Tag: money

The Original Sin of Taxation: Getting rid of the Revenue Act of 1913

Taxation is Legalized Theft

Based on the behavior of the Biden administration and the reckless antics of Congress and the senate over the Build Back Better Green New Deal’s massive taxation they are working on to satisfy their masters in Glasgow, the only conclusion that can be made is that the government is guilty of tax abuse.  Given what we’ve witnessed under this Congress and this presidential administration, it’s clear that we will have out-of-control spending problems like this in the future unless we take some drastic measures.  And one of those measures needs to be the elimination of the Revenue Act of 1913, which was the start of progressive taxation in the United States.  After more than a century of observing the behavior of government and its desire to grow continuously, we have more than enough history to make arguments that more free-market applications need to be applied to the government, instead of giving them the ability to legally steal our money all in service to a more bloated government that seeks evermore to grow well beyond what can be regulated with logic.  I understand that this is an issue that few are prepared to deal with, and it will take time to let it sink into the population in general.  Too many people have just accepted that this level of taxation is just the way things are.  But, we are at a point where we must ask, why have we let them become that way without debate and a proper understanding of what the government objectives are. 

One of the key reasons I set many arguments for American economic exceptionalism during the great gunfighter’s era of the Gilded Age of western expansion is that we have clear evidence that many of the progressive experiments have proven to be socialist failures.  For much of the last century, we have been living off the greatness passed down to us from the economic expansion of the Gilded Age.  Soon after 1913, specifically with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the implementation of the Revenue Act, America had let socialism into the door to get warm at our fires out of compassion.  But the bastards have been seeking to poison America as we slept and loot our country for all they could while we facilitated their comfort.  Until recently, we dared not show a lack of hospitality toward all thoughts of the world so that we might not be called capitalist pigs or tyrants of imperialism.  But really, all that America was ever guilty of was sharing the great benefits of capitalism with the world, and this jostled the feathers of globalists who did not want to be shown up by the young, agile country.  And since the explosion of economic growth that we have all enjoyed for many decades started during that gunfighter era, we have taken the power of our economy for granted.  This is most obvious in how the Democrats have pushed for all-out socialism in 2021 under the flag of Covid-19 and a stolen election by Big Tech, inserting a reckless insurgent of progressive thought and erasing the vote of millions across the country. They’ve always looked for this opportunity, and we should take them very seriously in the future.  We are no longer talking about conspiracy theories among Democrats.  They have shown their intentions to crush capitalism and rebuild our American society as a socialist state, and their method of achieving their evil has been taxation.

We should have never let the government set its level of tax rates they desire.  I first noticed this ridiculous notion while fighting school levies in my local school district.  It was clear to me that the labor unions ran the schools, and they controlled the school boards as to what their expenses would be.  All government school budgets were then runaway trains of big government spending that the taxpayers were always expected to bail out the stupidity of government.  But it was never just the schools; it was all government, from the military to the losers in Congress.  Are we getting value for what we pay?  No.  If we applied the same market conditions that McDonald’s must deal with while competing with Burger King, the government would fail 100%.  It’s kind of a running joke with everyone, even liberals; government is ineffective and never good at what they do.  Yet, we spend fortunes on the government to manage our affairs. When we continuously give them a blank check, they perpetually provide us with chaos and power grabs funded by the money they legalize themselves to steal from us with various methods. 

Hidden in these massive multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plans are all kinds of tax increases, and with each, we should be asking the question, what value are we getting for the money spent.  Do we like our government, and do we feel that it’s worth the money?  We ask that question from our fast food to our hardware stores with all other things in life.  In a capitalist economy, we have options, and those options drive down prices.  But when the government can steal the money, they can’t manage it the first time around; why are we standing for any of it?  Well, part of the problem is the payroll taxes that started due to the 1913 Revenue Act.  People paid the tax before it ever hit their pocket, so it was hidden between an employer and the worker, which was a mistake.  Just as we now must look at the John Dewey-designed public education system and admit that it was a mistake from the beginning, we must do the same with the way we are taxed.  The government ultimately is our government.  The people of the United States own it, but they have allowed themselves to forget that they are in fact in charge.  The government has shown that it is power hungry and must be defunded to a minimal level to keep its influence in check. To do that, the burden of value must be shifted from how it is now, hidden in paychecks, and revealed in the light of day, so people consciously see how much money the government steals from them each year. 

