- All around the cobbler's house,
- The monkey chased the people.
- And after them in double haste,
- Pop! goes the weasel
I'm a capitalist. For the uneducated that means I believe in the free exchange of goods and services. In today's world, that generally means exchanging money for stuff I want. I'm not going to get into why our currency needs to be backed by a tangible asset, that's for another day. Today I'm just dealing with the C-A-T is CAT definition of capitalism. It's a simple equation, a buyer on one side and a seller on the other with both sides agreeing on the exchange without force or fraud. Until the exchange happens, both sides are free to walk away.
It's a straight forward system that has proven itself over time. I know of no other economic system that works better in real life. Oh yeah, I know there are a lot of Utopian ideas out there, but none of them work better in real life. You want to get all hopey-changey on me, show me where your system is actually working outside of your head.
Now, if you want to compare your pet theory to our current system, you need to understand one thing. Our current system has been extremely successful despite the force and fraud interjected by our government. Taxes are a great example of both force and fraud. Try not paying your taxes if you don't believe that the Government uses force. If you try that, all I can say is "don't drop the soap." As far as the fraud goes, why do think that the tax code went from 400 pages in 1913 to 54,846 by 2003. It's hard to pull the wool over peoples eyes if they could actually read and understand the rules. Any tax that is designed to do anything other than raise income, is fraud and corruption. It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the goal, it's still fraud.
Now that you have read my lecture, here is a cartoon from the Scotland Press that I wanted to share.
R.E.A.L.
The new reality for me is that I'm 400 miles away from where I want to be. That's how far I had to travel to find a good paying job. Now I spend the week working in Mebane, NC through the week and fourteen hours driving on the weekend just to spend a day with my family. It's a contract job, so my wife and son stays at our house in Tennessee. We don't want to take on a mortgage until I'm an actual employee of the company I'm working for. That's just the facts. I'm a husband, a father, and a man. That means I do what I have to do to take care of my family. If I got to explain it, you wouldn't understand.
I normally don't edit my posts after I publish. I'll make an exception to this due to how far afield I strayed and apply the delete key.
REAL
Professor is a Genius
An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before,
but had once failed an entire class.
--------------------------------------------
That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, "OK,
we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan".
All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.
The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.
The second test average was a D!
No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering,
blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
Could not be any simpler than that.
Strangely enough, I'm not talking about my usual survival topics today. My focus has always been prepping to survive at my home in Tennessee, the hold'em off till the crops come in outlook. A long term outlook. I have a bug out bag, but had planned to supplement it from caches hidden on the farm. That was nice and I hope to get back to that some day, but changing circumstances have forced a change of plans.
Back in April, the company I worked for eliminated my position. I don't have to tell most people that this is not a good time to be out job hunting, but thankfully I didn't have much debt to burden me. I started planning for the long haul expecting to be unemployed for quite some time, but after 3 months I'm back in the rat race. More on that later.
I declared a ceasefire and truce with the inlaws. This helped to ease my wife's stress level and allowed me to work with them. I helped them plant twelve 120 ft. rows of pole beans and nine more of bush beans. At $22 for a 5 gallon bucket, it's more profitable over the whole season than corn for the given area used. I also started reselling furniture and other stuff. The deal was simple in concept. Go to auctions, yard sales, and estate sales, buy furniture and anything else I thought I could turn a profit on, clean it up and resale it using adds on GoLSN. Cash flow sucked, but the profit was great. I was doing pretty good at it, making about $200 cash profit per week to go along with $300 in unemployment. Yep, that's against the rules and breaks a few laws, but until uncle Sam goes back to the constitution, screw'em.
That's when I landed my new job. It's 400 miles away from home in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. I have to admit that the pay is very good, more than enough to cover the added taxes and increased cost of living in the area. One of the many changes to my mindset is that the modicum of trust that I had in my employer has been washed away, so I'm not going to move there permanently just yet. I'm going to be renting an apartment and driving back to Tn to be with my family as much as possible. Oh eventually I'll either buy a place and move them down or say to hell with this and move back, but right now I don't want to uproot them until we are sure that this is the right move to make. Welcome to the NEW ECONOMY.
So now I'm working on a G.O.O.D. plan that covers traveling over 400 miles if I stick to I-40, or a lot more if I have to detour. It's a daunting task and I've just got started. Baby steps first. I'm working on a basic kit to deal with basic auto emergencies, one for dealing with a Mad Max situation will come later. First is basic tools to cover the repairs I can do on the road and some spare parts like belts and fuses. Things to get me back going if there are simple problems. If the problems are not simple, well I have a few items to help hold me over. A serious medical kit, sleeping bag, a gallon of water and water purification tabs, fire starters, a couple of MRE's and a case of Ensure, and my .45 with an extra box of ammo. Throw in the knives that I normally carry and that should take care of me in most situations short of TEOWAWKI.
That's what I could throw together in a short period of time. I'll add to it and make changes as I go along. I can't help but think I'm still more prepared than most, but that's not saying much.
R.E.A.L.
To start off with, I would like to thank Dave and Maggie for the garden seeds they sent me back in March. The dry-shell beans and the Indian corn in particular was very nice. I reserved space in my raised beds for those just to make sure I could give them all the best and have plenty of seed for next year.
I hope that you like what I sent back. The red-seeded asparagus beans are great in stir-fry and I'm guessing that the Loofah that you sent me was the "dishcloth" variety, so I sent you some Thia Angled. Anyway, enjoy and god bless.
My pink-slip vacation has lead me to run out of garden space. Well, at least for every thing I started. Lets just say that this fall there shouldn't be any shortage of tomatoes or peppers or squash or .... well you get the picture.
So here I was with a bunch of extra tomato plants and my garden was full. Well the only thing to do was to go up and into containers. I got inspired by my brother growing tomatoes upside down in buckets, so I thought I would try it myself. In addition to that, I'm filling any every container with dirt. I only need room for 35 more pepper plants. It's a great problem to have.
R.E.A.L.
I really meant to write a post on gardening, but I just lacked the motivation to get out in the rain and take pictures. So you can expect that post as soon as the sun returns.
The only remarkable thing that has happened today is that I was given a wild turkey. Not the liquid kind, although that would be welcome. An actual turkey that my father-in-law shot today. He's squeamish and didn't want anything to do with it beyond the killing. I on the other hand have no trouble at all with fresh killed meat.
I had never dressed a turkey before, but I treated it just like a big chicken and it seemed to work out all right. It's in the fridge, soaking in a brine solution of salt, whole peppercorns, and candided ginger as we speak.
Tomorrow it's deep fried turkey and mashed potatoes for supper.
R.E.A.L.
