by Mike Adams
Throughout human history, most slavery has been enforced physically — with whips and chains. You either did what you were told or they beat you into submission.
Most modern people mistakenly believe slavery has been largely eradicated across our world. They don’t see people shackled in chains or being ordered what to do by their owners. Modern culture no longer accepts overt slavery, right? …Or does it?
As it turns out, slavery is alive and well on our planet, and its shackles are made of numbers, not steel. Those who are enslaved under this new system are people who fail to understand simple math: numbers, compounding interest, loans, investments and so on. You show me a person who can’t do math, and I’ll show you someone who functions as a slave to the system.
In this article, I show you how to escape mathematical slavery and live as a free person. But first, you need to understand how mathematical slavery really works.
Let’s begin with WAGES.
Wages
There’s a good reason why people who earn incomes reported on IRS W-2 forms are often called “wage slaves.” It’s not a derogatory term; it’s more of a cry for help. “Help! I’m a slave to my paycheck and I can’t get ahead!”
There’s a reason you can’t get ahead: the banks and the government have fine-tuned your “payments” to them (taxes, loans, fees, etc.) in order to extract the maximum amount from your paycheck while leaving you so little of your own that you can never get ahead enough to stop working.
Your car payment and house payment, for example, are precisely calculated to make sure you can’t pay either of them off ahead of schedule. They’re mathematically selected to guarantee you can only “squeak by” and barely pay more than the monthly interest, thereby extending your loan principles into the far distant future.
Mathematically impaired people, of course, don’t even know the difference between the “interest” and “principle” sections of a loan repayment schedule. Hence, they do not realize they can actually save themselves a small fortune on their home loans by making HALF the normal payment TWICE as often (every two weeks instead of once a month, essentially). This costs you nothing extra but can save as much as $100,000 or more on the life of a home loan.
Wage slaves genuinely believe that the parts of their paycheck “withheld” by the government are needed to run the government. This delusion has been hammered into their heads for so long that they simply cannot come to grips with the reality: the government can create all the money it needs to fund itself. It does not need to take it from taxpayers. The entire purpose of the tax code is not to raise money but to control the wage slaves.
Home loans
Mathematically impaired individuals really get “taken to the bank” when it comes to home loans. Through the entire process of getting loan pre-approval, making an offer on an house, having the offer accepted and then closing the home to make it “yours,” these people are getting royally screwed up one side and down the other.
For starters, they do not understand that they are paying (a loan origination fee) for the “right” to pay a bank over 200% more than their house actually cost. Yep, if you take out a 30-year home loan at any interest rate exceeding 5.5%, you actually end up paying for your home TWICE in terms of total payments to the bank.
And don’t even get me started on variable rate loans, “interest only” loans and other scammy vehicles that keep people financially enslaved.
Insurance
Insurance is where mathematically impaired individuals really pay the price. Most of the profits in the insurance industry come from people who make terrible decisions about what level of deductibles to apply to their insurance policies.
The way this works is that the lower your deductible, the more you’re getting ripped off. On auto insurance, any deductible under $2500 is a waste of money. Agents “sell” it to mathematically impaired individuals by saying, “You should buy a deductible of just $250, that way if something happens, the maximum you’ll have to pay out of pocket will be $250.”
To a mathematically impaired individual, that sounds perfectly reasonable. What they don’t grasp, however, is that the additional fees they are paying for the lower deductible result in them paying far more than $250 in additional insurance fees, usually within just the first 12 months. They would be much smarter to buy a far higher deductible, save the difference in the insurance rates and set it aside to cover the larger deductible if something happens.
Mathematically impaired individuals don’t realize the insurance companies have already run all the numbers through their computers and determined that a person with a lower deductible has an increased risk of causing a payout. Thus, rates are much higher.
These same principles apply to all forms of insurance, not just auto insurance. Generally speaking, people who are obsessed with buying insurance for everything are the very same people who are allowing themselves to be ripped off all the time. I’ve known people who buy cancer insurance, flood insurance, fire insurance, theft insurance, data loss insurance, work injury insurance and a dozen other policies. It’s almost an addiction for them, but at the end of the day they have no money left because they’re sent it all to the insurance companies in a foolish effort to try to “eliminate risk” in their life.