If all taxes paid are considered by the average taxpayer, the use taxes on bullets, on soda, on beer, on gas, then with all the local, state, and federal taxes, if people could see like they do the ingredients of a can of food how much they spend on government, they would be shocked and forced to place a more wary eye on what the money is spent on.  The Biden administration’s current government has no care or respect for how much money they steal from hard-working Americans. Otherwise, they would not seek high taxes from the new infrastructure bill and more IRS agents to enforce their authoritarian theft.  Rather than looking at the money the government steals as their property, too many people assume that a portion of all their work will always be stolen by a greedy, bully government.  They have grown to accept this as a fact.  When all along, it should have been heavily scrutinized.  Yet that was always the intention of the Revenue Act of 1913, to pay for a government that didn’t deserve the money and progressively increase the cost of that government through legalized theft over a long period.  The government does not respect us because of it. Before we can change anything, we must go to the source of the problem, 1913, when the government made it so that taxes were stolen from everyday people and that they could take the money without earning it, at whatever rate they decided was appropriate. 

Rich Hoffman

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CEOs Deserve to Make a Lot of Money: Average workers don’t own equally the risk it takes to run a business–Karl Marx never figured that out

It’s the same old communist push from progressives in the United States, politicians like Sherrod Brown from Ohio and Elizabeth Warren, the loser we know so well as the Indian claiming “Pocahontas.”  We’re talking about their positions on CEOs, that they make too much money, many times more than the average worker.  Whenever you hear some loser like them saying, “CEOs make 400 times more than the average worker, and that something needs to be done about it, what you are hearing is a know-nothing loser who has the economic maturity of a cat spaced out on catnip.  I address this issue in some detail in the supplied video but let me spell it out briefly.  CEOs make a lot of money because it is they who shoulder the risk for all the workers.  There is nothing wrong with being an average worker, but there is also a lot of safety in earning a living.  CEOs have no such comfort.  It is they who make a company successful or not, and it is they who own the risk for possible failure, of whether there is a job to even punch a time clock to.  There is no such thing as shared ownership of workers and creating a business, any business.  Such thoughts that they are in any way come directly from the works of Karl Marx and are picked up by loser politicians like Sherrod Brown and exploited purely for political purposes by the ignorant and purposely malicious. 

CEOs are great for society

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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The Economic Stupidity of Biden and Democrats: A fourth stimulus check?

Joe Biden and Democrats are Economically Stupid

Without dipping into the waters of conspiracy, I have listened carefully to the liberals connected to Joe Biden after his speech to the two houses of congress and understand why Democrats have no idea how economics works.  Joe Biden was asked that very question during an interview: he thought it was a good time to do all these taxable progressive items when it might harm the economy or something to that effect.  His answer was, “why do you think the economy is coming back? Because we are investing.” I think when he said that, he believed it.  He and other Democrats believe that “taxes” are the same things as “investing.” Therefore, taxes are investments in our children, infrastructure, job creation, and the only way to prosper.  In another interview, Biden stated that only government could invest in highway building, railroads, and airports.  He disputed the premise that private industry would be able to do those things, so in that way, he justified the role government played in building the nation. 

As I said in the video above, all these ideas on economic theory came from the school of Karl Marx.  And Marx died dirt poor and broke in London where his family suffered a great deal while he hid in the British Museum studying past economy theory to derive what he and his buddy Engles came to invent in Marxism.  Liberals like Biden have been in government their entire lives and have never earned money they received but were just given it, spending their whole lives not learning the basic economic facts of reality.  Joe Biden has been given money by the government his entire adult life.  He has also been given many millions of dollars by foreign investment to conduct influence peddling, and like most Marxists, they think that is part of a healthy, manipulative government.  The more influence you can peddle, the more money that people give you.  So if you control the levers of power, you can get cash for your influence to peddle.  That is how it is in all communist and socialist countries and why Democrats will do anything to gain more government power.  They have come to understand the economic value through the power that can be peddled. But since they aren’t very smart about what creates money, they incorrectly associate its creation of value through government, not the effort of work and labor that comes from an idea generated by freedom.

