Do

• End the empire, bring home the troops.
• End restrictive security measures at the border and encourage tourism.
• Open door policy for skilled immigrants and entrepreneurs. This is counter intuitive when unemployment is rising, but absolutely necessary.
• Tax-incentives to move south where real estate is still affordable.
• Lower property tax rate for foreigners who spend less than 6 months a year in their American property and have no children enrolled in school.
• Raise interest rates. Let strong banks eat the weak. Find some fraud and send a few executives to prison then make a big deal about cleaning up Wall Street.
• Eliminate the capital gains tax to encourage investment. Very few people have any gains anyway.
• Sell “Re-building America bonds” to the public. A slightly higher yield than regular treasuries, only available to people with US addresses. Use the money to create cheap-energy free-trade manufacturing zones in Detroit and somewhere out west to encourage the return of factories. Also build high-speed rail along the coasts, should be a more cost effective way to move people than airplanes.
• Break up the big media conglomerates.
• When the economy recovers make it illegal for the Federal government to deficit spend and increase capital reserve requirements for the banks considerably. Never stop reminding everyone how stupid bankers are, so we discourage intelligent mathematicians from wasting their abilities engineering financial instruments.
• Government public relations campaign (propaganda) to encourage modest city living and discourage worthless college degrees for the sake of experiencing college. End the “live for today” consumption oriented culture and convince people to roll up their sleeves and get back to work, dammit.
• Stop worshipping athletes and actors, tax the hell out of everything entertainment (movies and music) to reduce their pay if needed. Declare war on pop culture, encourage the return of public intellectuals.

Don’t do:

• Borrow more money from foreigners.
• Bailout bankrupt companies.
• “Stimulate” the economy with inflation.

I am naturally repelled by “cool” things. I liked SUV’s until they became cool. I liked Apple computer until they became cool. When I was 4 or 5 years old I used to tell people my favorite color was yellow… I actually hated yellow, but I chose it because everybody else hated it too. What does that say about me?

While I’m sure there are many such people living in urban areas, in my experience, all the people I would include in this box have grown up in comfortably upper-middle class suburban neighborhoods. They have never experienced great hardship, they have never experienced great oppression, they have never experienced great success. They have no understanding of poverty and they have no understanding of wealth. They are just strolling through life with moderate ambitions and moderate risks.

None of that is necessarily a problem, I don’t think suburbia is going to survive $300 oil, but there is nothing inherently wrong with mock country living when it’s affordable. Many of those descriptions apply to me, I certainly don’t think people need to experience every possible situation another has experienced in order to understand and sympathize. My point is simply that in my experience there are two types of people — those with vision and those with blinders. Those with vision can understand beyond their experiences and those with blinders can not. Those with vision are capable of seeing through the rhetoric and analyzing not only the short term effects, but also the long term effects and indirect risks associated with some idea or policy, while those with blinders… not so much.

For example, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created the expressed intent was to make mortgages more affordable to ordinary Americans. They did exactly that, which ultimately created such massive demand for housing that a bubble developed and the system became so dependent on increasing prices that any decline would destabilize the entire economy. Now their function is to maintain un-affordable prices by stabilizing the market at historically high levels. The well-intentioned plan has resulted in the exact opposite result — a misallocation of resources of stratospheric proportions — as is the case with many of these ridiculous ideas. The socialist goal of providing state assistance for housing (including central bank manipulation of the interest rates) accomplished its goal, then bankrupted the entire financial system of the most powerful empire in human history… No matter how much you wish it weren’t so, the market will always overwhelm these stupid ideas.

And who are they blaming? Free market capitalists! What is their solution? Yet another government plan that further centralizes power and money in the hands of progressively dumber politicians! Haven’t you people just lived through 8 years of Bush? Do you actually still believe the checks and balances are strong enough to contain an even more powerful version at some point in the future? Give me a break, why don’t you people learn.

Which brings me back to the title of this article, the suburban upper-middle class delusion syndrome. Enough said.

I find it so frustrating having to face the same tired old arguments every time I discuss important issues with people. It doesn’t matter how much logic or how many facts you drop on the table, some people always fall back to asinine arguments such as, “everybody says real estate is the best investment you’ll ever make except for you, do you think the whole world is wrong and you are right, that you are the smartest person in the world?” First of all, the whole world will never agree on anything. Second of all, how do you know I’m not the smartest person in the world?

In my experience, I have found that conforming minds become lazy minds, and lazy minds become stupid minds. Never accept any opinion at face value. Understand the reason someone holds an opinion and judge those reasons, not the conclusions of people who may very well have inferior abilities.

Equity investing is not supposed to be the equivalent of gambling, but here we are nonetheless. People do not seek profitable or plausible business models, they seek trends and insider knowledge of major transactions from those who move markets with the stroke of a pen. Too many profitable corporations are not paying dividends. The media is controlled. We never know from month to month how much money will potentially flood the market from unscrupulous central bankers trying to further inflate already unjustifiable prices.

The game is rigged, and the end result of our multi-decade gambling addiction, oblivious to these obvious inconsistencies, is a hopelessly bloated financial system accustomed to unsustainable returns and destined to implode upon itself. They got too comfortable screwing us for too long. It reminds me of the high-tech collapse. After the bubble popped, it was so obvious to every insider that astronomical returns could not be sustained forever, it was just another unfortunate case of “irrational exuberance” of course. Silly investors. Cough.

