Reply #227: I was once told by a financial expert that if you could see a bulb lighting up above the head of

[Joe Chi Minh]

everyone who was heavily in debt, you'd be very surprised at the people concerned. Of course, monied people use loans to invest for profit. With businesses they call it leverage, don't they?

"Lots of rich people use OPM all the time, and file for bankruptcy as often as they can , but somehow a stigma is attached to 'common people' who desperately need to file and struggle for years, only to end up losing it all anyway."

That reminds me of the way in which our trash newspapers in the UK, all corporatist rags, have regular campaigns demonising so-called "welfare scroungers" and the ones who "work a flanker", moonlighting for often, doubtless, a much needed bit of extra money.

Yet in the UK, the rich are permitted to hire lawyers to look for tax loop-holes, to avoid taxation by using tax havens, and to go bankrupt to the tune of hundreds of millions, maybe be billions for all I know; then after a few years set up another company. I don't know what the situation is now, but for a long time, crooks would set up one company after another, buying stock without paying, selling it, then going bankrupt, all income being virtually net profit.

All the money of the rich is made on the backs of the honest, hard-working citizens of our respective countries. Ironically, I believe it was Adam Smith, the father of economics, although actually a moral philospopher, and who the far-right have had the shameless temerity to claim to be their "guru", who explicitly stated that evident truth, as he, at least, was aware that everything depended on the existence of society, and consequently its "sine qua non" of sympathy between people, for one another.

Smith even went so far as to say that the purpose of government is to defend the rich from the poor, and "People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices."

It was why he warned in the direst tones against allowing businessmen in government, i.e. their self-interest was too narrow, and very much tended to be hostile to the common weal. Chance would be fine thing, today! We'd probably be able to count our representatives on one hand.