Liberals are and will always be chained to Plato’s cave theory.  Democrats only see the shadows on the cave wall to refer to the famous metaphor.  They are broken in their first assumptions about how economies work, and they can lie to you with a straight face because they know of nothing else.  This is yet another reason why they must cheat in elections because they aren’t just trying to gain more power to peddle in influence trading. Still, they are hiding from themselves these fundamental facts of economic thought.  Joe Biden is working towards a universal wage given by the government to the people under it for their sustenance.  Work and effort are entirely foreign ideas to Democrats.  They think that all they must do to maintain an economy is to print more money, and like magic, the value will hold, which of course to any sane mind is preposterous.  Yet that is what Democrats like Joe Biden honestly believe, chased down with a swag of insanity.    

When you hear some of the costly proposals that the Biden administration has put forth, the billions here, the billions there, the billions everywhere that soon add up to trillions in additional debt, why don’t we forget about these measly $1400 checks?  Why not make them a billion for each man, woman, and child in America.  When governments can write checks of any number for anything they want, why not go that far or further.  Concerning other things they are doing and wanting to spend money on, giving everyone a billion-dollar stimulus isn’t crazy.  It would be cheaper than many of their proposals.  So why limit a stimulus check to only $1400—for control.  To give the dog the illusion of freedom when the invisible fence only lets you travel a few feet from the house?  That we are supposed to believe that economic stimulation means the kind of junk you can buy with such a small check, a few bags of Skittles, and maybe a big-screen television.  But then again, who wants to waste money buying a tv when you can steal one at the subsequent Democrat-led community riot over race relations?  We learned that too this week, what Democrats think of race relations when they pummeled Tim Scott, a black Republican, for speaking after Biden’s speech about the state of the union.  They called him Uncle Tim to lynch him for being Republican just like Democrats did when they owned slaves leading up to the Civil War.  It wasn’t North and South that fought in that war to free the slaves; it was Republicans against Democrats. 

All this shows how dangerous ideas can be to stupid people who don’t have enough personal constitution to resist grabbing power over others to fulfill the fantasy of their sheer stupidity.  For the reasons I stated in the video, Joe Biden and other Democrats like Karl Marx start in the world as failures based on their thoughts.  Marx was a lazy guy who was looking for a way to bend the world to his sentiments.  Marx didn’t want to work as hard as Cornelius Vanderbilt and others did at that same time to acquire wealth and power. Marx wanted to sit in the British Museum contemplating history and theory. I’ve been to the spots where Marx studied so that I could understand something of his insanity on the subject.  I walked the streets around the area there, trying to understand how a person like Marx could have arrived at the ridiculous notions about the economic value created by the idea of communism, which has then poisoned the world terribly.  Lazy people love communism, and let’s face it, many people in the world are good for nothing and lazy to their core.  They have in Marx a means of gaining power in government and using that power to trade influence.  But like Joe Biden, who never learned the lessons of proper economic conduct and value, Democrats continue to embarrass themselves to the eyes of people who do know better. 

It is an honest assessment and not just hyperbole to suggest that Democrats are just lazy and stupid, especially when making and maintaining money.  For Biden to present with a straight face that taxation is an investment and that the more you do, the more you are investing for a better society is insanity on the level of Captain Nemo.  And we are expected to follow this insanity toward our destruction.   Never mind that Joe Biden and his investors who have propped him up are like every James Bond villain in the history of movies.  Of course, the villains never see themselves as such; they always think they are saving the world by killing everyone in it.  Or it is controlling them for their own good only the villains can see through insanity.  That is the real danger of Marxism.  It allows for such fantasies to exist in the minds of the stupid and lazy because it prevents any performance from seeing the light of day, and the rules of economic theory to permeate where it would otherwise not survive without a massive government to hide its faults from itself.  And suppose anybody thought Joe Biden was stupid before this point of referred time. In that case, they know they have confirmation of it by his mouth, and the notion of a fourth stimulus check to keep the monsters of opinion residing under the water for just a while longer.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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Corporations Should be in Charge of Mars: Governments can’t even control themselves, let alone space