The emperor has no clothes.

But unfortunately, with this casino as with any other, the house always wins. Translated into Wall Street speak — don’t fight the Fed. They will inflate, oh they will inflate. If you hold US dollars you’ve got a target on your back and Bernanke is on the hunt.

Such people should not require constant validation from those around them, unless they have other deficiencies. Some might call that arrogance, I prefer pragmatism and confidence. How can the acceptance of truth be a negative? No arrogant person can be lacking in confidence, they travel together, the difference is only a matter of perception. Barring any psychological issues, whichever term you prefer, if you have none there is probably something wrong with you. Maybe you should join a gym.

The same holds true for intelligence, knowledge and generally any skill set. If you’re good, you know you’re good. It’s that simple. When an undisputed fact is presented for your consideration you have only two options, either you accept reality or you accept living in a state of delusion. If you’re not at least a little bit arrogant you’re probably not very good at anything.

This does not prevent those with false delusions of value from crowding the stage, but for those who are genuine, the fakes stand out like elephants.

The world needs some arrogance because people who have none have no incentive to challenge themselves. The only rational justification of any attempt at extraordinary achievement is a belief in your ability to succeed beyond the limits of what has already been reached. That is arrogance, that is confidence, and that is damn important for human advancement. It takes an arrogant person to do anything of value, unless you get lucky.

Society’s attempt to equalize every individual reminds me of a child’s unsuccessful attempt to push a square block through a round hole; it doesn’t work because it doesn’t fit. People are not the same, get over your childish ideological opposition to reality. Instead of suppressing the best among us with guilt, jealously and socialist policies, imagine a world in which all extraordinary people were deluded into believing they are average, then realize how grateful you are the world has not been deprived of the benefits derived from their contributions. Join me here on earth, you won’t like the state of delusion, they don’t have running water.

I am arrogant, if you have a problem with that… I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

I love learning new things, but learning on my own or in the workforce has proven to be much more effective than a formal education. The vast majority of my daily activities are informed and guided by knowledge earned on my own time, in my own way, for a fraction of the cost in dollars and days, relative to my university education. Other than mainstream recognition and a feeling of achievement as I framed that ridiculous $20,000 piece of paper, university education for me has proven to be a colossal waste of time.

I did well, but I did well mostly regurgitating and repeating ideas and processes developed by other people for other purposes. As I wondered from lecture to lecture, I was confident I already knew enough about my discipline to enter the workforce because I cared enough to learn on my own. Hanging around for all those years just to rubber stamp my knowledge was incredibly frustrating.

Exposure to a broad base of material is obviously necessary to build a solid base of understanding in any discipline, but it’s painfully useless for people who have no interest in jumping through the various bureaucratic educational hoops required to get the societal acceptance associated with a degree, which is unfortunately required to get one foot through any door.

When students have no interest in a certain topic, even if they manage to pick up a few useful pieces of information during a course, they will likely forget everything a few weeks after the exam anyway. And if by some miracle they manage to retain a tiny bit of knowledge, the likelihood it will be useful in the workforce is quite low.

People need a broad base of understanding to be competent in many disciplines, I get that, but I am posing a much broader societal question. If the people who are likely to absorb that knowledge would have done so with or without a formal education, and those who will not absorb that knowledge never need it anyway, does it make economic sense to send millions of people in their prime to educational institutions that will leave them with a negligible net increase in knowledge and ability? Wouldn’t it make more sense to concentrate more resources per student on the few students who actually want to be there and will actually benefit from the experience? Do we really need to educate everyone as though they will enter academia? How about some more projects and hands on experience?

I’m not arguing against education. I am asking if it makes sense to educate, often at public expense, millions of people who will achieve no more with a degree than was possible without a degree. People who are as healthy as they will ever be, as energetic as they will ever be, as mobile as they will ever be, and as willing to work for less than they will ever be. If you want find a primary reason manufacturing has moved abroad, maybe you should start here. Imagine how many cars and televisions we could have produced with an army of university students working happily for $10/hour, full time, in shifts around the clock.

The socialist idea that everybody should get an education is destroying this country and it’s destroying the universities. The infrastructure required to give an equal opportunity to millions of first year students has a cost. In order to pay those bills, educational institutions around the country are forced to either lower standards or pass undeserving students to continue the stream of tuition dollars a little longer.

Honestly, if I felt as though my degree actually certified that I learned something, maybe I would have cared. There was a time university graduates actually knew something, those days are gone. In time, as more people are exposed to our army of educated morons the mainstream recognition once associated with an undergraduate degree will disappear altogether, and people will then be forced to waste even more time in post-graduate studies just to begin their careers at the bottom.

What a waste.

The amount of capital required to start your own independent operation varies greatly by industry, but in my case, there is nothing any employer would be willing to provide that I can’t afford to provide myself.

I suppose it’s easier to let other people assume all the risk and simply trade your time and energy for a small sum of money, even if that sum is worth less than whatever it is you produce, but doesn’t the bureaucracy, laziness and stupidity of your co-workers get to you?

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit and I find being forced to work in a tiny box (mentally and physically) unbearable and suffocating.