Forum Post: Six Out of Every Seven Dollars

There’s an aspect to the Occupy movement that puzzles a lot of people. They refer to it as a lack of focus, or a foggy agenda. They look for a list of demands, and a council of leaders who can articulate what needs to change. There’s a good reason they won’t get it. It’s not a single thing, or a simple issue that we need to fix. It’s the “universal ground rules” of the game we have a problem with. The playing field is no longer simply tilted, it’s been reshaped to the point where the visiting team can’t even hope to play ball.

Here’s an example to chew on: in an average mortgage, six out of every seven dollars the “homeowner” pays every month goes to the lender for “interest.” This is the average, not what happens in one of those high risk loans. The average, everyday terms of a deal that isn’t very fair. Everybody has simply accepted the terms of this deal, and it cannot hold for much longer. The banks have tilted things by “front loading” their loans to collect as much interest as they can before allowing the borrower to accrue any equity. They defend this practice by telling the world that they’re taking on the risk, and fronting the money, and so they should get their fair share up front. And we accept it, we don’t question it, and we think that if we don’t go along with it, we won’t get the loan.

Perhaps it’s time we rethink the nature of our anti-trust laws. The mortgage lenders, in this example, spent many years tilting the playing field to get those six out of every seven dollars, and to get us to think of it as normal. There wasn’t any active collusion, no star chamber or convention in the Bahamas to plot and scheme. Each player just did their part to tighten the noose a little bit at a time. The theorists tell us that market forces will drive them to a different line of business, just as the strip miners eventually move on. This is another form of socializing the real cost of doing business; whenever we recognize an industry relies on this practice, we should investigate to determine if there is good cause for regulating their activity (i.e., if we all bear some of their cost of doing business, then we deserve a say in how they conduct their business).

Another fun example to consider: employers are now telling me they won’t consider an applicant who lives in another state. Fun Catch-22 with this one: if you can’t find a job in the state where you live, and you can’t afford to relocate until you find a job in another state, and they won’t consider your application until you move to the state … you’re kind of stuck. Leads us to the question: is it fair to discriminate against an applicant based on their present location? No easy answer, but the market is once again tilted to favor the employer at the expense of the rest of the culture (which must find a way to subsidize the relocation or house the homeless when a company decides to “let some people go”).

It’s not an easy game, challenging the status quo. That’s why I started out by aiming at the kids who aren’t so vested in it that they’re willing to entertain another view.

See http://www.desolationpress.com for more of my humble attempts, and I look forward to hearing what everyone else comes up with.