Finland has a new government and I have to say, for a country that normally is pretty decent with its political arrangements - I am skeptical. Like normal, it is a coalition government (as no party gets enough support to forma government alone), they call it "right-leaning" because one of the parties (of the four) are against immigration, and they are focusing on (mentioning in the media) the big topics, like increasing the alcohol percentage available in supermarkets - but still no wine, and cutting the refugee intake from a massive 1050, down to 500. Like that is what is holding the country back.
It is a show.
Two of the main cuts:
Education: €149m
Social and healthcare services: €2.05b
In an environment that is already suffering from decreasing educational quality after being a world leader, they are cutting more. And when it comes to healthcare which has been one of the lowest in the EU, but spends on preventative, they are cutting a lot.
There are plenty of other things, on the list, but I am not going to dive into them here. However, I was with some friends tonight (they came for a barbecue - I made some great burgers) and we were talking about some of these things and for the second time in a day or two, I heard the
"Be happy with less"
Argument.
How we should consume less to save money.
The problem though is....
That doesn't mean that there is less to consume.
The conversation was actually about how the general level of service in the US had degraded (There were a couple Americans here - I put icing sugar on the meat patties so they felt at home) even though prices had gone up in restaurants and stores. One person said it might be because they are understaffed now, unable to find people to do the work.
And herein lies the issue.
We are being conditioned to expect less from service and to expect less from range. We are told to save money (which we should on some things) because prices are going up. So, we do, but what this means is that the range can be decreased and we accept it, because of the economic conditions, yet we are paying more for less, which means that somewhere in the supply chain, someone is making more.
It isn't us.
The more we "save" the more room there is to extract. For example, Lets say I have 300 dollars and that there are three products to buy worth 100 each that I normally buy. The price goes up to 120 on all of them, meaning that I need 360 to buy all, or go into debt. Some people will choose the debt and have 60 dollars that they will need to pay some percentage of interest on. However, some (not as many) will choose to buy only two items for the 240, meaning that they have the potential to save 60. But, once this becomes the norm, the prices on the two remaining popular items will increase until they are 150 each, so that the production will only need to produce 66% of the items to get 100% of the value.
They will call it inflation, but is it?
Yes, the price has increased on the items, but it has been an engineered increase that might have zero reason. For example, as soon as the war broke out in Ukraine, suddenly every product in the world seemed to have some level of production in Ukraine - no matter what it was. It was nonsensical, yet people accepted increases as if it was justified.
For instance, my friend tonight was saying that the change in service was because of being short-staffed, due to the gig economy having more of an effect, so people didn't have to do waitperson work. However, "short staffed" should only happen on rare occasions when too many people are sick and those that could fill the shift are already drunk. If a company is paying enough, they will never be short-staffed.
Do you see what I mean by this?
We are being conditioned to accept less, whilst simultaneously conditioned to pay more. This creates the conditions for increased profit mechanisms, which of course benefit those who are invested into the companies that are profiting. These aren't the people who are cutting back on their spending, these are the ones who are able to increase their spending, because they are extracting more from those who are saving.
The disposable income difference of cutting back spending on the three products to the two, is very soon absorbed into an increase in price on the two products - products that are able to be made more cheaply because the volume is higher and the demand more stable. At some point, the price of the two products gets too high so after people falling into debt to keep their already reduced standard of living, will have to bite the bullet and move from two to one product. Their "savings" will then be leveraged in banks, and then milked as the price of the remaining product goes up too. A product that takes even less resources to build, making more profit for the suppliers.
It could be that we'd be happier if we expect less from life, but it is also true from an economic sense that the more we save, the more incentive there is to extract it from us. This means that inflation will happen "naturally" because the companies will know that we can spend more here, because we are buying less there.
See how that works?
Wealth distribution doesn't improve the more we save, it gets worse. Saving is good, but what we have to do is invest into generative activities and put our hat into the ring to compete for a piece of the wealth pie. Rather than "putting up" with bad service, we need to take ownership of something that will draw financial attention to us instead.
We have to create value, not save money.
I don't know if I have explained this well, but saving is never going to help us long term, because it will always be targeted by corporations and governments. If we take what we save and generate additional income with it, investing what we make into what we value to generate more value, we can compete. If we keep reducing our consumption, that doesn't mean that we are saving, because it will just drive prices up further. Changing what we are consuming from what makes the wealthy, wealthy, redirects that wealth to a different point. If what we are buying is what makes us as a society wealthier and better off, we will slowly reverse the wealth gap and the more it shifts, the more it will shift.
Saving money is a losing game, unless with what we are saving, we are taking ownership of something with value.
Before it gets milked away.
We are being taking advantage of by the laws of economics, because we aren't learning the rules of the game. It isn't about being peas in a pod in our behavior, but understanding that wealth is generated in the things we choose to consume. So if we want to be wealthy, we have to consume what we own.
What do you own?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