As I have been enjoying the National Geographic series, Mars on their network station the latest episode from this past week hit on really the philosophic difference between a liberal and a conservative and further defined my assertion that the two cannot share in governing responsibilities of anything. And now with the very real possibility of settling people on Mars, which I’m all for, we have to look in the mirror and come to some terms within ourselves once and for all. Because this problem is literally in everything, we do hour by hour every day of the week—and that is who is in charge of society. Liberals turn to government, conservatives turn toward money—generally speaking. One reverts back to primitive notions of controlling and regulating society, the other turns toward money measurements and the bottom line. Both wan to assert value into the management of whatever we are talking about. In the case of Mars, this particular episode that I’m referring to offered that we must be cautious to not let evil corporations take over the work of exploring Mars, and that we should preserve Mars for academia to explore at their back of the train pace and that the entire purpose for going there would be to learn about it, not to exploit its natural resources. So there is already an argument as to who will control Mars, just s there is on earth as to who should drill for oil, and who should not and by what methods.

I personally get tired of hearing that all corporations are evil because they want to make a profit and that they should be tightly controlled by government. Yet there is no proof in the entire history of the world that government does much of anything right no matter what country they represent or economical means they pick. Governments are slow and generally feel they shouldn’t exist by any performance measurements. However, corporations are constantly measured by many factions, if not by their share holders directly, by their internal need to compete with some other company. They can’t get away with being a bad company making bad products because market forces regulate them in the mutually agreed value of money. Governments resent this value because they simply resist the need to be measured. The proposal on the National Geographic Channel regarding Mars was that it was our first task as viewed by science to understand Mars and preserve it, not to exploit it the way mining companies are sure to do as ran by corporations.

This is why I personally dislike government workers, because no matter where they are, they generally feel that performance is not something that should be measured in whatever they do. School teachers in public school certainly don’t want to be judged on their performance, and neither does the FBI. It was just a few days ago that we learned that Robert Mueller knew about the destruction of evidence on Lisa Page and Peter Strzok’s cell phones by DOJ officials so not to incriminate any of the Obama intelligence officials in the attempted coup of the next elected president. Some of the worst corruption by any government in the world was revealed in the wake of the Trump election. Whether or not the readers here voted for President Trump or not, or like him or not, what was exposed was absolute proof that government shouldn’t be in charge of anything, because they can’t handle the temptations to not operate from a corrupt vantage point. The checks and balances do not work in government because they have no regulatory controls themselves. All we have as a society to keep government under control is the voting booth and the threat of owning guns to take over that government at gunpoint should things get really bad. So why should government be in charge of anything? Especially Mars.

Even going back to Plato’s very good book, The Republic, people have struggled to come to terms with who should be in charge of society. In American culture under capitalism market forces have turned out to be our best bet. People who work for corporations at least have some context to pursuing goodness in life. Sure they try to cheat on occasion to get competitive advantage over their rivals but market forces do a remarkably good job of sifting out value. A bad company seldom ever survives far into the future if they can’t figure out how to make money within their organizations and that value cascades throughout their organization and into their customers. When a liberal says that all corporations care about is the “bottom line” I say, well of course they do. At least they care about something. Government doesn’t care about anything.

Without companies getting involved and chasing after the value of money so they can make some of it, Mars is just sitting up there doing nothing. The rocks and minerals that might have some economic value are stuck in a static phase and have been apparently for millions of years. They will remain until either some new natural disaster such as a planetary collision or our own sun runs out of fuel and eventually overtakes our entire solar system with gravitational forces that literally destroy everything into a super powerful gravitational trash compactor, or humans through corporate investment might use some of those tools to advance society beyond a Type 1 civilization. Eventually if humans want to survive into the future, we have to not only leave the solar system, but the universe itself. There isn’t anything to preserve in life because everything is always in motion and if the value of money is providing guidance into the value of whatever activity is being undertaken, then the efforts are wasted.

