Thou shalt not covet

Another day, another favorite Youtube video taken down (as usual, for “copyright” infringement).

Patent royalty claims are invading the 3d printing community.

I cannot shop online without later being spammed to death by Google ads offering me what I already bought, or decided NOT to buy.

Under the guise of protecting the environment, cities are conning rural land owners into selling their development rights to cities. The dishonest way the phrase “development rights” is misused is appalling. There is a conscious effort to make people think that a purchase of development rights means that the rights are extinguished, and the property is somehow “protected.”Why does it take a lawyer to understand that whoever owns the development rights has a right to develop the land, and that cities can — and will — develop it?

In 2010, when Ann Arbor bought development rights to pristine land known as the Nixon Farm, people naturally thought it was being “preserved.”

Now — a mere four years later — the city wants to build 1200 units on it:

Nearby residents still aren’t convinced.

“We’re going to be destroying a lot of natural areas, face it,” said Roger Kuhlman, who lives in the subdivision immediately west of Nixon Farm South.

“To me, that’s a pretty strange kind of environmentalism, to go out and add a lot of people to the city, destroy wetlands.”

Poor fools. They just don’t get that whoever has the development rights has the right to develop. The city of Ann Arbor is a huge developer, but more crooked, because it pretends to be just the opposite. Development is one thing, but development in the name of opposing development is positively Orwellian. As to why people continuing to fall for this nonsense, who knows? Where’s the Sierra Club? Why aren’t greenie weenies howling in protest? Are they being paid off?

But I digress from my rant.

MBAs scheme over how to get more money from consumers for ever-shoddier merchandise. The price of lightbulbs has risen from cents to many dollars, and the waste is now toxic (in the name of “the environment”). Portion sizes are deliberately decreased for the same product while the price remains the same or higher (in the name of “health.”)

I see continual attempts to pick my pocket by government and big business (as if that’s a distinction anymore) and of course complain about it all the time impotently.

This morning is no different, except I had an additional revelation so disturbingly obvious that it shouldn’t have warranted “revelation” status.

Everybody wants someone else’s money. 

The rest is just how to get it.

That’s pretty much it, although I realize there are exceptions, because there will always be saints, altruists, hermits, and principled kooks. But unless they are independently wealthy, even they will want money from somewhere. It is a hopeless human condition, and it has led to “entitlement” based schemes like socialism, welfare statism, communism, or the much devalued “work ethic” which posits that if you work hard enough, you will have “earned” the money others give to you. All are systems of morality which underlie man’s attempt to grapple with the problem of wanting other people’s money.

Naturally, whether you earned your money by hard work or had it extracted from others and then handed to you out of “entitlement,” whatever you get is never enough. And just as naturally, others will try to extract as much of it from you as they possibly can.

That’s the human playing field. No wonder the Communists killed so many people in their fruitless attempt to rejigger the game.