If there's all risk and no return, why deploy it? This single change could probably do more than any other. I am one of those capable of deploying capital, but all my life I haven't even once: the legal maze is incredible, the taxes are near 100% of profits, and the risk is total loss of everything you own, and with liability and garnishing wages, everything you might ever own. This same math drove my father out of small business altogether, and that was the early 90s when the gov't (including Fed debt) was 1/4 of todays' size. Was it too small then?

For example, here in Rochester, NY, there are 12-BR Craftsman mansions, all woodwork, fireplaces, show homes, 20min from the city, already cut into 3 apts for, oh $220,000. That's like giving it away. Replacement cost would be in the millions. You know what? The return on that investment is zero; the rents + taxes + risk would take ALL the profits, every penny: to the state, the bank, and the insurance companies.

That's why the present owner is trying just to sell it at breakeven. He doesn't want it either.

That's what I'm talking about in deploying capital, although laundromats, farms, restaurants, are all the same math. You work entirely for the State. Any profits are more than overshadowed by the additional risk. So I do nothing; and neither does anybody else. Do we get anything for this cost and nuisance? No. At least 30 miles north, in Canada, they GET something for their equivalent taxload: universal health care, and a system that has no personal risk. The dole is easy to get on, and there's no real stigma or bother attached to it. In NY we don't even get good roads.

It's nonsense. Go back to how it was--let the roads go back to dirt for all I care, cancel health care and everything else--despite the promises we don't really get it anyway. Most people out here would agree with me.

If we steal from workers and savers to give to speculators and borrowers, then why should people work for themselves anymore? And I can attest that here in NY, they don't. The farms were economically firebombed years before the rest of the economy. There's now no work people wish to do--although astonishingly there's still a lingering work ethic. So we do nothing, and nothing gets done.

Money won't solve this problem. That's the real point. Only work in the real world will. To get that, we need to reverse the reward structure 180' and reward people who work instead of those who shuffle, actively prevent the work of others, or who speculate.

History shows that will happen and despite recent appearances, it seems this may even happen peacefully, if with great hardship. Time will tell but the American people seem to be avoiding that path by not getting riled even when VERY put upon. They seem to be content with simply playing out all the rope that the present system needs. When it is completely nonfunctional, it will more or less hang itself without our needing to get off the couch. That's unconscious, and it's giving great benefit to the people, but here in the country, people KNOW they're getting screwed into poverty every day--and I mean actual no-heat, lose-the-house poverty. It's not as they say in the suburbs: that people are fat and lazy and don't know. THey seem to know well enough here but still prefer to play out the rope. I think people are more or less terrified of the explosion that might occur if they allowed themselves to get angry and take action. History would show, I believe, that their common sense in this is correct.

I liked the reader who spoke of "living on the land"--he has the relaxed and patient method I wish I had, although he wasn't able to flesh out this important idea so thickly. Living in farm country, thick with turkey and deer I can agree--hunting in a Depression is a dangerous fantasy. It took from 1932 to 1990 for turkey to return here, and only when re-introduced. Deer were virtually wiped out until the late 50s. There are no fish now even in normal times. Imagining hunting might work is an excellent way to get killed. Far better to buy a few hundred in garden seeds and a shovel, something I intend to write on if I can clarify a plan before people are already inside the storm. But you just can't write a 100-word essay on growing food. It's like being a doctor or a mason, it takes decades to learn to do well, everything is a soft-case exceptions, and only experience can teach you.

It seems like that idea that non-edible savings itself is illusionary, and that money is useless compared to real work are ideas that need to be explored. I look forward to seeing what you discover."

Thank you, reader. Here are two ideas to start with: tax the heck out of unproductive capital and unearned income, not just to raise revenue but to drive that capital into productive uses, and lighten the tax burdens placed on small business. The more that survive, the more tax revenues you'll actually gather.