Let's say there was an auction, and side by side were presented the Sargent of the woman and her children on the couch, the Tissot of the girl standing in the park, and this Hy-Art combining the two.
Aliens who didn't understand human culture might assume if the first two were worth a million dollars each, the third, combining the two, would be worth two million. Of course, we know that this, though quite pretty, would fetch virtually nothing.
This is because art is valued based on a complicated array of factors in which the aesthetic effect of the result is relatively minor compared to the context in which the work was first presented, the physicality and craft of the work itself, and the prestige that is conferred on the individual artist by the critics of his time, posterity, and the market.
Wealth is an idea. A bar of gold has no inherent value at all, it is worth a lot because we have all collectively agreed that it should be so. A loaf of bread in a supermarket with thousands of other loaves is worth 1.99. To a starving tentful of refugees, the very same loaf is worth a fortune--it may be the difference between life and death.
It is patently ridiculous that the same 500 corporations measured on the Dow Jones Industrials can be perceived to be "worth" trillions of dollars more or less from one day to the next. They have the same equipment, infrastructure, employees, product and potential. Their difference in value is entirely an illusion.
It is catetogorically nuts that we keep borrowing more money to pay the interest on money we have already borrowed. Isn't it high time we take all the interest we have paid on the national debt and consider that applied to the principal itself? If I loan you $100, and you pay me back $120, how can you still owe me $100? Isn't that loansharking?
Not to mention WE are the ones loaning ourselves the money. Where do you think banks get their wealth from? Your and my deposits. Where does "the government" get their money from? Your and my tax dollars. We are chasing our own tails, and the wealthy who have structured the system just so are laughing their asses off as they float away in their golden parachutes.
All those foreclosed house are HOUSES. They are the same houses whether the market values them at $100,000 or $400,000. You can live in them, sleep in them, be heated in them, raise kids in them. The idea that they are worthless from one day to the next is CRAZY.
If such talk makes me a socialist, then arrest me now. Free market capitalism is an emperor with no clothes, and it time we started pointing it out.
MCO 2008
