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• send some amount of money to the person at the top of a list;
• remove that person's name from the list;
• put your own name at the bottom;
• send the letter off to a few of your friends;
• sit back and wait for the riches to roll in when YOUR name hits the top of oodles and oodles of other people's lists.

Anyway, today the con artists who devise these rip-offs disguise them under various types of camouflage, the most common being a device called multi-level marketing. What characterizes these systems is:

1. something, consisting of actual goods or services, is truly being sold;
2. what is REALLY being sold, though, is dealerships, "down line" participation, management trees;
3. there is, as with a chain letter, a promised exponential return on investment.

One time, an old friend who is a professional movie cameraman, came to town to shoot a film for a company named Amway, promoting their company, which is incidentally pretty much the prototype of the multi-level marketing firm. In fairness to Amway, they DO sell products and have successfully marketed their products this way for many years. I, personally, however, believe they are little different than the current crop of con artists. I asked my friend, therefore, if wasn't he a little troubled by the pyramid scam nature of his employer. He replied, "Brucie, I'm ashamed of you! You know perfectly well that CAPITALISM is a pyramid scam!"

And, you know what, he was right!

When I was quite a bit younger, I flirted with Marxism for a time, reading all K.M.'s work and participating in many "discussion groups" (usually fronts for recruiters of one or another communist group) to see exactly what was what. While I found many nuggets of information and wisdom among the writings of the leading Marxists of our time, my eventual response to the Big Picture being presented always seemed to be a resounding, "Say what!? You expect me to believe WHAT!?"

However, I will discuss the religious nature of left wing philosophy at another time. Today, I wish to focus on a piece of wisdom about which old Karl was dead right. Capitalism IS a pyramid scam. Oh, he wouldn't have put it quite that way. Instead, he recognized a simple but inherent flaw in the capitalist scheme of things. That is, if the people who actually make things are not paid the full value (measured any way you please) of what they produce, then they can not buy back the complete body of goods and services that they have produced. This must necessarily lead to periodic surpluses of both goods and services (which Marx called the "crisis of overproduction" and which capitalists call the "business cycle") leading to the collapse of uncompetitive companies, unemployment for some portion of the labor force and general malaise among the people. This does indeed happen, all the time. But, that is not the most serious problem. Capitalism deals with this problem in a way guaranteed to lead, eventual ly, to GENERAL collapse, MASSIVE unemployment and a REAL SNIT amongst the people.

You see, capitalist theoreticians long ago noted that a way out of this dilemma was to increase the total market faster than the increases in production. The problem with this "solution" is quite evident. The market is FINITE, while production can increase without limit.

Talk to you later...

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