An Ancient Book Predicts Drastically Rising Food Prices
An Ancient Book Predicts Drastically Rising Food Prices
Destroying living standards is part of the great reset to serfdom
I’ll just come out and say it:
The ancient book in question is the Bible.
The Bible, for those unfamiliar, is actually a library of 66 books. The word biblos simply means “books.” This book contains more than a dozen genres of literature including poetry, law, history, letters, etc. Some people read the whole thing literally, but they need to learn to read it literately.
One of those books in the book of books is called The Revelation.
It was written on a Greek island called Patmos by a torture survivor named Yohhanan, who was one of Jesus’s original 72 disciples. (That’s not a typo — most people think Jesus only had twelve disciples, but then again, most people know zilch about Jesus.)
After having an apocalyptic vision, John wrote in Revelation 6:6:
“Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages…”
If you read the context, the message is clear:
When rampant corruption is allowed to flourish unchecked, it’s only a matter of time before a whole day’s work barely provides workers with enough money to survive.
And that’s exactly where we find ourselves today.
Let’s take a look at how, exactly, elite forces are pushing the global economy toward the place where, for the majority of humanity, a whole day’s work will barely buy bread.
Step one: Privatize everything
When God created the Earth* (*though not necessarily ~6,000 years ago — the two Genesis creation poems are poems, not scientific/historical documents) all the land, water, and resources were completely free.
So what did humans do?
They monopolized it all, calling it “privatization.”
Under the guise of “property,” they stole what rightfully belongs to everyone and everything.
Classical capitalists like Henry George didn’t think we should go full-communist and throw everything back in the public domain, they simply suggested we implement a land value tax so people had to pay the commons for the right to monopolize land that belongs to all. It’s one of the few economic ideas that pretty much everyone from left to right love, including Friedman, Churchill, Einstein, etc.
So naturally, it’s never happened.
Step two: Introduce debt
Once all the land was monopolized, it gave the propertied class a huge advantage over the unpropertied.
As Cory Doctorow put it:
“Debts are inescapable. In order to provide a society with its necessities — food, shelter, energy — producers need the inputs (seed, fertilizer, materials, tools) before they have the means to buy them. In order to produce, producers must borrow.”
Can you see how messed up and corrupt that is?
Real wealth is created by applying human time/effort/energy to natural resources, but the vast majority of the population is forbidden access to those natural resources without indebting themselves to resource-monopolizers. This is pure evil.
In fact, the very first debt records in history appear after the monopolization of land in the hands of the Sumerian temples.
This is what Proudhon meant when he said that “all property is theft.”
Step three: Suppress wages
Since most sane people are extremely uncomfortable with taking on debt in order to gain access to the natural resources that they already collectively own but are monopolized by the propertied class, the propertied class had to invent another way to extract value from the assetless class.
So they invented jobs.
J-O-B, as the old saying goes, stands for “just over broke.”
Because the vast majority have been barred from accessing natural resources, they either have to go into debt or they have to go to work for a resource-monopolizer. Most people choose the latter.
So what do the resource-monopolizers do?
They play the workers off each other in a bid to keep wages low and profits high. They stop people from gaining enough group power to bargain collectively by smashing their unions. They fight tooth and nail against every advance of real wealth creators — fighting against the end of slave labor and child labor, against eight-hour work days, against five-day workweeks, against minimum wages, against benefits, against social safety nets.
Because remember: New wealth is only created by workers who apply work to natural resources. Resource-monopolizers are completely and utterly mathematically useless, adding zero new value whatsoever, but simply extracting value from those whose wages they suppress.
Step four: Take control of money
Once all resources were monopolized and everyone had been put to work to create wealth for the resource-monopoly class, that gave the hoarders enough money-power to go after government, create the private Federal Reserve,
Now, corporations are completely in control of the government and the money-creation process.
Ideally, money would be created debt-free by democracy itself, accountably spent into the economy on commons-improving assets, and taxed back out from whoever benefits most from democracy and the civilization it creates.
In America, nearly all money is created as debt — either by the Fed selling bonds to banks in exchange for ever-growing billions in interest, or by the banks themselves as they create interest-bearing credit.
But there’s a huge problem with debt-based money, as anyone with a brain can see: Real biological wealth grows incrementally, whereas interest-bearing credit compounds exponentially.