Money is not evil as government generally attempt to propose. Corporations put a lot of money into politics essentially because there isn’t anything else to trade that has any real value but money. Ethics is a value but not one that can be traded for building relationships, so if money isn’t the root of everything that is good on planet earth, than what is? It was liberals who stated that money was the root of all evil because they are in denial of what makes all elements of civilizations tick. We have studied the world and can see many ancient cities that were building magnificent buildings and aspiring to becoming great economic powers. That is of course what we consider to be first-rate societies, what kind of economic power they had. A spear chucker from some third world country doesn’t have much value no matter how much National Geographic photographs their naked bodies, because they are not advancing mankind beyond its present state. Only some method of advancement is acceptable and under capitalism the value of money is turned loose to provide that much-needed value assessment that everything requires. If something is good, people will pay for it, and that money then fuels all other activities which advance the corporations and thus the human race. Governments do not do that, they only hold advancements down because they function without a value system to guide them.

Global warming isn’t a value system, it’s a religious belief. It’s not enough to state that a planet or a migratory species should be saved by the antics of evil corporations unless money is injected into the mix to bring value to the conversation. Money is the invention that mankind has invented to sort out good activity from bad. Nature by itself is just there. To have value humans invented money to extract value from nature. So the real argument is whether or not human life should just be like other life and just live and die like everything else, or should it seek to advance itself to not only save itself from the natural disasters that are sure to come anyway, and possibly save many other lives along the way. Because left alone, nothing but death will happen to everything. For anything to have a chance as sustainable life into the future, money has to be the minimal measurement of success or failure. Because government is part of the problem due to their lack of internal measurements and tendency to act corruptly because of it. They can’t be in charge of Mars, the moon, or anything in space. They can’t even govern themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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The Virtue of Material Acquisition and Spending Money: Defying thousands of years of wrongly framed thinking

I am not suggesting that any person spend money like a bottomless pit buying anything everywhere to cover up some deep psychological problem.  That is a different issue from what I’m proposing.  Money is simply a representation of value so when someone spends money without considering the implication of cost they are essentially unable to grasp the concept of value because psychologically, they are lacking the basic foundations to do so.  However, and this is a uniquely American way to think which was drawn incredibly clear for me while traveling recently through London, Paris, Brighton and many other places in between and observing the people there and comparing them to those I have known back home in the United States.  Additionally, as one of my many occupations, I am an employer and am an expert in the breakdown of labor=productivity and the psychological implications of personality=quality+implied effort toward targeted outcomes, so what I’m about to say requires some advanced context—because it eludes most people living on the earth today—and my assertion of these concepts comes from very advanced knowledge earned the hard way, and in my view, the only way.

I had the fortune to grow up and know both of my grandparents very well.  Both were farmers and had obviously had their world outlook shaped by the Great Depression.  One was particularly keen about every penny spent and watched them like a hawk always afraid that some big wave would come and overtake them wiping them out forever into poverty. They were extremely hard-working people and were socially very honorable, but did reflect a constant fear that their money would be taken away by some unknown force be it a disaster or the aggressions of mankind through some form of robbery—so every penny was watched for their entire lives. The other set of grandparents were rather loose with their money.  If they wanted something they bought it and never gave much of a concern if something cost thousands of dollars even back in the 60s, 70s and 80s.  If they wanted it they’d do what they had to in order to obtain it—whether it be a farm, a particular car, or just a lifestyle.

While traveling around Europe there was this constant phantom in the back of every conversation I had with people I interacted with, from family, friends and mild acquaintances which were shocked that we did so much in such a short period of time while people who were regionally located had spent their whole lives 60 miles to 100 miles from the things we were doing as a family in Europe yet had never tried to do them themselves.  And it came up more than once at dinner tables that my youngest grandson who was at this point only 10 months of age had already been to Disney World once, and was now traveling around Europe with my daughter and her husband.  Additionally while he was still a fetus he traveled around Iceland the year before so before he was even a year old had experienced vast cultural influences which are the foundations of a very interesting coming life that he will have—but people hearing all this just didn’t understand.  “You spent how much at that Ramsay restaurant in Chelsea?”  “You took the Eurostar to Paris just to go to the Louvre?” “Why go all the way out to Stonehenge just to look at some old rocks?”  Those were the kind of questions we received just over the last few weeks by people mystified by the amount activities we reported through small talk which of course opened up a deeper sore which rests on the surface of most things human beings do in their lives.  What is the value of a human day and what does one wish to do with those days toward a value that is internally comprehended at the subconscious level?

