It goes without say that when we engage in a productive activity that generates any sort of value, we do not get to keep the fruits of our labor in their entirety.  We pay for goods and services necessary for ours and our business’ survival and prosperity. Then there are always taxes.  In this interconnected world, we constantly enter arrangements with other people and organizations. Many of those arrangements are mutually beneficial and from the biological point of view, can be called symbiotic. Other arrangements, however, are severely skewed in favor of only one party at the expense of the other. The one who takes advantage becomes a predator or a parasite, and the loser becomes prey or a host. What is the difference between a predator and a parasite? A predator kills you first and then feeds on your carcass. Unless you have a death wish, you would normally know better to avoid such killers if you can spot and identify them in time.  Parasites, on the other hand need you to keep living on, often for a long time but at least for a while so they can feed and breed. They need to be sneakier, and you may be even the one inviting them to the table where your blood is served as the main course, at least metaphorically.  Biological parasites can feed on anything our bodies consist of and sometimes even on our emotional energy if they happen to walk on two legs.  This post, however, is about the leeches thriving off our hard productive work and our finances. 

The list of individual parasites lurking in the alleys can be endless, but most of them fall in just a few categories. If left unchecked, they will stymie yours and your business’ financial health, force your finances to wither, shrivel, and perhaps ultimately meet an ugly end. What makes parasites’ jobs easier is a system of beliefs constantly injected into and maintained in the society by the media, educational institutions, and uncle Bob at your next barbecue. Those detrimental beliefs range from the liberal agenda to the myth of home ownership “dream.”  Charlatan business “coaches” and their teachings are a species of their own.  All that creates fertile ground for parasites who now more easily find warm bodies who believe this regular bloodletting is inevitable and sometimes even desirable! So let us bring those ugly parasites to light.

Employers  

Why even mention it here? If you still think someone who buys the irreplaceable time of your life at the lowest possible rate and turns it into maximum profit is your friend, you are beyond help. Keep slaving!  Sit, Stay, and Pant for a treat in the form of a measly bonus, a puny raise (after you’ve  slaved enough extra hours and weekends for free to show your dedication), or even just a good quarterly evaluation, a commendation stating you are an outstanding pet. So jump, wag your tail, rejoice, and try even harder to make someone rich! Good puppy!  Nevertheless there are temporary benefits of being an employee that go beyond simply paying your bills: you can learn something valuable for your future endeavors.  Most of the time, however, once a person sets foot on this selling-time-for-money path, the trap door slams behind, and another permanent employee is initiated into a lifetime of servitude.

Banks and similar lenders

Under the right circumstances, a straightforward loan is the most benign of all the parasitic arrangements one can enter. It is almost symbiotic with the exception that one side ends up working hard and the other just waits for the money to come in. But joking aside, at least a loan is a closed ended deal. All the terms are agreed upon from the very beginning, and when the bill comes due, you pay it with predetermined interest, and you are free.  If your business borrowed $10,000 and made $10,000,000, you still owe just $10,000 plus interest which cannot be said about the kind of deals offered by the next player on this list. When it comes to loans used to finance one’s lifestyle choices rather than business growth, however, the situation is far less rosy. A 30-year term common in so many mortgages seriously reeks of permanence. And with all the interest charged upfront we are looking at a much more voracious kind of parasite.  And, assuming you are serious about paying your bills, you are locking yourself into decades of slavery selling your time away at the lowest going rate and not spending it on better money making options.

Investors

Watch out now! We are entering the territory of seriously ruthless parasites. A bank lending you money for a few percentage points is a pussy cat compared to an investor. Let us be clear: they are not angels unless there are “angels” that fly around latching on to their hosts with little hope of being pried off until the bitter end.  They may even deposit eggs so their maggots can continue the feast. Investor is someone is offering you money in exchange for a share in your business. It is a one-shot deal on the part of the investor but a constant noose around your neck. Now you need to worry about growing your business and making it successful which is challenging enough while the investor can go back to sleep and do NOTHING (perhaps except for occasional lame attempts at micromanagement).  This kind of a “deal” has no end: even if you want this parasite out of your life, you cannot just flick it off. The parasite now owns a chunk of your business that may be now worth 10 or 100 times the initial investment for doing NOTHING. They can take their talk about taking risk somewhere else. It is not work: it is gambling. They are in it just for the money. They are parasites to the core and often eventually destroy the business through interfering with its management or forcing its sale so they can cash in whenever they please. If a business owner is desperate or impatient enough to raise capital quickly and sells his or her soul and business to the parasitic investor, he or she should not expect to own this business in the foreseeable future. It will be taken over, gutted, plundered, or sold out in a feeding frenzy. It happens all the time to entrepreneurs who give away control of their company in exchange for instant cash. So the best thing say to a blood sucking investor is: Take a walk, swim, or slither depending on your preferred method of locomotion!

Trade Unions and Organized Crime

Why group them together? Because the unions and the mob are essentially the same: they both are racketeering organization robbing people of their livelihood. They use exactly the same methods to achieve their goals: extortion, intimidation, and corruption of government officials.  These extortion organizations easily turn to violence. It is not surprising that the mob has infiltrated and is in control of many of the unions with union bosses either being mobsters themselves or the mob’s puppets.  Unions and organized crime are little more than twins, both evil, and the best way of avoiding them is doing business in a location where they don’t have a foothold. Not surprisingly, a location free of the mob also tends to have limited power of the unions, and the opposite is also true.

