Your Usury Becomes My Dividend Payments

I’m an arguably affluent investor.  And these tickers describe the kind of publicly traded stocks and funds I buy:
  • Communications: Q, VZ, HIT
  • Energy: PPL, APL, UTF, TRP
  • Non Cyclical Consumption: MO, SVU
  • Healthcare:  BMY, PFE. IYR
  • Banking/Finance: CIM, MFA
  • Insurance: PRU, HUM
I buy shares in amounts sufficient to generate dividend income to cover basic household expenses – i.e. gas, water, electric, cable, phone, internet, mobile.
I do so because, at age 49, I’ve come to understand certain realities about money:
  • Money can’t buy happiness!
  • Money is not to spend.  Materialism is a psychological and economic trap, except to address physical, social and cultural needs (food, shelter, communications, media).
  • Capital can collateralize greater liquidity (loans) if or when that’s needed (hopefully never).
  • Capital is a form of self-insurance that generally precludes paying corporations for insurance against catastrophic (Black Swan) events.
  • Basically money buys freedom.  At least a significant measure of freedom from neo fascism in the form of wage, fee and debt slavery under hegemonic, meta corporate capitalism.  Though, objectively, investing inflicts this slavery on others.
But until society changes; until humanity’s gaping existential consumption void is more widely understood and ameliorated, money represents one of scant few objective freedoms (free-will) there are.  (Another being psychology, mind liberation.  But that’s a non empirical pursuit forever prone to delusion.)
Alternatives to having and minimally spending money include:
  • Martyrdom: Hang on a Cross of physical and material deprivation as the “normal” world scoffs and ridicules you.
  • Idealism: Tilt endlessly at myriad Windmills of social and economic injustice.
  • Normalcy: Embrace, or worse eroticize, capitalist subjugation through empty, consumptive acts, like high end shopping, gluttony and travel.
Like anyone reading this, I’ve struggled with pursuing all of the above at various times in varying degrees.
But what I don’t understand is how anyone could unapologetically celebrate consumerism amid the larger contradiction of global suffering and resource scarcity, and especially, repetitively vote (or not) essentially for more, more and more of the same?
Possible reasons include:
  • Bad religion?
  • Mis-education as regards money and finance skills?
  • Corrupt, “Wall Street” government and economic hegemony?
  • Bad teaching as regards classical, pseudo scientific, Voodoo economics?
Undoubtedly, our Broken Machine redounds from all of the above.
It isn’t just!  It’s just the way it is!