A Quick Guide to American Capitalism

• Give a starving man a fish and you’re a saint (and a sucker).

• Teach him to fish and you’re a socialist.

•  Tax a man for the fish he catches and you’re a government.

• Sell fish to a man for profit and you’re a capitalist.

• Buy the lake, sell off all the fish for a quick profit and you’re a “private equity” capitalist.  

• Rent the lake for $1 from the Interior Department, sell all the fish to an international cartel and you’re a petro-capitalist.

• Stock the lake with GM “franken-fish”, then sue a man when he catches one and you’re an agro-capitalist.

• Ignore the man fishing, pump all the lake water into plastic bottles to sell by the case and you are a “Nestles” capitalist.

• Buy all the shoreline around the lake, sell or rent docks to a man so he can fish and you are a real-estate capitalist.

• Buy up shoreline, sell fancy docks, charge their owners to fish from them and you’re a time-share capitalist.

• Buy and sell orders for a man’s fish before the fish are even caught (called “fish futures”) and you’re a commodities trader. 

• Sell insurance policies (called “swaps”) to those who buy “fish futures” so they get their money back even if the fish go bad and you’re a hedge fund manager.

• Now bundle all those fish into “fish-backed” security bonds, secretly mix tainted fish in every bundle, sell these bonds to the unsuspecting public, invest heavily in “swaps” payable to you when all that fish goes bad and you are WALL $TREET.

Data Driving View Points: www.AsEyeSeesIt.blogspot.com, January 10, 2012

Permission to reprint is hereby granted.