You can get just about anything insured including things with highly fluctuating value like an automobile, antiques, personal possessions in ones home, etc. For items like this the payout would be replacement or a cash payout for the cost of replacement. Given the publicly available markets it is pretty easy to determine the cost of replacement and settle the claim. This would be the cost of replacement on the actual day of settlement.
"If the policy is based on the value at the time it's issued, the insured party has a motivation to purposefully lose or destroy the coins if the market dramatically drops - the insured value is higher than the market value."
"those actions are the same actions they supported when Bush was doing it, then they are the ones calling the predecessor's actions evil"
Let me quote you again.
"I said I disagreed with their policies"
You said that YOU disagree with their policies. So no, you did not merely point out a logical fallacy on the part of those who support Bush but stated your own opinion. Why back pedal now? If you disagree with policies that means at the least you think they take the place of better policy and by doing so cause harm. To be harmful is to be evil. A person who supports policies that causes harm is therefore causing harm thereby. Thus a person who supports evil policies is evil themselves. Saying you disagree with someone's policies == saying that person is evil.
"Again, I have not called anyone evil either directly or indirectly."
Your attempts to deny it are rather disingenuous. You are so busy trying to win that you've missed that you have nothing to gain by the denial. Conceding the point does nothing but concede that you view a set of policies as harmful.
"It's not us versus them."
Then why have you assumed that those who oppose Obama support the actions of Bush and are thus disingenuous in opposing Obama?
"We are one country and should all be trying to work together to solve problems to our mutual benefit as opposed to screwing the majority to protect certain people."
Agreed. But what is the mutual benefit of your approach to those who are protected by screwing the majority? When two parties have directly conflicting interests sometimes there can be no compromise that benefits everyone.
evil/ivl/ Show Spelled[ee-vuhl] Show IPA adjective 1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life. 2. harmful; injurious: evil laws. 3. characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering; unfortunate; disastrous: to be fallen on evil days. 4. due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character: an evil reputation. 5. marked by anger, irritability, irascibility, etc.: He is known for his evil disposition.
"to call him evil in the face of all the horrors that were acceptable under his predecessor is quite disingenuous"
Implies that Obama's predecessor is the evil one rather than Obama. The second definition above is the definition being used his opponents. You are clearly saying you believe his predecessor did the harm and therefore is harmful aka evil per the second definition.
It is nothing but manipulative word play. It is you trying to put words in the mouths of Obama's opponents in the form of either the 1st or 4th definition and thereby create a strawman that you can beat down to give yourself the appearance of taking higher moral ground. The reality is that both opposition to Bush and opposition to Obama claim the respective individual is fits the second definition of evil whether they choose to use that word or not. It is not "putting words in the mouth" of someone when you point out synonyms of the words they used.
"I said I disagreed with their policies"
Exactly. A person with harmful policies has a harmful effect and harmful is, per definition, evil.
'You missed the part of my post where I said: "You can also argue that bandwidth is not a true "physical" resource that takes cost to produce; once a certain capacity is in place, you shouldn't charge for usage."'
Perhaps he didn't buy the tatic where you toss an off-hand one liner at each of the arguments that erodes yours at the end to prevent others from expressing them and damaging your argument.
AT&T claimed they couldn't expand to accommodate growing usage due to technical limitations and that was the reason for the tight data caps. This was supposed to be a firm limitation not solvable by throwing more money at it.
This move guarantees increases data usage dramatically which suggests there is no firm limitation, AT&T is just trying to charge more for data than the market will bear.
I think he was saying that Obama supporters don't engage in namecalling like calling someone evil. They debate the actual issues instead of bashing people. He then went on to talk about how Bush was evil...
G. W. Bush isn't evil. He's a tard. Its his handlers that are evil.
It has nothing to do with being able to read. The lenders have been in the game a while they know the special circumstances that commonly arise and don't. They know which fees you are more likely to get shafted with and not. They know how much that variable rate is likely to change. They've amortized the numbers and know how ridiculously much your house would have to appreciate rather than depreciate for you to actually come out ahead.
No truth in lending statement fixes that and people are smart enough to know it. The lender and the real estate agent are also con-men typically positioning themselves as an allies and advisers. Most people believe it is these individuals jobs to help them. People trust them.
