say you should save all of your money, I said you shouldn't spend all of your excess money. You should be saving for an emergency fund, retirement, kids college, things you want to buy in cash rather than putting everything on credit. American are horrible at this, they live right at the edge of, or above their means rather than below it as they should.
The farmer is farms land stolen from Native Americans.
If we go by the odds it isn't some farmer taking out a small loan at Wells Fargo, most wheat is grown by big agribusiness.
The yield on the wheat is so high largely because of government funded fundamental research into agriculture and biology, including genetic modification, which has revolutionized things. Much of this publicly funded research is done by universities under grants from the NSF and such, and they are allowed turn around and sell the resulting patents to the agribusiness conglomerates. Not exactly a free-market miracle.
Wal-mart often demands public subsidies from small towns in order to put their store there, leveraging their massive outside scope and bargaining power with suppliers to be able to make their case to the municipalities.
1. Farmer takes out a loan at Wells Fargo.
2. Loan clears, Farmer buys seed, etc.
3. Farmer grows 2000 acres of wheat.
4. Summer passes, farmer harvests wheat, and it travels 1000 miles to be processed.
5. Nabisco (Altria) buys wheat for a pre-agreed price (determined months ago by the Chicago futures exchange--a bunch of speculators who took risk on themselves so Nabisco and Joe Farmer could get to business.)
6. Nabisco puts the wheat (plus 10 other commodities) into its industrial mixers, ovens, packaging machines, fleet, etc, until it winds up at Walmart.
7. Walmart (which did 1001 separate things in order to make the deal go down) puts a $2.00 electronic price on the crackers.
8. I show up, put some plastic through a device, some digital numbers go through 2 thousand miles of wire to 5 different financial institutions, and then I get a box of crackers. Game over.
I've participated in 500 billion dollars worth of business without even realizing it, getting a day's worth of calories for a tiny percentage of my daily income. That's "evil" somehow?