Myths of capitalism: the myth of scarcity

“We have to make the hard choices.”

“If we raise the minimum wage, unemployment will increase.”

“If we spend money on social programs, our grandchildren will pay for it.”

“If we don’t decrease benefits, Social Security will become bankrupt.”

How often have we seen these ideas, splashed across the editorial pages of newspapers, dribbling from the corporate mouthparts of the pundit class, or floating in the muck of right-wing plans to “reform” us back to the Gilded Age?

All of these ideas offer a “hard choice,” an either/or: EITHER we have living wages OR we have jobs; EITHER we foot the bill OR our kids will; EITHER today’s senior citizens give up some of what they earned OR tomorrow’s seniors will get nothing.

In other words, EITHER we hurt the working class OR we hurt the working class.

In philosophy, this kind of argument is called a false binary: a fallacy where someone offers two choices as the only possibilities, deliberately excluding other options.

In the case of these right-wing talking points, the option no one wants to mention is taxing the rich and cutting corporate subsidies to invest in social welfare, good jobs, and education!

It’s not hard to see why the ruling class uses this technique. They want to make workers think that our only choice is between how and when we pay to keep their profits flowing. They want to hide the real choice between paying and making them pay.

We would be wrong to think that this self-serving nonsense is somehow new, a creation of a particularly predatory ruling class or an increasingly fanatical right wing.

The truth is that this fallacy is written in the DNA of capitalism. The basis of capitalist economics is the idea that there isn’t enough to go around, that somebody is going to have to go without.

We can see it in the classical definition of economics: “the science of allocating scarce resources to maximize the achievement of competing ends.” In other words, there isn’t enough to go around; somebody is going to have to go without.

We can see it in the way people talk about education, not as a way of forming citizens for a democracy, but as a way of training young people to compete in an increasingly ruthless job market. There isn’t enough to go around; somebody will have to go without.

We see it every time bosses ask for givebacks and benefit cuts, or lay off another round of workers to “stay competitive.” There isn’t enough to go around; somebody will have to go without.

We see it in the thousands of advertisements claiming to help working people “stretch their dollar,” in countless finger-wagging admonishments to “live within our means” as wages stagnate and prices increase. There isn’t enough to go around, so the working class can go without.

To scarcity, to going without, to this inhuman and predatory economics, we say ENOUGH!

We, the working class, have had enough of scrimping and scraping and going without.

We, as a society, have enough to go around. We are the richest and most productive society in the history of the world. Our labor has generated untold wealth, now concentrated in the hands of the few while the many go without.

If we think in terms of Dr. King’s “radical revolution in values,” it is time to replace the economics of scarcity with a new economics of abundance, whose first principle is that however much there is, there is enough to go around.

We might look to tiny Cuba, strangled and impoverished by the U.S. economic blockade, whose entire GDP is scarcely more than the 60 billion dollars a year we lose to legal corporate tax dodges. With its limited resources, Cuba provides housing, education, food, and health care to every one of its citizens.

This is what the story of loaves and fishes, the feeding of the multitudes by fair distribution, looks like in the modern world. If it is a miracle, it is one that we can work for ourselves. We must break, once and for all, with the myth of scarcity.

We are faced with a choice of who will pay to rebuild our infrastructure, educate our children, and transition to a green economy. We will not, cannot, pay, and neither can our children or grandchildren.

So make the billionaires pay. They might have to cut back on buying private islands and elections, but isn’t it time they go without for a change?

Original Article

Wisdom

Financial Advise from Tony Robbins.

Tony Robbins is so much more than the fast-talking life coach with the TV infomercials. He is credited with helping some of the world's most powerful, wealthy, and successful people--from billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones to the late anti-apartheid crusader Nelson Mandela to Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff.

Even Bill Clinton leaned on Robbins's advice during the former president's impeachment proceedings. Some of Robbins's best lessons from his long career as a life coach to the rich and powerful were captured in an interview with Inc. editor-in-chief Eric Schurenberg.

After the Great Recession, Robbins says he saw people lose their homes, their businesses, and just about everything they had worked for their whole lives. America is still hurting from the 2008 crash, but Robbins says you can be successful.