Sorry but that crap should be illegal. Rather than bailing out banks there should be a lending and credit advocacy service with no other purpose than to be that trustworthy adviser the agents and lenders pretend to be.
"I have no sympathy for anyone who is foreclosed on because they got a loan they couldn't afford. And make no mistake, they knew what they were getting into. It's all right there and anytime I've purchased real estate, they laid it all right out for me and had me initial it. I knew what I was getting into and I knew what my budget was...so did everyone else."
Including the bank. So why didn't the bank accept their 'foreclosure' and move on? Nobody DESERVED a bailout. If a bail-out had to happen it makes more sense to forgive the mortgages at their principal (the banks shouldn't make any interest, any interest paid to date should be retroactively applied to the principal). That bails out the people and the banks. Giving money to the banks directly doesn't just bail out the banks, it puts money into the pockets of a lot of wealthy people who not only didn't deserve it but didn't need it.
Fair enough I suppose. It is sort of like arguing about whether vampires are REALLY harmed by silver bullets. But there is a difference, Hamlet and vampires are commonly accepted to be mythical figures. When one makes statements about them one doesn't have to reference their fictional status because it is assumed in the context of modern common knowledge. In fact you have to make a declaration to state otherwise.* The fictional Jesus figure is actually entangled in a widespread urban legend not unlike the eye of the needle myth, or the we only use x% of our brain myth whereby people incorrectly believe it is commonly accepted that there was such an actual person. In reality, the roman records to support such a thing are lacking as well as any period writings to support such a belief. All the writings are biblical writings of cult members and the earliest examples of those gave no indications the authors thought the "Jesus" being was ever a human. The later writings copy each others mistranslations indicating they are adaptations of a common source and not independent accounts of common events (merely) subject to copying errors.
Because of this urban legend it can not be assumed that the author is knowing referring to the Jesus of the given work of fiction or is making the assertion that an actual figure really did make a statement.
I didn't say anything about a lack of a god. I spoke regarding the mythical Jesus figure who was based on the ancient sun deity Mitra/Mithra/Mithras and sun deities in general. The only evidence for there ever being such a person is the gospels in the bible. Roman records of Jesus do not exist.
The first account of Jesus is by Paul who never gave any indication he thought Jesus was a physical being. Paul had a "vision" which he compared favorably to the Jesus "vision" of Peter. The "gospels" didn't appear for another hundred years and copied mistranslations of one another into Jesus quotes so they are obviously not independent accounts of the same events. The gospels also worked things into Jesus's life to attempt to fulfill misinterpretations of old testament prophesies. The childhood stories were also later additions that were common with mythological themes. Many deities are virgins having the children of divine beings and born under a special star. Things like that.
Mithras Died and lived again (along with every other sun god figure, the sun sets and rises) Ascended to heaven Was born on Dec 25/Winter Solstice of a virgin Anahita Was wrapped in swaddling, placed in a manger and attended by Shepherds. Had 12 companions or disciples. Performed Miracles. Sacrificed himself for world peace when he died. Ascended to heaven. Was viewed as "the Good Shepherd", the "Way, the Truth and the Light", the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah. Is omniscient, as he "hears all, sees all, knows all: none can deceive him." Was identified with both the Lion and the Lamb. His sacred day was Sunday. His religion had a eucharist. He emphasized baptism. His places of worship were called "chapels" had celebate priests called "father" "sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers"
The religion of Mithras was known ancient Rome and died out around the time Christianity took root. The religion is much older though dating thousands of years before the CE.
There are similar expenses that exist to try to avoid getting ripped off by the rich lowlifes. SEC, financial and banking regulation, lawyers, audits, the types of orders and rules applied to any trading market, etc.
If you think about it accumulating wealth requires hording resources you can't consume at the expense of someone who needs them and then loaning it back to them via investment and charging them interest.
It may not be the poor or middle class directly who borrow it back but whoever it is, is going to have to exploit them in order to get an unfair return on their labor so they can cover that interest.
"Perhaps being born to wealth and privilege from the start with a poor upbringing could be an environment in which those kind of assholes grow in."
I think you are on to something. Getting wealthy requires accumulating a disproportionate share of our nations output that exceeds what others can consume and doing so at their expense. Staying wealthy requires loaning the wealth you exploited from them to those who now don't have enough as a result of your actions and then charging them a tax for it (interest). Being able to convince yourself that these are justifiable and good things requires a special breed of assholism, the ones who don't manage to convince themselves and do it anyway are not just assholes but sociopaths.
