Tim Blair, rent as a form of welfare and capitalists as the salvation of capitalism

(Above: sign available explaining space in Tim Blair's brain dealing with economics is available for rent on a 99 year peppercorn lease. Any more than a peppercorn would be considered an outrageous extravagance likely to bankrupt a company).

Tim Blair explaining capitalism:

We, the financially useless, are dependent upon the sensible. For example, they buy the houses that we rent. Were it not for them taking reasonable risks in the property market, we wouldn't have places to live. These people lease us their wealth.

It's a kind of welfare arrangement minus the bureaucracy. And with a lot of money being paid to the welfare agency by the welfare recipients.

Actually, come to think of it, it isn't much like a welfare arrangement at all. My attempted analogy there possibly explains why I'm on the rental rather than ownership side of the equation.

Tim Blair explaining the effects of capitalism:

At 27 Carol Gould began planning for her future. The US-born, Britain-based TV producer joined an employee pension plan, then bought the flat she'd been renting and signed up for a couple of financial endowment plans.

By the time she was 30, Gould had made all the sensible financial decisions those of us now in our mid-40s wish we had made at the same early age. None of her investments were risky.

"Had anyone looked at my life at 30," Gould wrote last week in online journal Pajamas Media, "they would have said I was the most prudent young woman."

Gould is now 55. She is broke.

The thousands of dollars she paid into endowments, pensions and mortgages is gone. A believer in capitalism, Gould now writes: "My capitalist life has brought me nothing but anguish and the shame of begging from friends to pay basic bills."

Tim Blair on capitalism as our only hope in the future:

At the primary level of participation, you have investors, property owners, business people and so on. They provide. We join in.

So they've taken the first big hits. Like Gould, some have taken hits so serious they're now reliant upon friends to pay bills. In one cycle of collapse, they've moved from a primary level of involvement to no involvement at all.

We are yet to see it on any serious scale in Australia but the next phase is major pain for those of us in the doofus sector.

Rational people are predicting a rise in unemployment to 10 per cent or more.

At which point we'll hope for a return of fortune for the likes of Gould and others in the investor class. Only capitalists - even broke capitalists - can save capitalism.

Yep, thank the lord the governments around the world have had nothing to do with bailing out the greedy pigs, and what's more using precious taxpayer dollars to make sure the rich retain their rightful place in the world as the rich, dispensing their largesse in the form of charging rent at full market rate as a kind of welfare for the poor. 

As for the unemployed, I guess they can trot off to Macquarie Bank for their dole cheque, seeing as how Macquarie is so generous, and - apart from running the worst airport in Australia as a cartel ten times worse than the Australian publisher cartel bemoaned by arch hypocrite Bob Carr - is doing so tremendously well in its charitable works for its shareholders.

Lordy lordy, a joke's a joke, but how low can you go?

So kind the rich, always have been from Dickens' Scrooge to Groening's Mr. Byrnes.

And I always thought socialists didn't have a clue. Remind me not to employ Tim Blair any time soon in the future as a financial advisor. Remind me not follow his economic advice. Remind me to sell any shares he spruiks and buy up big on any company he writes down. 

And above all remind me, if I ever end up in the unfortunate position of Carol Gould, not to rely on trickle down nonsense but to understand the trickle up effect is the best way to get rich, an art perfected by that rogue Richard Pratt as he clipped every user of cardboard boxes just a tad more for his philanthropic delusions of grandeur.

I guess Blair's column My number's up and I can't count is supposed to pass as grim humor in the face of the GFC, but I've had more fun and laughs at an Irish funeral, and more insight into the ways of the world. 

Rent as a welfare arrangement without the bureaucracy! Why that would make interest a welfare arrangement with a bureaucracy. And shares a kind of collectivist communal hippie sharing of the wealth.

ENRON CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
Sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public buys your bull.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have 2 cows.
News limited buys them for an inflated price.
They eat clover for months and produce nothing.
Rupert gets pissed at another one of his children.

(There's more here if you like that kind of stuff).