Here’s some stern advice: Number one, you can’t eliminate all the risk in your life. And number two, insurance companies go broke all the time, meaning that you might be paying insurance into a company that goes belly-up right when you need them.
The Lottery
People who can’t do math love to play the lottery. That’s because they are incapable of comprehending their odds of winning, so the state extracts yet more money from them in order to feed its own endless budgetary needs.
Lotteries are a way the state steals from the poor. Wealthy people don’t play the lotto, primarily because wealthy people tend to have a far better grasp on mathematics.
National debt
A typical mathematically impaired American does not know the difference between the national debt and the budget deficit. They think that when Obama says something like, “The budget deficit is actually decreasing…” that it means the national debt is being paid down. Or even that the budget deficit itself is getting smaller.
What Obama really means, however, is that the rate of growth of the budget deficit is smaller. This is the government equivalent of a “budget cut.”
Because mathematically disadvantaged people do not understand deficits and debts, they are incapable of discerning which candidate for public office is actually committed to shrinking deficits and paying off debts. Thus, they vote for whoever talks the most convincingly, and that’s how we end up electing the best liars rather than the best economists.
Investments
The stock market is going up! Must be a great time to get in, right?
It’s all a scam, of course, designed to extract money from people who cannot do math. Most people, for example, don’t understand that the “Dow” is a compiled metric of the market that is constantly re-worked to show high numbers by dumping poor performers and adding high performers. The same is true with the Nasdaq. These market index numbers are specifically manipulated to make you think the market is doing extremely well at all times.
Then there’s the fact that as the money supply gets flooded with cheap money from the Fed, it causes all stocks to appear to go UP in value because they are all being purchased with increasingly worthless dollars from an eroding money supply.
A typical American thinks, “The Dow is up another 20 points today! That’s good!” but they fail to realize the Dow is a contrived market index whose primary purpose is to sucker new investors into the system so that the market insiders can (legally) separate them from their money.
10 ways to free yourself from the modern era of mathematical slavery
The one thing different about modern-day slavery is that you can free yourself from its grip. It only requires that you educate yourself in basic mathematics and begin to use your knowledge to separate yourself from banks, lotteries, investment scams and other vehicles of financial confiscation.
Here’s the true path to financial freedom that frees you from mathematical slavery:
#1) Develop a valuable skill and use it to earn money.
#2) Live well BELOW your means so that you can save at least 20% of your after-tax income.
#3) When you buy your first house, pay it off as quickly as possible — within five years at most.
#4) Never buy another house using bank loans again. Always pay cash and you’ll never be living under somebody else’s roof.
#5) NEVER take out loans on vehicles. Buy your vehicles outright, even if it means driving something older and less expensive.
#6) NEVER buy insurance that isn’t required by law. If you are forced by the state to purchase insurance, get the highest deductible allowed. Set aside enough money to cover any catastrophic loss, and you’ll always be ahead of the game vs. buying insurance for it.
#7) NEVER play the lottery. The state has enough suckers to fund itself.
#8) Consider starting your own business. This is the one true path to economic freedom. It will require time, money and effort, but it offers you no limit on your earnings. Plus, it gives you a wealth of ways to legally deduct all your business expenses.
#9) Don’t listen to mainstream “investment advisors,” none of whom warned anybody about the dot-com crash or the housing bubble crash. These people are paid sales agents for mutual funds and other investment vehicles “for the masses.” If you really want to invest in something valuable, invest in your own education via books, DVDs, seminars or graduate degrees that offer real, practical skills.
#10) Diversify your savings. Never put all your eggs in one basket… or even one currency. Be wary of the coming financial collapse, bank holidays, bank account confiscations, etc. Make sure you can protect the wealth you’ve earned.
And stop watching television! Nothing makes you more mathematically stupid than CNBC.
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