Someone who isn't an asshole can stumble into wealth but they won't keep it long because they will enrich the lives of others with it.
The tough nuts are those who ended up with a disproportionate share after lots of hard work. Because they worked hard they have a sense of entitlement to their wealth. They make the false assumption that others who have less, have less because they didn't work as hard (or as intelligently). For a hard worker this is re-enforced because they look around themselves and see others not working as hard and sure enough those others have less. Of course that is really just simple odds. If you works very hard the simple odds are that most people around you aren't going to be hard workers. If you are wealthy, the same odds apply. Most people don't enslave themselves to work and most people aren't wealthy therefore most people aren't wealthy also don't enslave themselves to work. But the reverse is also true, most people who ARE wealthy don't enslave themselves to work either. In fact, the poor have to work harder than the wealthy just to survive and cover the tax of the wealthy (interest) when they want things like a home and car.
Money represents the cumulative output of our society. Your share is dependent on the number of hours you put in. No life is more precious than another and therefore no hour spent investing in the production of goods and services that improve quality of life is more valuable than another. People who believe themselves more valuable than others are living on sheer ego. So NO you didn't earn it. If you have more than your share than you have it at the expense of everyone who is working equally hard or more hard than you and has less.
As for giving back to society, that would be what taxes is. Society produces a certain amount of milk, in order to keep producing milk society must skim off the cream. If you've ended up with more of societies milk society needs a PROPORTIONATE amount of cream back. The wealthy generally do little or no work, use the most resources, and do everything they can to avoid giving up ANY cream at all, expecting others to contribute that cream for them.
Your attitude is one that stems from the false belief that the only absolute right is the right to property. That is ridiculous. You only have your property because society pays to enforce and regulate a system that has allowed to accumulate it and society pays to protect it.
"That is fair. If I wanted to not pay those taxes then my option is to live exactly the same as somebody making $35,000 a year (or whatever the average is right now).
If I lived like a hermit and had a farm I could pay no taxes at all. I would also consume nothing. That billion dollars would just sit there steadily increasing from investments and interest. At some point I am going to die and all that wealth can transfer to the person I designate. Now I imagine at some point, that somebody is going to want to spend that money."
Someone is going to want to spend money but the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy spend about the same amount of money and that amount is FAR less than it takes to maintain their life-style. At some point through nothing but capital gains that wealth takes on a life of its own and grows at a rate that is faster than anything approximating an extravagant life-style plus inflation. So no, at no point will the resources you are hording EVER be proportionately contributed back to the community chest the disproportion will just grow. You are hording the resources of society, resulting in others having no means, and then loaning it back to them and charging them a tax for the privilege.
The passing of wealth from parent to child should be stopped as well. There should be no reward for hoarding more of our cumulative wealth than you can consume. It's bad enough that parents are able to 'tink' their children and give them an advantage over others. Everyone deserves an equal shot, nobody should be given advantage or disadvantage as an accident of birth.
"If you can't make at least $1.05 from the loan, then it makes no sense to take out the loan."
Make it where? Where does the $1.05 come from? At some point, somewhere, some bank borrowed it from the FED and eventually has to pay it back plus interest.
Sometimes value is created. But effort doesn't automatically equate to value. If I pay someone to clean my floor every other week and you pay someone to clean a similar floor every week is your floor more valuable? Nope, but you paid the cleaning lady twice as much. The cleaning lady did twice as much work for you and she collected twice as much money but she created the same amount of value. Services CAN create value but it is false to say that they do create value because someone paid for them. Money is SUPPOSED to represent productivity but people pay and collect money for things that aren't productive all the time.
In practice what usually happens is someone "realizes value". What that means is I took something valuable (call it a hat) and got someone to pay me more for it than I paid for it. The Harvard economist would claim I realized value that was already there or that I created value. But there is still just a hat and all I've done is inflated the price.
I've deflated currency by the amount of the fed interest rate on the increased price because someone, somewhere had to borrow new money that didn't exist before to pay that increased price. At the end of the day we've still just got one hat. What I did doesn't enable anyone to wear a hat today that couldn't wear a hat yesterday. It doesn't change the amount of food that is there to go around. It doesn't even increase comfort. The net result of my labor doesn't improve quality of life. The net result is that I will consume more things that DO improve quality of life without having given anything back.