That same daughter who traveled with me just recently purchased an iPhone 7 Plus after working with mine on that trip and I was proud of her because it’s the best on the market at this particular time and I like to see she does not compromise quality for the comfort of saving a few dollars.  Just like my view that if we are in London and my wife wants to go to the best restaurant that they have—why not do it?  Essentially if I really want something, I typically get it. I don’t feel that way about everything and I do go through a screening process.  Such as Stonehenge is something that I’ve mulled around for years, but the expense wasn’t worth the trip just for that endeavor.  But If I’m in London on business, or leisure, then I’ll find a way to get there—you better believe it.  I am not the kind of person content to just watch from my front porch others doing things and not doing them myself.  To me nothing on earth is off limits—if I want it, I’ll get it.  With that in mind, when I hear someone say that this is too expensive, or that is too far out of reach, I lose respect for those people because what they are really saying is that they are not willing to do the extra work to acquire the things their heart’s desire and are more than willing to yield to complacency.

Such people who do the minimum in life favoring the lazy position of being victims of circumstance are miserable human beings.  One thing that makes Donald Trump a uniquely American product is that he has the kind of mind that never felt limited by circumstances.  He dreamed big, lived big, and was more than happy to show off how much harder he was willing to work than his contemporaries.  Because after all what is a man really showing off when he arrives at an exclusive club in a Lamborghini with a hot woman on his arm looking very debonair?  He’s not saying he just inherited millions of dollars from his dad, or that he’s willing to waste large volumes of money on nothing—he’s saying that he is willing to outwork his peers and has obtained success and by fluffing his feathers declares himself above those around him so that he can have top access to the best that mankind has to offer—whether it be women, productivity, or leisure opportunity.  Those who point jealously at the man are those simply not willing to do what it takes to acquire such things.  They resort to socialism hoping to be equal to the man without having to do the work so that they essentially don’t have to feel the guilt of underperforming in a world which rewards people like the Lamborghini driver over those who watch every penny fearful that the penny might be taken from them at some point forcing them to work one hour longer to make it up in the future.  People who deliberately set low bars for themselves are constantly unhappy when they have to live in a world where people are free to work and gain all they can and this is the cause of much anxiety in the world. By having a guy like that Lamborghini driver in the White House the expectations for our national economy will naturally expand which I see no negative to at all.  People who are afraid of hard work won’t like it because the social bars of expectation will be raised out of their range of desired applied effort—but that’s good for America as a whole for obvious reasons of economic expansion.

What I observed in Europe was something completely foreign to me.  I knew about it, but actually spending significant time there the situation was glaringly obvious.  They think small in Europe.  They have too much vacation time-they sit and talk too much about nothing and are content to live with the limitations they inherited from their ancient ancestors and they have grown as a region to accept many restrictions which keep them from really living life.  I personally don’t have any of those limits in my life because honestly no matter how much I spend, I’m willing to work harder than anybody else to have what I desire.  I may not care to have a Lamborghini because I’m not interested in the social things that come with it.  I’m married and not looking for women, and I usually do things with my family so there isn’t a back seat for them to sit in when we go out to dinner so the value isn’t worth the cost to me.  But if I wanted one, I’d buy one and nothing would stop me from getting it.  There really aren’t many “things” I want in life because material objects don’t bring much value to me—intellectual things do like books—but “things” themselves don’t do it for me.  But when I want a particular gun, or a motorcycle, or an iPhone—or a television—I get the best of whatever it is and I don’t think about the cost because I am literally willing to work 24 hours a day 7 days a week to obtain whatever it is.

