April Fools

What a bunch of fools we have as our leaders. Their corruption and incompetence have resulted in the worst recession for 80 years. But their solution to the problems is to help the people who caused the problems.

They have spent hundreds of billions of dollars in helping the financial institutions whose recklessness with other people's money caused the problems in the first place. Yet, at the same time they refuse to help the retailers and manufacturers who trade in the real world and are having difficulties because the banks don't trust each other anymore.

They have reduced interest rates, helping individuals who been borrowing well beyond their means. But this has decimated the income of individuals who were sensible and saved some of their income during the good times.

Our leaders' promises that there will be no more booms and bust were just a big fat lie. The actions taken by governments will produce a boom which will inevitably lead to a bust.

We are doomed to make the mistakes over and over again unless we have wholesale rethink about our economic values.

There has been a lot a talk recently about getting rid of hedge funds and other "imaginary" financial instruments. But what about reducing our dependence on the false prophets of the stock market and property market?

The stock market has been the heart of capitalism for the last 200 years but what do share prices really mean? A single rogue trader can decimate a company's share prices irrespective of the financial position of the company. Our pensions and investments are tied up in these houses of cards.

In recent years the property market has become a crucial part of the economy, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. People are using their homes to increase their wealth rather than working to increase their wealth. They are moving homes not because they need to move home but because they want to "cash in" the increase in price of their homes. They fail to realise that if they sell their highly priced current home, the home they move into will also be highly priced and so they aren't any better off.

Finally we have to realise that the idea wealth can be created is just a myth. The conservation of energy law states that energy can't be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another. Similarly, wealth, and money for that matter, can't be created (or destroyed). It can only change hands. So if someone has become wealthier it is at someone else's expense. People don't become wealthy by "working hard". They become wealthy by overcharging their customers, underpaying their employees and arm-twisting their suppliers.