You can see where this leads, right?
Eventually, interest payments become larger than all wealth creation, and the economy and nation collapse. But not before huge amounts of human suffering as people like you and me struggle under ever-rising interest payments in the form of higher prices, higher mortgages, higher rents, higher everything.
Inflation is driven by debt. As the amount of credit-money in society balloons, sellers raise their prices. Higher prices means money loses its value. Inflation is the easiest way to impoverish the world.
Step five: Monopolize shelter
Once you’ve monopolized land, introduced debt, suppressed wages, and taken control of money and devalued it, it leaves you in the excellent position of being able to rent-trap all of humanity.
All you have to do is outbid workers for houses, so you can then rent those houses back to them for more money than they would’ve spent on a mortgage had you never been born and/or grown up to become so evil.
That’s why trillion-dollar hedge funds are now buying up tens of thousands of family homes every month.
That’s why Jeff Bezos just backed a predator startup that outbids a family for housing every two minutes.
That’s why corporate terrorists are monopolizing trailer parks.
The beauty of this model is that when you financialize a house (IE turn it into a rent-seeking asset), the prices soar. As house prices climb higher and higher, it means fewer people can afford to buy, so they have no choice but to slave their lives away to pay you rent instead. Woohoo!
In London, for example, people are now paying $1000/month for a single bedroom in a shared house. Trillion-dollar corporations monopolizing and finacializing houses are why house prices will rise to $10 million in our lifetime.
Step six: End ownership
Eventually, once you’ve been a parasite land-lorder long enough, you realized that you can do to any item what you’ve done to people’s houses.
If you can turn an item into a form of rental income, you can make way more money than doing something old-fashioned like making and selling a product. Why not monopolize that asset so you can squeeze out a lifetime of rent instead?
Instead of selling Adobe software for $500, you can choke $25,000 out of every graphic designer over the lifetime of their career, without any more cost to yourself or value to them.
Instead of selling a piece of furniture for $1,000 — be it a couch or table — you can wring out $6,000 over a five-year rental plan at $100/month.
If people can’t afford a financialized fridge or washing machine for $1,000 upfront, you can rake $9,000 out of them over a six-year rental.
Boots and shoes that once cost $100 will cost $1,000 at “just” $29/month.
Yes, clothing will eventually be subsumed by the investment monopoly’s rent-for-life model.
Anything that can turn a profit will be made to turn a profit.
Then you just need to convince the masses that the “sharing” economy is good for them, repeating stupid phrases like:
Step seven: Automate
What’s the endgame for corporate feudalists?
Well… techno-feudalism.
It has two parts:
Assetless misery for the masses (until they die off or stop having kids because they can’t afford to do so.)
Superabundance for the propertied class who were lucky enough to monopolize enough resources to now be served by robots who don’t ask for pesky things like pensions and pay and human rights.
That’s the game of thrones we're all stuck playing — it’s all about who can ensure their family comes out on top when the planet is destroyed and the real economy has been completely swallowed up by the parasite anti-economy.
Sure, there will be a bumpy season where there will be riots and civil wars and famines and floods and such, but the elites will be luxuriously hunkered down on their hyper-yachts and doomsday bunkers and spaceships while their robot armies and AI digital currencies slowly but surely draw down the human population.
It’s a race to the finish, a race to the bottom, a race to our destruction.
So maybe John’s apocalyptic prediction will come true.
“Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages…”
Or maybe it’s a truth about reality that comes true again and again and again: When rampant corruption is allowed to flourish unchecked, it’s only a matter of time before a whole day’s work barely provides workers with enough money to survive.
That’s certainly the trajectory we’re on:
Resource monopolization means you can’t create new wealth without taking on interest-bearing debt or being subjected to wage suppression.
The corporate control of money means every dollar is shackled with debt, and the resultant inflation will ensure it always buys less.
Bankers and land-lorders will keep jacking shelter prices.
Corporations will stop selling goods and force you to rent them instead.
AI and automation will eventually wipe out the three gig jobs you were working to stay alive.
At that point, we’ll be so desperate for work that we’ll take whatever’s on offer… whatever “the market” — AKA resource-monopolizers — dictate.
My guess is that a day’s work will barely put food on the table.
The only question is:
How long until it happens?