That's basic accounting for everyone who isn't the federal reserve. The federal reserve does NOT loan from its reserves. The federal reserve creates new currency out of thin air. Except physical currency which it purchases from the treasury for four cents a bill and then loans at full face value. There is a reason that dollars are also called Federal Reserve notes. This is how new money is created. It isn't a secret. The fed's interest rate is used to cause new loans to be taken out more slowly (and thus cause more repayments than new loans) to decrease the total money in circulation or by lowering the rate they increase loans and therefore the rate of new money creation.
Additionally, what you describe is how a savings and loan works which is why they mostly don't exist anymore. Today's banks work on a fractional reserve system. What this means is that when the bank wants to loan money it borrows it from the Fed (which creates it out of thin air) but the bank is must have assets and reserves that represent a small fraction of the amount it wants to borrow. In practice the bank of course borrows large lumps from the fed not each individual loan, the individual loans come from the lump but its the same thing. At any moment a bank is only required to have a tiny fraction of the amount it invests/loans in reserve. AND USD counts! So lets pretend the fraction is 1/10th. You deposit $100. The bank can now loan out $1000. If that $1000 is deposited in an account in that bank. The bank can now loan out another $10,000 and so on. It's called Fractional Reserve Banking, you should look it up on Wikipedia.
Of course the bank has to come up with the Fed's interest. That is 0.012% at present. The bank can do most anything with the money and make more interest than they are being charged. Including investing in Treasury Bills. Debt is created when we borrow from the Fed but that debt isn't counted as part of the 'national debt' unless the banks do actually buy Treasury Bills with it. Why? The Federal Reserve isn't actually part of the government it just has some political appointees on the board. The federal reserve is actually a for profit entity owned by private individuals. This is where the conspiracy theorists come in.
How do you sell a hat for $30 when the only money in existence is the $10 you borrowed? The guy who wants the hat has to borrow $30.
See that is why people have trouble understanding the problem. In the real world there is already trillions of dollars floating around. But the trillions of dollars were ALL borrowed to begin with and all the trillions have interest attached and some people have gotten some of the trillions while leaving others owing the interest. That's why you don't literally walk to the bank every time you buy a hat.
": 1) That the money loaned will be used in a manner that will increase in value over time"
That is the ideal but there is no guarantee of that. The problem isn't that the FED creates money in truth. It causes inflation but there is argument supporting a small amount of inflation. They can manipulate the rate it goes out with interest rates so they can raise the rate so they are issuing less loans than yesterday to decrease the supply.
The problem is that the loans are secret and the federal reserve no longer collects data on the money held in banks and reserves. There is more to the economy than the US economy. The value of a dollar doesn't mean much unless compared to something. The rest of the world uses the USD to compare their currency to on the foreign exchange. Every time the FED issues a secret trillion dollar bailout loan there SHOULD be a serious adjustment to pretty much every other currency in the world. But there isn't because nobody knows it happened. A lot of that money is put into things like treasury bills and takes awhile to enter the economy so it takes a while but the vast supply of currency with an unbalanced buying power means that bubble is created. Eventually the market will adjust anyway and when it happens the bubble pops.
Nobody said the FED physically prints the money. The fed CREATES money. As our central bank it is the fed that creates our money, it is the fed that values on money on the international exchange, and it is the fed that controls the interest rates the determine how expensive new money is.
When a bank takes a loan from the Fed the funds don't come from reserves, the fed creates the electronic funds from thin air. The fed also buys currency at cost from the treasury, it doesn't pay the face value of the bill. I believe the price is something like four cents per bill regardless of the denomination.
To whom? The fed didn't borrow it, it created it. Even if it were actual cash the fed doesn't pay the treasury $100 when it loans $100, it pays more like four cents... the cost of printing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Might be a bit difficult to find someone who even would insure their bitcoin balance."
Their business liability insurance should cover this.
You can get just about anything insured including things with highly fluctuating value like an automobile, antiques, personal possessions in ones home, etc. For items like this the payout would be replacement or a cash payout for the cost of replacement. Given the publicly available markets it is pretty easy to determine the cost of replacement and settle the claim. This would be the cost of replacement on the actual day of settlement.
