Critique of Modern Economic Systems

Have you ever stopped to think about how completely ridiculous the whole arrangement is?

You're born, you open your eyes, you take your first breath

of air, and boom, you're already on the hook.

You're already in debt to some guy in a suit you've never met.

Think about it. Everything you need to survive was already here.

The whole damn package. The earth provided it for free.

Nobody manufactured it. Nobody built a factory to churn out the planet.

But somehow, by some magnificent stroke of bureaucratic nonsense, you were born owing somebody for it.

Look at the trees.

The fruit trees were just sitting there.

They grew out of the dirt entirely on their own,

dropping free food on the grass for millions of years. What did they do?

Some guy with a clipboard and a bad haircut puts a fence around the orchard,

slaps a barcode on a shiny red apple, and sells it back to you.

They didn't invent the apple, but you're paying for it.

And the water! This is my favorite part.

The rain falls from the sky, right? Flows into the rivers,

feeds entire civilizations for thousands of years. It's the definition of a free public utility.

Then some corporate sociopath looks at a mountain spring and says, hey, let's pump that into a little plastic cylinder,

slap a picture of a glacier on it, and charge these suckers two bucks a pop so they don't die of thirst.

And we buy it.

Then there's the dirt, the land.

The planet was just a big rock spinning in space,

minding its own business, long before any human being decided to draw imaginary invisible lines all over it.

But now?

If you want to stand on a piece of dirt,

if you want a place to sleep that isn't actively raining on your head, you need a deed,

a title, a mortgage, and a 30-year payment plan with an adjustable interest rate.

You need permission to stand on the earth.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a form of collective insanity?

Everything you need, water, food, shelter, was already here, but they locked it up.

And now you have to rent your own survival.

And the absolute genius of the whole scam,

the real cherry on top,

if you suggest that maybe just maybe simply existing without debt shouldn't be a crime,

they look at you like you belong in a straitjacket.

A free life? What are you, a lunatic?

Do you want to exist without a billing cycle?

Get a job, you bum.

They have actually convinced us that existing without debt, without bills, without begging for permission to be alive on the planet you were born on is a crazy fantasy.

Who the hell convinced us that this is how it's supposed to be?

We bought the biggest lie in the history of the world that you have to pay just to be here.

And then comes the grand finale,

the ultimate insult.

After 70, 80 years of running on this hamster wheel, your ticker finally gives out, you flatline,

you think, ah, finally, I'm free, the bills have stopped, cut the cord, I'm out.

Wrong, my friend. Welcome to the exit tax.

That's right, it costs money to leave the planet, you have to pay to die.

They hit your grieving family with a bill for 10 grand to put you in a shiny mahogany box with brass handles and a velvet pillow.

You're dead,

you don't need a pillow,

you're not catching up on your sleep.

Then they pump your veins full of industrial formaldehyde because God forbid you just decompose naturally and give a little something back to the dirt you've been renting for eight decades.

No, we have to preserve you so you can look your best for the worms.

And then they charge you for the whole,

you thought the real estate market was bad for the living.

Try buying a six by three plot of dirt when you're dead, you need a deed, a cemetery maintenance fee and a granite paperweight just to hold you down.

You come in owing them for the air and you go out owing them for the dirt.

It's a beautifully closed loop of financial insanity, folks, and we just keep thanking them for the privilege.