Give To Yourself First

godRev. Angela  – Someone asked me recently if I could articulate some easy and basic “steps” that a person could do every day that would help them be in alignment with wealth, meaning be “in line” to attract wellbeing, goodness, and prosperity. So, that prosperity would flow easier in life. So, that where they stood emotionally was a reflection of what they wanted to create in life, versus standing in fear and scarcity.

My answer to that question was yes! Yes, you certainly create some basic “steps” to do each and every day that would align you with wealth, joy, and goodness. Now, before I go there, I want you to realize that these steps, or perhaps a better word would be “keys”, to alignment are not set in stone. But, they are indeed good building blocks for beginning the journey, your journey, that sets your “keys to alignment” apart from everyone else’s. Continue reading

What Is Real Wealth?

moneyCharles Hugh Smith – What is real wealth? Money, right? Currency, gold, quatloos, you name it. Money is real wealth because you can use it to buy whatever you want.

I would argue money in any form is only the means to acquire real wealth, which is the agency, opportunity and time to pursue your life’s work.

The conventional view of wealth is money and leisure has it all wrong. Let’s imagine the owner of a vault of conventional treasure: jewels, gold coins, etc.

If the “wealth” stays in the vault, what’s the point of owning this “wealth”? The secret satisfaction of being “wealthy”?

If “wealth” is only an internal state, then let’s measure friendship and being needed/wanted as the metrics of “wealth.” You see the point; if “wealth” is merely an internal state of satisfaction, then a vault full of “money” is a poor metric.

What money buys that is real wealth is freedom and control of one’s life. This control over one’s life is called agency. Agency is defined as “the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment.” This may not seem like a profound concept, but another way to describe agency is that agency is the opposite of powerlessness. Continue reading

The Dead Giveaways of Imperial Decline

wealthCharles Hugh Smith – Identifying the tell-tale signs of Imperial decay and decline is a bit of a parlor game. The hubris of an increasingly incestuous and out-of-touch leadership, dismaying extremes of wealth inequality, self-serving, avaricious Elites, rising dependency of the lower classes on free Bread and Circuses provided by a government careening toward insolvency due to stagnating tax revenues and vast over-reach–these are par for the course of self-reinforcing Imperial decay.

Sir John Glubb listed a few others in his seminal essay on the end of empires The Fate of Empires, what might be called the dynamics of decadence:

(a) A growing love of money as an end in itself.

(b) A lengthy period of wealth and ease, which makes people complacent. They lose their edge; they forget the traits (confidence, energy, hard work) that built their civilization.

(c) Selfishness and self-absorption.

(d) Loss of any sense of duty to the common good.

Glubb included the following in his list of the characteristics of decadence:

— an increase in frivolity, hedonism, materialism and the worship of unproductive celebrity (paging any Kardashians in the venue…)

— a loss of social cohesion

— willingness of an increasing number to live at the expense of a bloated bureaucratic state

Historian Peter Turchin, whom I have often excerpted here, listed three disintegrative forces that gnaw away the fibers of an Imperial economy and social order: Continue reading

The Criminalization of Financial Independence

tax donkeysCharles Hugh Smith –  Just as the “war on drugs” criminalized and destroyed large swaths of African-American and Latino communities, the “war on cash” will further criminalize the few remaining avenues to financial independence and freedom. The introduction of “entitlement” welfare in the 1960s generated a toxic dependency on the state that institutionalized worklessness, a one-two punch that undermined marriage and family in America’s working class of all ethnicities.

The “war on drugs” launched in the 1970s turned millions of American males into felons with severely restricted rights and opportunities in mainstream America.

Now we see the same destructive pattern repeating with “disability” being the new “welfare” and “legal” synthetic heroin (oxycotin etc.) being the new street-smack that lays waste to entire communities. Once you’re dependent on the state for disability and synthetic smack, you are owned by the government, lock, stock and barrel.

When the temptation to sell your $3 Medicaid prescription for synthetic smack for a quick $1000 becomes too much to resist, bang, you’ve got a one-way ticket into the Hell of America’s criminal “justice” system. Do you see the pattern? Offer the blandishments of “free money” and nearly free synthetic smack, and the vulnerable populace is quickly reduced to a dependent state of worklessness and addiction.

Needless to say, an addicted, ill, workless populace that is herded into the grinder of the criminal justice system isn’t going to create any political resistance. They have their hands full just trying to stay alive and avoid being sucked into the voracious maw of the criminalization meat grinder.

This is the context for the upcoming “war on cash” and the criminalization of financial independence. Every conventional means of remaining financially independent of the state-cartel-banking system is being restricted and criminalized, the better to herd everyone into centrally controlled institutions.

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If Knowledge Is Power, Is It Also Wealth?

housingCharles Hugh Smith – Let’s consider a syllogism: Knowledge is power, power equals wealth, so knowledge equals wealth.

Is this true? Author George Gilder thinks so. His book  Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World, proposes that (in Bill Bonner’s apt phrase) “the economy is fundamentally a learning system, not a way for distributing wealth.”

In Gilder’s view, new information (i.e. knowledge) enables us to do things better, i.e. increase productivity. New knowledge is what creates value.

New knowledge is always surprising, and it naturally disrupts “business as usual.” So those earning money from business as usual must suppress the disruption arising from new knowledge to maintain their incomes/profits.

Bonner summarizes the conflict between vested interests (cronies and zombies) and those with new knowledge in this lively fashion: “In an economy, the person who is the source of most important new information is the entrepreneur. He is the fellow who takes risks and builds a new business.

The cronies want to stop him, before he undermines the value of their old assets and old business models with new information. The zombies want to drag him down, leeching on him so greedily that he runs out of energy.”

Continue reading