Black Friday

As I stand in line at kohl’s at 418 in the morning, behind a line of people so long and winding I can’t see the register, I now have a moment to reflect on the significance of black Friday. This wonderful day of shopping bliss where everybody gets up in the wee early hours in the morning to put themselves into that first bit of Christmas debt, and get the stores back into the black and out of the red. You see, black Friday acts as more than just a buying surge. It is a chief economic indicator of the nation at large; think of it as Punxsutawney Phil meets Allan Greenspan. If the people (who will in this case be represented by Phil) see their shadow, don’t wake up and have a bad shopping day it means the recession continues as all self-fulfilling prophecies do, if however Phil goes shopping then things may potentially get better, and while the recession doesn’t necessarily pass it is certainly a good sign.

Just walking around here, the raw amount of people is amazingly large. The most similar experience I have to such human traffic is either last black Friday or else the 9/12 rally in D.C. However in this circumstance I feel it is akin to the rush on the banks in the U.S.A. or maybe even the breadlines in Soviet Russia, either one of those are not good things. Now I am very much a supply side capitalist so I would like to explain how all of this is a function of supply and demand at work.

Let’s start with Soviet Russia, not to bore you with statistics, but in 1917 Russia was the world’s largest exporter of grain. Russia and Ukraine practically fed the world. By 1987 just 70 years later they were the world’s largest importer of grain. Well how is that possible? You might ask. The land didn’t change, global warming wasn’t invented yet? Well you are certainly right, what did happen was; the government took the supply of a good into their own hands. The amount of a certain product is kept low so that the price is artificially high; in this case the product was bread. There are many reasons for doing this.
1.) As everybody knows poverty is a great equalizer. When you are poor you are all equal. That’s what I call communism at work
2.) Hunger is a great equalizer. When you are all hungry you are all equal. That is what I call communism at work
3.) Nobody worked the fields. Let’s face facts its communism. Do you get paid more if you work harder? NO! So why do you care. Do you get paid less if you work poorly? NO! so who cares.
Now you may be noticing some parallels, one in particular; poverty as an equalizer. Well lets expand on that concept and see what we find shall we? Cap and Tax; making products more expensive to create makes them more expensive to the consumer; therefore we see that there is less money in the hands of the consumer. Value Added Tax: More cost to buy, less money in consumers wallets. Higher taxes for government, Tarp programs etc. and the list goes on and on.

What if we take this a step further and analyze Government Motors whose majority share holders are the United States government and The Union. Well the nature of the modern day union is job security and benefits for employees. But with that job security comes, the inability/difficulty to simply fire an employee. Once upon a time during the lassies faire period of the industrial revolution, unions designed to get employees fair compensation, and safe work environment were a wonderful thing. Unfortunately as most people know once a bureaucracy is started it is difficult to stop it. The union has changed from a means to help the worker, into a hindrance against him. The union is a business which survives for its own good. Unions in effect stall business by forcing companies to exceed their budgets, making them unable to provide goods at competitive prices. I bet that if you asked any displaced auto-worker whether he would be willing to forgo a couple things so he could have his old job, he would be more than willing to accept. But that’s too late, people don’t own the car companies anymore, now the greatest bureaucracy of all owns the car company, that being the U.S. government. Why don’t you write a letter to GM C.E.O. Barack Obama and tell me if you get a response?
So, why did I Bring all this up?

To show parallels. In the USSR the government owned industry and people didn’t get fired. U.S./Union Government Motors is a singing example of the U.S.A. rounding the bend into socialism.

Now back to Black Friday! I would like all of the readers to imagine a dismal future, one where it is not the stores who keep supplies of low priced goods artificially low to drive a buying frenzy but rather the government keeping a consistent grip on the supply of goods driving prices up and equalizing people through poverty. This may be a stretch, it may not ever happen or it could come sooner than you think. But think about it this way, the ground work is already here. Think about government run industries, think about all encompassing unions, and think about the government preparing to take command of 1/8th of the U.S. economy via the health care reforms. I say these things not to frighten, but to warn. No matter what happens, the America we give to our children is not the one that we grew up in.

