Doing the rounds at the moment..
Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism"

Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 29 Jan 2009, 12:53, 5 replies, latest was 16 years ago)

Heheh!
Commie!

*EXPLODES*
( Noeli overtheshoulderboulderholderthingstraplatchboobs, Thu 29 Jan 2009, 13:00, Reply)

Dirty pinko commies
It's only a matter of time before we're calling each other comrade and eating potatos.
(SpunkyMcSpunkbubble Diddled your nubbin on, Thu 29 Jan 2009, 13:08, Reply)

It's made up, it's not a Marx quote
He never envisaged the proletariat owning their own houses.
(Son of Sam-i-am We're all as mad as hatters here, Thu 29 Jan 2009, 13:23, Reply)

eh? Potatoes?
God's own food is the mighty potato. There is no foodstuff more versatile than the potato.
(bazmorningstar efil4nat3b, Thu 29 Jan 2009, 13:24, Reply)

Can a bank become bankrupt if it creates the money it lends out of thin air?
It'd really be the world becoming bankrupt.

Watch "Money as Debt" on youtube. Someone here pointed it out the other day, makes very interesting watching.

If you're feeling too lazy, or in the office, or both, the jist is this:

Banks are allowed to lend up to 9 times more than they have in their vaults. We'll ignore the fact it isn't gold in their vaults any more, it is just paper money, making it kinda a figment of its own imagination.

When you take a loan, they invent some money to give you. You buy a car with that, which gets deposited in another bank. The bank can then loan nine times that amount to someone else.

When you pay it back, the bank takes the interest, so makes money out of nothing.

Now the crunch: Because all the money in existence is conjoured (sp?!) from thin air in this way, the interest you pay back you made from someone else's debt. The total interest owed by everyone rises much faster than the total capital borrowed. So the only way the world can pay back all its debts is for the economy to expand forever, making enough surplus to pay back the interest.

It can't, it doesn't and the whole world goes pop. Like now.

Coincidentally, this growth we 'need' is directly proportional to how much of the earth we mine/harvest, destroying the world at an ever increasing rate.

OK, so that turned out to not be the short version ;-)

Still worth a watch though.
(MrOli is ugly, but in the morning you will be sober, Thu 29 Jan 2009, 13:35, Reply)