"If the policy is based on the value at the time it's issued, the insured party has a motivation to purposefully lose or destroy the coins if the market dramatically drops - the insured value is higher than the market value."
How does one destroy a bitcoin?
Evil means harmful or injurious.
"those actions are the same actions they supported when Bush was doing it, then they are the ones calling the predecessor's actions evil"
Let me quote you again.
"I said I disagreed with their policies"
You said that YOU disagree with their policies. So no, you did not merely point out a logical fallacy on the part of those who support Bush but stated your own opinion. Why back pedal now? If you disagree with policies that means at the least you think they take the place of better policy and by doing so cause harm. To be harmful is to be evil. A person who supports policies that causes harm is therefore causing harm thereby. Thus a person who supports evil policies is evil themselves. Saying you disagree with someone's policies == saying that person is evil.
"Again, I have not called anyone evil either directly or indirectly."
Your attempts to deny it are rather disingenuous. You are so busy trying to win that you've missed that you have nothing to gain by the denial. Conceding the point does nothing but concede that you view a set of policies as harmful.
"It's not us versus them."
Then why have you assumed that those who oppose Obama support the actions of Bush and are thus disingenuous in opposing Obama?
"We are one country and should all be trying to work together to solve problems to our mutual benefit as opposed to screwing the majority to protect certain people."
Agreed. But what is the mutual benefit of your approach to those who are protected by screwing the majority? When two parties have directly conflicting interests sometimes there can be no compromise that benefits everyone.
Evil http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evil
evil /ivl/ Show Spelled[ee-vuhl] Show IPA
adjective
1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.
2. harmful; injurious: evil laws.
3. characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering; unfortunate; disastrous: to be fallen on evil days.
4. due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character: an evil reputation.
5. marked by anger, irritability, irascibility, etc.: He is known for his evil disposition.
"to call him evil in the face of all the horrors that were acceptable under his predecessor is quite disingenuous"
Implies that Obama's predecessor is the evil one rather than Obama. The second definition above is the definition being used his opponents. You are clearly saying you believe his predecessor did the harm and therefore is harmful aka evil per the second definition.
It is nothing but manipulative word play. It is you trying to put words in the mouths of Obama's opponents in the form of either the 1st or 4th definition and thereby create a strawman that you can beat down to give yourself the appearance of taking higher moral ground. The reality is that both opposition to Bush and opposition to Obama claim the respective individual is fits the second definition of evil whether they choose to use that word or not. It is not "putting words in the mouth" of someone when you point out synonyms of the words they used.
"I said I disagreed with their policies"
Exactly. A person with harmful policies has a harmful effect and harmful is, per definition, evil.
'You missed the part of my post where I said: "You can also argue that bandwidth is not a true "physical" resource that takes cost to produce; once a certain capacity is in place, you shouldn't charge for usage."'
Perhaps he didn't buy the tatic where you toss an off-hand one liner at each of the arguments that erodes yours at the end to prevent others from expressing them and damaging your argument.
AT&T claimed they couldn't expand to accommodate growing usage due to technical limitations and that was the reason for the tight data caps. This was supposed to be a firm limitation not solvable by throwing more money at it.
This move guarantees increases data usage dramatically which suggests there is no firm limitation, AT&T is just trying to charge more for data than the market will bear.
That's like claiming you should be able to do whatever you want on the road because you paid a toll or paid a fee for your drivers license.
I think he was saying that Obama supporters don't engage in namecalling like calling someone evil. They debate the actual issues instead of bashing people. He then went on to talk about how Bush was evil...
G. W. Bush isn't evil. He's a tard. Its his handlers that are evil.
It has nothing to do with being able to read. The lenders have been in the game a while they know the special circumstances that commonly arise and don't. They know which fees you are more likely to get shafted with and not. They know how much that variable rate is likely to change. They've amortized the numbers and know how ridiculously much your house would have to appreciate rather than depreciate for you to actually come out ahead.
No truth in lending statement fixes that and people are smart enough to know it. The lender and the real estate agent are also con-men typically positioning themselves as an allies and advisers. Most people believe it is these individuals jobs to help them. People trust them.
Sorry but that crap should be illegal. Rather than bailing out banks there should be a lending and credit advocacy service with no other purpose than to be that trustworthy adviser the agents and lenders pretend to be.
