Murder Through Starvation

Shifting land from food production to idle entertainment is frequently a bad idea.

I noticed that, yes. It's another reason I think those ill-gotten gains should be removed from the robber-barons and put back into circulation where they can do some good.

>>Unfortunately, that's probably not going to happen thanks to a little bill they managed to railroad through congress last year.
Congressmen can now get unlimited funding from corporations--there's no way any congressman is going to forgo that source of campaign funding!<<

Yes, that's true. But they're going to find out that an economy with no sound foundation, and a government run as a plutocracy, are not going to work and will stagger from one crisis to another. That's dandy for distracting the masses -- but sooner or later something critical is going to hit the big hard crash.

>>It's amazing to me that it came and went on the news in just a few hours but stuff that's only opinion gets chewed over like bubblegum for weeks.<<

Like the corporate-owned media are going to cover something that awkward, that doesn't involve sex?

>>The quintessential libertarian/conservative/republican
would argue that the system corrected itself,<<

Yes, that principle asserts that it is desirable for an economy to spike and dive repeatedly. I would rather have one designed for moderate swells and dips than one that behaves like a junkie getting high and crashing.

>>Consumers everywhere are paying protection money to wealthy extortionists.<<

This is another big part of why the economy doesn't work properly, and ought to be illegal.

>>It's one thing if an investor puts in money
to make an endeavour possible,
and then gets a share of the profit
for doing nothing else,
or if a middleman
adds value to a product by transporting,
warehousing, or distributing it;<<

To some extent this is true: the extent to which such people take a fair share for their effort. Too many just use it as an opportunity to run the price up.

>>It's semething else entirely when an investor simply
adds a step to the process solely for the purpose of making a profit.<<

And there's a lot of this going on, where people remix investments to shunt the risks onto deliberately chosen victims (as in the housing market crash) or stack layers of transportation and distribution that again just run up the price. It's killing America's small farms, for instance -- almost all the money goes to middlemen, not to the farmers; but the prices for many foods are still uncomfortably high for consumers.