Below is Robbins's most important advice for entrepreneurs.

Set up a one-employee side business.

The first step in being financially successful is knowing you can be, he says.

"You need to understand the game is still winnable," Robbins tells Inc. You don't have to be Paul Tudor Jones to make money, just start putting your money to work now.

"Set up a financial business on the side with no employees, it'll be an extraordinary nest egg that could bring you income for life," he says. Robbins says you should not wait until you have a pile of cash, get started with what you have.

"To be a great investor, you need to make good decisions without perfect knowledge. The first step is not to wait until you have a huge sum of money. The illusion is that when you have more money, you'll invest and it'll be more worth while," Robbins says. "The most important thing to do is start investing now, so you can unlock the power of compounding."

Robbins recounts the story of a UPS employee who never made more than $14,000 a year, but retired with a $70 million fortune "without inheriting a dime." Theodore Johnson's friend told him he was going to take 20 percent of his salary off every paycheck and invest it. To make due without that money, Johnson's friend told him to treat it like a 20 percent tax that Uncle Sam took out of every paycheck. Over the years, compound interest and good investments helped build a $70 million fortune.

"You don't earn your way to a fortune, you invest your way, you compound it," Robbins says.

Add value, and help those around you.

Robbins wants you to dream big, get inspired, and live a life of wild success, but in order to get there, you have to accomplish smaller things and build up. Long-term, sustainably wealthy entrepreneurs didn't wake up in a room of cash, they set out to add value and help people.

"You can get rich by screwing someone, but if you're going to stay rich, you have to be constantly helping people," he says. When Robbins's first child was born, he was only making $38,000 a year. By the next year, he was making $1 million a year. "That jump wasn't a sudden new skill set, it was a must for me psychologically to produce that wealth," he says.

Robbins's mentor, the entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Rohn, gave him two lessons on how to tap your strongest talents and resources to be successful:

"Find your passion and find a way to use it to do more for others than anyone else does and add value. And proximity is power. If you want to get the job done, you have to get in the environment of the best of the best," Robbins recalls Rohn saying.

When Robbins told Rohn he needed to provide for his family, Rohn said for the goals he had, he needed to be in the proximity of the best moneymakers. Robbins wanted to acquire more wealth, so he started hanging out with investment bankers. "I did that for a couple of years, but it seemingly produced no business results. Until one day, one of those relationships grew into a deal that made me $400 million in a day, we took a company public," he says. "I could've worked my entire lifetime and not made that happen, I had to be in proximity with the best."

No one grows personally and professionally by themselves, everyone needs help. If you want to do a certain thing--make money, build a company, help feed the hungry--then you need to be around people who do that well.

"My own growth has always been about challenging myself to be around people who play the game of life at a higher level. In order to stay on the court with them, you need to lift your game, you need to grow," he says. "If you're around them and you're adding value, you'll find opportunity. Proximity is power."

Law Of Gratitude.

We know that everything we put attention and emotional energy on, good or bad, will eventually show up in our lives. The universe, and our subconscious mind, don’t know good from bad, and they treat fear and enthusiasm exactly the

same. If we’re putting energy on it, we’re placing an order for it.

It’s important, then, to be putting positive energy on what we want, not negative energy (fear, worry) on what we don’t want.

Gratitude is so important because it is a very high energy positive vibration of thought. It is powerfully attractive! Wattles says it connects us with the Source.

Do you see what he is saying? If we are grateful about everything, we are focusing on what we want. It’s a way of making sure we are putting the highest possible positive energy on our desires, and withholding energy from the doubts and fears that we don’t want.

This is the reason that almost everyone who teaches about goals insists that you see your goal as already accomplished, and that you be grateful for it – now! It’s a powerful way to be sure you’re putting strong energy on the goal – using gratitude.

You’d think with gratitude so important that everyone would be conscious of it. But what I’ve noticed is that many people are actually pushing away the success they want without knowing it because they are violating this law!

This belief leads to competitive thinking – the idea that in order to get what you want, you have to take it away from someone else.

This is a belief system that encourages fear and worry. Most sales training is based on this idea. So are all wars.