"They also are not smart enough to understand the interest-only or ARM loan issues."
This crap should be illegal. Balloon payment loans exist for the sole purpose of conning someone into buying something they can't afford.
"I have no sympathy for anyone who is foreclosed on because they got a loan they couldn't afford. And make no mistake, they knew what they were getting into. It's all right there and anytime I've purchased real estate, they laid it all right out for me and had me initial it. I knew what I was getting into and I knew what my budget was...so did everyone else."
Including the bank. So why didn't the bank accept their 'foreclosure' and move on? Nobody DESERVED a bailout. If a bail-out had to happen it makes more sense to forgive the mortgages at their principal (the banks shouldn't make any interest, any interest paid to date should be retroactively applied to the principal). That bails out the people and the banks. Giving money to the banks directly doesn't just bail out the banks, it puts money into the pockets of a lot of wealthy people who not only didn't deserve it but didn't need it.
Which represented a fraction of a percent of their fair proportional tax share to what a manager at blockbuster had to pay!
Fair enough I suppose. It is sort of like arguing about whether vampires are REALLY harmed by silver bullets. But there is a difference, Hamlet and vampires are commonly accepted to be mythical figures. When one makes statements about them one doesn't have to reference their fictional status because it is assumed in the context of modern common knowledge. In fact you have to make a declaration to state otherwise.* The fictional Jesus figure is actually entangled in a widespread urban legend not unlike the eye of the needle myth, or the we only use x% of our brain myth whereby people incorrectly believe it is commonly accepted that there was such an actual person. In reality, the roman records to support such a thing are lacking as well as any period writings to support such a belief. All the writings are biblical writings of cult members and the earliest examples of those gave no indications the authors thought the "Jesus" being was ever a human. The later writings copy each others mistranslations indicating they are adaptations of a common source and not independent accounts of common events (merely) subject to copying errors.
Because of this urban legend it can not be assumed that the author is knowing referring to the Jesus of the given work of fiction or is making the assertion that an actual figure really did make a statement.
* See "real vampires" on Google.
I didn't say anything about a lack of a god. I spoke regarding the mythical Jesus figure who was based on the ancient sun deity Mitra/Mithra/Mithras and sun deities in general. The only evidence for there ever being such a person is the gospels in the bible. Roman records of Jesus do not exist.
The first account of Jesus is by Paul who never gave any indication he thought Jesus was a physical being. Paul had a "vision" which he compared favorably to the Jesus "vision" of Peter. The "gospels" didn't appear for another hundred years and copied mistranslations of one another into Jesus quotes so they are obviously not independent accounts of the same events. The gospels also worked things into Jesus's life to attempt to fulfill misinterpretations of old testament prophesies. The childhood stories were also later additions that were common with mythological themes. Many deities are virgins having the children of divine beings and born under a special star. Things like that.
Mithras
Died and lived again (along with every other sun god figure, the sun sets and rises)
Ascended to heaven
Was born on Dec 25/Winter Solstice of a virgin Anahita
Was wrapped in swaddling, placed in a manger and attended by Shepherds.
Had 12 companions or disciples.
Performed Miracles.
Sacrificed himself for world peace when he died.
Ascended to heaven.
Was viewed as "the Good Shepherd", the "Way, the Truth and the Light", the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah.
Is omniscient, as he "hears all, sees all, knows all: none can deceive him."
Was identified with both the Lion and the Lamb.
His sacred day was Sunday.
His religion had a eucharist.
He emphasized baptism.
His places of worship were called "chapels"
had celebate priests called "father"
"sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers"
The religion of Mithras was known ancient Rome and died out around the time Christianity took root. The religion is much older though dating thousands of years before the CE.
There are similar expenses that exist to try to avoid getting ripped off by the rich lowlifes. SEC, financial and banking regulation, lawyers, audits, the types of orders and rules applied to any trading market, etc.
If you think about it accumulating wealth requires hording resources you can't consume at the expense of someone who needs them and then loaning it back to them via investment and charging them interest.
It may not be the poor or middle class directly who borrow it back but whoever it is, is going to have to exploit them in order to get an unfair return on their labor so they can cover that interest.
"Perhaps being born to wealth and privilege from the start with a poor upbringing could be an environment in which those kind of assholes grow in."