With all this in mind please keep this capitalist holiday as it is a capitalist holiday, but let’s keep it as a once a year occurrence instead of letting the pandemonium spread like a plague. Let’s keep it black Friday, not Red every day.
Remember you are in control of your nation’s destiny and until next time: You’re on notice!

The First Post

Ladies and gentleman, I proudly bring you my first post. I feel to be fair to my readership I should introduce myself, who I am and what I stand for. I must begin by saying I am a human being. I know that may not seem like a bold statement but in this day and age, that statement is far more profound than one may think. I have a great interest in my own welfare as well as that of my fellow man. I worry about my own mortality as I do the mortality of others. This type of thought often influences my opinions and decisions.
I worry greatly about my own freedom and that of others. One of the things that separates us from animals is that we are in control of our own lives (for the most part). I am very tired of sitting back and watching our freedom not be pried from our cold dead hands but rather given away as one gives out candy to children on Halloween night. Children of course are inherently greedy, so if you give them one candy they want more until really you have no candy left to give. This is the state of our nation.
I am also a college student. I currently attend a wonderful junior college and will be transferring to a prestigious four year institution within the next year. Something that disturbs me is the utter propaganda which students are forced to swallow in order to receive the grades necessary to achieve admittance into said prestigious universities. History classes which subtract every achievement by saying “blacks and women didn’t have the opportunity”, sociology classes which claim “white men expanding and being greedy is the cause of all the world’s problems”, English classes that focus on minority writers and teach white man’s guilt as an inherent concept. This is propaganda and it is wrong. I accept some of what they say. They are right In the America’s blacks were oppressed, this is absolutely true. Women didn’t receive suffrage until the 1920’s and they still have a glass ceiling. But do I need to hear about how Jackson beat the British in New Orleans, but women didn’t receive their due credit as nurses. Do I really need to read on every page some sort of reference to a contextually irrelevant racial indiscretion.
ENOUGH ALREADY!
I am white; I guess I should make that clear. But I am also a first generation immigrant. I was born here but I didn’t speak English until I was school age. My family was heavily discriminated against. After all coming to the U.S. from the USSR during the height of the cold war would be somewhat akin to a Muslim in an airport the day after 9/11. The only difference is the Russians who came didn’t have a civil rights group or anything like that. They accepted their lot and bettered themselves as best they could. That being said I come from a disenfranchised class and my family didn’t arrive in the states until the late 70’s. Why should I be assumed to have white guilt? I did nothing wrong. Nor did my ancestors, frankly speaking the word Slav comes from slave, so most likely my ancestors were slaves at some point in time.
I can accept that I do receive some opportunities because of my race, but at the same time I receive an equal amount of disadvantages. As far as statistics go less minorities go to college and more are in prison etc. (I took soc, I get it, it’s my fault!) but at the same time if a minority should have the opportunity, the amount of financial assistance available to them is so much larger than the amount available to a WASP(I’m not a WASP I just look like one, I guess minorities have to be separated by ethnicities but whites are just whites. How about we all be Americans?) Or similar. This is not to blame them, Capitalism (while we still have it) says take what you can get do what you can to better yourself. Rather my qualm is with a society that says if you are white you did wrong, and are inherently evil. This system forgets that many minority groups are in fact white. Jews, Albanians, Serbs , Christians in Muslim nations received far worse treatment during their respective genocides and other global conflicts than did minority groups in the U.S., frankly a concentration camp prisoner would trade his arm to be a slave on a plantation. While I disagree heavily with the politics of dear leader Barak Hussein Obama, I will say he holds the marks of a true capitalist in the tradition of Jackson. He came from the bottom and through hard work and luck he made it to the top. Now trying to take that ability from others, well it is simply not fair, but that deserves its own post at another time, I digress.
That above discussion of colligate propaganda was far longer than I thought it would be. I am sure I will discuss it more at length as it pertains to economics as well as other important issues of the day.
To conclude, If you like reading thought provoking articles from a young mind please stay on this blog. If you are interested in other things like vinyl records, a little hobby of mine there will be a section devoted to that on the blog
Thank you for visiting
And for now remember that You’re On Notice!