How easy is it for anyone to be grateful when they think that the universe is designed to make things tough for them? Especially when their thinking keeps creating situations where they get to be right about how tough it is.

Let me show you how abundant the universe really is. Both science and spirituality tell us that everything is made out of the same original stuff. Science calls it energy. So how much is there to make more of whatever we need?

A recent scientific survey of the cosmos added up everything they could find and determined that only about 4% of the available energy was used to make the entire universe! There’s 96% left over, or enough for 25 more universes! That seems pretty abundant to me.

So let’s choose a different way of thinking. We can see an abundant supply, rather than scarcity. We can choose to create our success, rather than compete for a limited supply. When we do this, we cease to be a victim of circumstances and we begin to reclaim our power over our lives! Seeing the universe this way is the first step in the law of gratitude.

All bodily manifestations have their roots in the mind

In many ways, man lives essentially through the mind. Even when we perceive something as

a physical occurrence, deep down it turns out to be a psychological phenomenon. All bodily

manifestations have their roots in the mind. Let me explain a few things in this regard, then it

will be easy to follow.

Until fifty years ago, all human illnesses were treated as illnesses of the body. In the last fifty

years, the more we have learned about illnesses, the more the proportion of physical illnesses has decreased while that of the psychological illnesses has increased. Even the greatest of physiologists is ready to admit today that more than fifty percent of all human ailments are psychological.

Sicknesses which are otherwise considered as physical, more than half of them are caused by

the mind. Mind is the very substratum of man’s being, his existence. It is the source of our life, it is the source of our illness, and it is the very source of our death. That’s why so much importance is given to the will.

If you have ever witnessed an experiment in hypnosis, there are a few things about it worth keeping in mind. A hypnotized person is simply one whose conscious mind is asleep and whose unconscious mind is awake. When the conscious mind goes to sleep, the person stops doubting, because all doubts and misgivings are limited to the conscious mind.

If we divide the human mind into ten parts, it will appear that one part of it is conscious while the remaining nine are unconscious. Nine parts are in the dark unconscious; only a small portion – one tenth of the mind – is awake.

 It is this conscious mind that doubts, thinks, ponders. If this conscious mind were to sleep, then the remaining nine parts below would stay totally receptive. There, no questions are asked, no doubts are raised.

In the state of hypnosis, the doubting mind is put to sleep and the undoubting, receptive mind comes into effect. In that state, if you were to place a small piece of rock on the hand of the hypnotized person and tell him it is a hot coal, he will cry out in pain as if his hand had been burned. He will at once throw the rock away – just as he would if a real hot coal had been placed on his hand.

Up to this point one may assume that just an idea in his mind must have caused this to happen. But the astonishing thing is that blisters appear on his hand – the same as it would have if a hot coal had been placed there. So apparently, although you had placed an ordinary piece of rock, the person’s mind totally accepted your word that it was a hot coal. And the body has no means of denying the mind, so it acts accordingly. Remember well, if the mind accepts totally, the body will have to follow it.

There is a reverse of this experiment too, which is even more astonishing. You can place an ember in the hypnotized person’s hand and tell him it is just a cold pebble. The man will keep on holding the ember and yet no blisters will appear on his hand. Without the mind’s permission, the body is helpless to do anything.

That is why fakirs are able to dance barefoot on fire – there is no miracle in it. It’s just a little

experiment in the science of mind. There are ten fakirs dancing on the fire, they openly invite

anyone to join them, so there is no question of any fraud. You are welcome to dance with them.

But that will be possible only when watching those ten people you become fully convinced the fire is not affecting them. Once you are convinced – that if they are not having burns, you won’t either– you reach the same state a hypnotized person does. In that state, the one part of your mind is not doubting, and the nine parts are believing – now you can jump into the fire, your feet won’t burn.

One who has any doubts will not jump, but the one who has none will jump in. What this means is that even fire cannot burn you if the mind is not open to it, and even coldness can cause burns if the mind is ready for it.

The society is not for human beings,the society is using human beings as a means for itself.

ECSTASY IS A LANGUAGE that man has completely forgotten. He has been forced to forget it; he has been compelled to forget it. The society is against it, the civilization is against it. The society has a tremendous investment in misery. It depends on misery, it feeds on misery, it survives on misery.