I think you are on to something. Getting wealthy requires accumulating a disproportionate share of our nations output that exceeds what others can consume and doing so at their expense. Staying wealthy requires loaning the wealth you exploited from them to those who now don't have enough as a result of your actions and then charging them a tax for it (interest). Being able to convince yourself that these are justifiable and good things requires a special breed of assholism, the ones who don't manage to convince themselves and do it anyway are not just assholes but sociopaths.
Someone who isn't an asshole can stumble into wealth but they won't keep it long because they will enrich the lives of others with it.
The tough nuts are those who ended up with a disproportionate share after lots of hard work. Because they worked hard they have a sense of entitlement to their wealth. They make the false assumption that others who have less, have less because they didn't work as hard (or as intelligently). For a hard worker this is re-enforced because they look around themselves and see others not working as hard and sure enough those others have less. Of course that is really just simple odds. If you works very hard the simple odds are that most people around you aren't going to be hard workers. If you are wealthy, the same odds apply. Most people don't enslave themselves to work and most people aren't wealthy therefore most people aren't wealthy also don't enslave themselves to work. But the reverse is also true, most people who ARE wealthy don't enslave themselves to work either. In fact, the poor have to work harder than the wealthy just to survive and cover the tax of the wealthy (interest) when they want things like a home and car.
Money represents the cumulative output of our society. Your share is dependent on the number of hours you put in. No life is more precious than another and therefore no hour spent investing in the production of goods and services that improve quality of life is more valuable than another. People who believe themselves more valuable than others are living on sheer ego. So NO you didn't earn it. If you have more than your share than you have it at the expense of everyone who is working equally hard or more hard than you and has less.
As for giving back to society, that would be what taxes is. Society produces a certain amount of milk, in order to keep producing milk society must skim off the cream. If you've ended up with more of societies milk society needs a PROPORTIONATE amount of cream back. The wealthy generally do little or no work, use the most resources, and do everything they can to avoid giving up ANY cream at all, expecting others to contribute that cream for them.
Your attitude is one that stems from the false belief that the only absolute right is the right to property. That is ridiculous. You only have your property because society pays to enforce and regulate a system that has allowed to accumulate it and society pays to protect it.
"That is fair. If I wanted to not pay those taxes then my option is to live exactly the same as somebody making $35,000 a year (or whatever the average is right now).
If I lived like a hermit and had a farm I could pay no taxes at all. I would also consume nothing. That billion dollars would just sit there steadily increasing from investments and interest. At some point I am going to die and all that wealth can transfer to the person I designate. Now I imagine at some point, that somebody is going to want to spend that money."
Someone is going to want to spend money but the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy spend about the same amount of money and that amount is FAR less than it takes to maintain their life-style. At some point through nothing but capital gains that wealth takes on a life of its own and grows at a rate that is faster than anything approximating an extravagant life-style plus inflation. So no, at no point will the resources you are hording EVER be proportionately contributed back to the community chest the disproportion will just grow. You are hording the resources of society, resulting in others having no means, and then loaning it back to them and charging them a tax for the privilege.
The passing of wealth from parent to child should be stopped as well. There should be no reward for hoarding more of our cumulative wealth than you can consume. It's bad enough that parents are able to 'tink' their children and give them an advantage over others. Everyone deserves an equal shot, nobody should be given advantage or disadvantage as an accident of birth.
"so IF Jesus HAD spoken he literally WOULD HAVE said"
Fixed that for you.
*sighs* Sounds like Harvard economics to me.
"If you can't make at least $1.05 from the loan, then it makes no sense to take out the loan."
Make it where? Where does the $1.05 come from? At some point, somewhere, some bank borrowed it from the FED and eventually has to pay it back plus interest.
Sometimes value is created. But effort doesn't automatically equate to value. If I pay someone to clean my floor every other week and you pay someone to clean a similar floor every week is your floor more valuable? Nope, but you paid the cleaning lady twice as much. The cleaning lady did twice as much work for you and she collected twice as much money but she created the same amount of value. Services CAN create value but it is false to say that they do create value because someone paid for them. Money is SUPPOSED to represent productivity but people pay and collect money for things that aren't productive all the time.
In practice what usually happens is someone "realizes value". What that means is I took something valuable (call it a hat) and got someone to pay me more for it than I paid for it. The Harvard economist would claim I realized value that was already there or that I created value. But there is still just a hat and all I've done is inflated the price.
