This is a companion piece to my article running right now at substack. I suggest you read both.
Here we go:
You
take a rundown city neighborhood; high crime rate, poverty, buildings
boarded up, rats, roaches, broken streetlights; and you buy up the whole
area at a bargain basement price.
You
tear down everything and you put up new buildings and you clear out all
the residents---and you bring in new renters and owners. Now you’ve got
nice apartments and cafes and art galleries and bike paths.
This is called gentrification.
Then
you enact bullshit claims about a pandemic, you lock that neighborhood
down, businesses close, many renters and owners go broke and move
away. Decay sets in. The crime rate rises. Illegal immigrants are bused
in and placed in empty buildings.
I call this REVERSE GENTRIFICATION.
THEN
you do exactly what you did the first time. You buy up the whole
distressed neighborhood at rock-bottom prices AGAIN, and you rebuild.
I name this GENTRIFICATION 2.
It’s profitable economics as it’s practiced these days.
I’ll present you with a good example. NEW YORK CITY. Pretty much all of it.
Go
out on the streets of New York and document all the changes. Hopefully,
you’ll make a deal for a 10-page photo-spread in Vogue Magazine.
You’ll
need a big glossy media outlet to give you lots of space every year for
an annual update. The up and the down and up of the Lower East Side,
the Upper West Side, Soho, the Village, etc.
Pump, dump, and pump again.
On and on.
Just like the stock market.
---Actually,
this whole method of economics is based on the notion that you’re never
going to find major paradigm-changing breakthroughs. You have to keep
cycling through the tearing down and building up, because nothing new is
really on the horizon.
And by new, I mean, for instance, a new source of energy. Such an abundant supply that it changes the game forever.
Which brings us to this question: has such a source already been discovered, and is it being hidden?
Is it in one or more of the several thousand patent applications which the US Patent Office has sequestered in limbo?
If
so, and if such technology is real and valid, what economic model would
best support it---assuming you could bring it to market.
Yes, bringing it to market is the rub. But I believe there are ways to accomplish it.
I hope to have more on these issues in the near future.
One
thing I’ll say for now. The idea of abundant energy for everybody for
free is misguided. There is no free lunch. Think, for example, of all
the streets and roads and highways in America. People tend to take them
for granted. Some people claim they’re there for everybody’s use---at no
charge. Those people have never heard of taxes.
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Substack, Twitter, and Gab at @jonrappoport)
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