The society is not for human beings. The society is using human beings as a means for itself. The society has become more important than humanity. The culture, the civilization, the church, they all have become more important. They were meant to be for man, but now they are not for man. They have almost reversed the whole process; now man exists for them.

Every child is born ecstatic. Ecstasy is natural. It is not something that happens only to great sages. It is something that everybody brings with him into the world; everybody comes with it. It is life’s innermost core. It is part of being alive. Life is ecstasy. Every child brings it into the world, but then the society jumps on the child, starts destroying the possibility of ecstasy, starts making the child miserable, starts conditioning the child.

The society is neurotic, and it cannot allow ecstatic people to be here. They are dangerous for it.Try to understand the mechanism; then things will be easier.

You cannot control an ecstatic man; it is impossible. You can only control a miserable man. An ecstatic man is bound to be free. Ecstasy is freedom. He cannot be reduced to being a slave. You cannot destroy him so easily; you cannot persuade him to live in a prison. He would like to dance under the stars and he would like to walk with the wind and he would like to talk with the sun and the moon. He will need the vast, the infinite, the huge, the enormous. He cannot be seduced into living in a dark cell. You cannot make a slave out of him. He will live his own life and he will do his thing.

This is very difficult for the society. If there are many ecstatic people, the society will feel it is falling apart, its structure will not hold anymore.

Those ecstatic people will be the rebels. Remember, I don’t call an ecstatic person ”revolutionary”; I call him a ”rebel.” A revolutionary is one who wants to change the society, but he wants to replace it with another society. A rebel is one who wants to live as an individual and would like there to exist no rigid social structure in the world. A rebel is one who does not want to replace this society with another society – because all the societies have proved the same, The capitalist and the communist and the fascist and the socialist, they are all cousin-brothers; it doesn’t make much difference. The society is society. All the churches have proved the same – the Hindu, the Christian, the Mohammedan.

Once a structure becomes powerful, it does not want anybody to be ecstatic, because ecstasy is against structure. Listen to it and meditate over it: ecstasy is against structure Ecstasy is rebellious.

Love should not be a demanding love

Love should not be a demanding love;

otherwise it loses wings, it cannot fly. It becomes rooted in the earth, becomes very earthly; then it is lust and it brings great misery and great suffering. Love should not be conditional, one should not expect anything out of it.It should be for its own sake – not for any reward, not for any result. If there is some motive in it, again, your love cannot become the sky. It is confined to the motive; the motive becomes its definition, its boundary. Unmotivated love has no boundary: it is pure elation, exuberance, it is the fragrance of the heart.

And because there is no desire for any result, it does not mean that results do not happen; they do, they happen a thousandfold more, because whatsoever we give to the world, it comes back, it rebounds. The world is an echoing place: if we throw anger, anger comes back; if we give love,love comes back. But that is a natural phenomenon, one need not think about it. One can trust: it happens on its own. This is the law of karma: whatsoever you sow, you reap; whatsoever you give, you get. So there is no need to think about it, it is automatic. Hate, and you will be hated. Love, and you will be loved.

And the third thing: let love become more and more conscious. When it is unconscious it remains entangled with sexuality. Nothing is wrong in sexuality but that is the lowest form of love, the first rung of the ladder. It is good in itself but to remain confined to it is not to grow: there are higher rungs in the ladder. The ladder reaches to the ultimate and sex is the first rung. Use it to go beyond it.

Love should be more conscious. When it is conscious it is less sexual. I am not saying that there will be no sex: sex will be there but it will not be sexual. It will be pure sensuality; that is a totally different phenomenon.

It will be sheer joy, sensitivity, but there will be no sexual mind behind it. You will not be thinking about sex, there will be no cerebral sex in it no head sex in it. It will be a simple sharing of energies. So these three things to be remembered; then love, slowly slowly, becomes light.

The English word ’light’ is very very significant. It has two meanings: one is light, luminosity; another is weightlessness. Those two meanings don’t seem to be joined at all but they have a subtle connection. When one becomes full of light, one becomes weightless; one can fly, one has wings.