I've deflated currency by the amount of the fed interest rate on the increased price because someone, somewhere had to borrow new money that didn't exist before to pay that increased price. At the end of the day we've still just got one hat. What I did doesn't enable anyone to wear a hat today that couldn't wear a hat yesterday. It doesn't change the amount of food that is there to go around. It doesn't even increase comfort. The net result of my labor doesn't improve quality of life. The net result is that I will consume more things that DO improve quality of life without having given anything back.
"No, this is basic accounting."
That's basic accounting for everyone who isn't the federal reserve. The federal reserve does NOT loan from its reserves. The federal reserve creates new currency out of thin air. Except physical currency which it purchases from the treasury for four cents a bill and then loans at full face value. There is a reason that dollars are also called Federal Reserve notes. This is how new money is created. It isn't a secret. The fed's interest rate is used to cause new loans to be taken out more slowly (and thus cause more repayments than new loans) to decrease the total money in circulation or by lowering the rate they increase loans and therefore the rate of new money creation.
Additionally, what you describe is how a savings and loan works which is why they mostly don't exist anymore. Today's banks work on a fractional reserve system. What this means is that when the bank wants to loan money it borrows it from the Fed (which creates it out of thin air) but the bank is must have assets and reserves that represent a small fraction of the amount it wants to borrow. In practice the bank of course borrows large lumps from the fed not each individual loan, the individual loans come from the lump but its the same thing. At any moment a bank is only required to have a tiny fraction of the amount it invests/loans in reserve. AND USD counts! So lets pretend the fraction is 1/10th. You deposit $100. The bank can now loan out $1000. If that $1000 is deposited in an account in that bank. The bank can now loan out another $10,000 and so on. It's called Fractional Reserve Banking, you should look it up on Wikipedia.
Of course the bank has to come up with the Fed's interest. That is 0.012% at present. The bank can do most anything with the money and make more interest than they are being charged. Including investing in Treasury Bills. Debt is created when we borrow from the Fed but that debt isn't counted as part of the 'national debt' unless the banks do actually buy Treasury Bills with it. Why? The Federal Reserve isn't actually part of the government it just has some political appointees on the board. The federal reserve is actually a for profit entity owned by private individuals. This is where the conspiracy theorists come in.
How do you sell a hat for $30 when the only money in existence is the $10 you borrowed? The guy who wants the hat has to borrow $30.
See that is why people have trouble understanding the problem. In the real world there is already trillions of dollars floating around. But the trillions of dollars were ALL borrowed to begin with and all the trillions have interest attached and some people have gotten some of the trillions while leaving others owing the interest. That's why you don't literally walk to the bank every time you buy a hat.
": 1) That the money loaned will be used in a manner that will increase in value over time"
That is the ideal but there is no guarantee of that. The problem isn't that the FED creates money in truth. It causes inflation but there is argument supporting a small amount of inflation. They can manipulate the rate it goes out with interest rates so they can raise the rate so they are issuing less loans than yesterday to decrease the supply.
The problem is that the loans are secret and the federal reserve no longer collects data on the money held in banks and reserves. There is more to the economy than the US economy. The value of a dollar doesn't mean much unless compared to something. The rest of the world uses the USD to compare their currency to on the foreign exchange. Every time the FED issues a secret trillion dollar bailout loan there SHOULD be a serious adjustment to pretty much every other currency in the world. But there isn't because nobody knows it happened. A lot of that money is put into things like treasury bills and takes awhile to enter the economy so it takes a while but the vast supply of currency with an unbalanced buying power means that bubble is created. Eventually the market will adjust anyway and when it happens the bubble pops.
Nobody said the FED physically prints the money. The fed CREATES money. As our central bank it is the fed that creates our money, it is the fed that values on money on the international exchange, and it is the fed that controls the interest rates the determine how expensive new money is.
When a bank takes a loan from the Fed the funds don't come from reserves, the fed creates the electronic funds from thin air. The fed also buys currency at cost from the treasury, it doesn't pay the face value of the bill. I believe the price is something like four cents per bill regardless of the denomination.
"Fed pays back $1.01"
To whom? The fed didn't borrow it, it created it. Even if it were actual cash the fed doesn't pay the treasury $100 when it loans $100, it pays more like four cents... the cost of printing.