That leaves me with absolutely no sympathy for the person who holds onto their money because they either fear someone taking it from them through aggression, or that they just are afraid of hard work. The person who is afraid to take their wife out to a nice dinner isn’t being fiscally prudent as much as they are just being a wimp afraid of giving up their leisure time to make their spouse a little more happy and comfortable. To select the cheaper version of a car to save money is setting the bar lower for other things and such people are artificially restricting the quality of their life to preserve their internal laziness—in most cases.  And that’s a generally accurate way to identify much of what is currently sickening the world in regard to human beings. They want things that they see other people have, but they are not willing to do what it takes to have those things.  In many cases their religions have given them a free pass to be lazy by constantly castigating the wealthy by highlighting poverty as some kind of virtue.  And that has been a cleverly shrouded element in our society which has garnered little to no attention from our everyday life.

I fortunately was able to live in Canterbury for a good part of February 2017 and in that ancient city there are still monks who make the conscious decision to live in poverty—to essentially quit yearning for material objects so that they can earn their way into heaven.  Its one thing to read about such things, it’s quite another to meet them and see them in the streets of Canterbury which I did.  My wife and I even went to their little island in the Stour River to get a sense of how and why they live the way they do.  Additionally, there are quite a few homeless people in Canterbury who have obviously quit life yielding to the escape of alcoholism.  The two groups of purposely poor demographic groups had decided to set the bar so low for themselves that they were victims of circumstance and simply yielded their life to other controlling elements.  Compassion is not the word I would use to explain their circumstance upon meeting them and speaking directly to them about their manner of living.  They have quit life and have tossed it back to what they think “God” is—and by my definition for things are wasting themselves.  It’s not honorable to be poor or to sacrifice their life for some greater good when what they are really hiding is their sheer laziness to get up each day and battle toward personal goals set for the benefit of being alive.  Such as, you can’t take that car, that house and that nice watch with you into the next world.  But what you do take is the experience gained in obtaining those things because the effort expands your intellect which has resonance into the many dimensional planes of reality that your soul resides on.  So in essence, the work utilized in reaching for material goods and services has a natural byproduct that resonates across the universe into your eternal elements—and those monks in Canterbury are missing the point by deciding to live in poverty so to obtain the grace of God.  And regarding the homeless people, I’ve been at points in my life where compared to them, they were much wealthier than I was—but I never quite working.  A person like me would never be on the street without a house or the means to get one and to me there is no excuse in living on the street begging for food or enough scraps to get a bottle of alcohol to indulge in drunkenness.  They are people who lack the internal drive to fight through each day and make the best of it—let’s be honest.

So those are some things to think about in regard to money, value, virtue, and immortal spirit.  When my daughter told me she had bought a new iPhone 7 after working with mine I would say she did more for her eternal spirit than those Canterbury monks have done in 30 years of living deliberately impoverished in dedication to God—because the value isn’t in the material item—it’s in the productive output to acquire it.  The morality of a good economy does more for assisting the soul of its recipients than deliberate quitting of the world does by yielding to the old forces of intellectual control over those willing to submit themselves to every authority.  Doing what the heart desires for the right reasons is a more moral decision than sacrificing it to circumstance.  It is not honorable to say “I can’t do this because of that, or that I don’t have enough of that to do this.”  It is honorable to say I want that so I’m going to do this to have it because the virtue comes in the act of acquiring the means to perform the task.  For instance the virtue of spending over $1000 on a meal isn’t the food itself or the obvious consumable nature of it—it’s in acquiring the $1000 to spend and in sharing that experience with the people you care about for the memory of it—and the message to them that they are more valuable to you than just setting the bar too low for everyone and holding them prisoner to your low expectations for yourself.  Monks hide that low bar behind dedication to God. The homeless behind their lack of internal resolve to fight through personal challenges–and the lazy hide behind circumstances—whether they are too short, not smart enough, too weak, too something to be that guy who shows up to dinner in the Lamborghini with the hot chick on their arm—so reserve themselves to sitting on their front porch watching the world pass them by and claim that they are being “fiscally prudent.”  They are just being wimps.  And that is the harsh reality that so many people need to face—because they aren’t fooling anyone.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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