The Government

It is the ultimate parasite with virtually unlimited power. To make things worse, there are few good options of avoiding this parasite. In modern so-called “democracies,” the government derives much of its power from ensuring parasitic existence for vast swaths of the population.  Given its virtually limitless and unstoppable reach, does the government even make a worthy subject to spend a great deal of time discussing here? Resistance is futile anyway, and this is not a political blog in the first place.  But this is exactly the reason it is important to understand this father of all parasites. Know your enemy! And when or if the time comes to part ways with it in search of friendlier and smaller parasites on greener pastures, it would help to have a long standing appreciation of the issue. Understanding this parasite may also help anticipate its future moves and plan accordingly.

But first, let us look on the brighter side. We do need a government to have some structure in the society and to provide basic services. Anarchy is as utopian as a totalitarian paradise.  Therefore to some extent, the relationship with the big parasite would appear almost symbiotic if not for the gross inequality of power between the government (parasite) and its subject (host). This uncomfortable relationship is more like a deal with the devil; a deal you cannot readily opt out of. Now let’s look at the ugly sides of parasitism of the government that dwarf its usefulness.

Wealth redistribution. “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.” The authorship of these quotes is subject to debate but history confirms the truth of those words.  Marxist class warfare and ensuing socialistic government policies create a path of no return.  Once that venom is injected in the society it will eat it from within until the empty shell collapses. First, a critical mass of the population becomes dependent on and addicted to government handouts that in turn are based on robbing productive members of the society, creating an atmosphere of entitlement, and growing a bloated wasteful government bureaucracy.  After the ranks of freeloaders swell, government money runs out, and nobody is left to confiscate it from,  the society is doomed. The government dependents will not give up their piece of free pie and will riot if they have to, just like they do in Europe. Taking away the government goodies becomes a taboo and political suicide.  Europe is already starting to face the music, and the US may soon follow suit.  So what can just one person do in the middle of this developing maelstrom? Needless to say fighting windmills is not a wise course of action. The best thing one can do is to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible while it is still possible and make plans to get out of the way of the decaying carcass quickly enough so it doesn’t take one down with it. Now let us examine wealth redistribution systems that go hand in hand with the existence of parasitic government.

Welfare is the most obviously parasitic program since the recipients do not work and just receive money confiscated from someone who does. Some welfare recipients may consider constant breeding in order to get an even larger government check hard work, but it would be best to leave that subject for another post.  Let us not forget the large bureaucracy needed to distribute the welfare goodies. Those government employees technically work for their money but they are still part of the parasitic wealth redistribution system.  The welfare, however wasteful, probably does not create a major direct impact on the economy but it presents a much more serious threat to the society.  The threat comes from the ability of welfare and other government handout recipients to vote and elect politicians who guarantee the welfare money to keep coming by robbing productive members of the society and buying the votes of welfare parasites with it. What other charity allows its beneficiaries to dictate its affairs? If the Founding Fathers thought taxation without representation was bad enough to start a revolution, what would they have done today? Taxation without representation is back in full swing and on top of that we now have representation without taxation. A double whammy! Something to think about…

Taxation system based on unequal contribution to the government budget while receiving the same benefits and no additional voting power is a more but nonetheless parasitic system. Progressive taxation system was demanded in the Communist Party Manifesto more than 150 years ago and has been ultimately implemented in the US and many other countries. Even with a flat tax rate higher earners would be contributing much more than lower earners while still having one vote per person. Progressive tax system takes this parasitic arrangement to a much higher level.  In addition, welfare redistribution system is hidden in government programs such as Social Security.   A redistribution system is already built into Social Security in its current form despite caps on the benefits and reduced tax rate beyond a certain income threshold. Marxists like Obama & Co want to tax the entire income while keeping the benefit capped thus turning the program into an overtly parasitic welfare program. It is almost certain the negative economic impact of socialism will continue to grow with more expensive and extensive wealth redistribution programs such as ObamaCare imposed on the society.

Government corruption.  The Government constantly gains more and more power to interfere with the free market and dictate how, where, and with whom one can or must do business. This is accomplished through regulation, creation of privileged status for certain groups, special deals and tax breaks, grants, and bailouts. Extreme corruption inevitably follows. As a result, large businesses and organizations focus most of their efforts not on competing in the open market but rather on electing and corrupting cooperative government officials. Unions do the same. By doing so, they become parasites feeding off those who do not have political influence and are forced to pay much higher taxes and deal with an insurmountable burden of compliance with every regulation the government imposes. Businesses are forced to hire employees whose work is dedicated exclusively to compliance with government’s totalitarian edicts. Smaller businesses in particular find themselves at a huge disadvantage or are even forced close their doors yielding their market share to competitors in bed with corrupt politicians. Reports often emerge that corporations spend much more on lobbying than on paying their tax bill. The tax code is tens of thousands of pages long.  Little by little, the US Government has become one of the most corrupt cartels in the world and certainly the largest and the wealthiest one!

Runaway government intrusion and control.  It must be a natural tendency of any oppressive organization to grab more and more power and grow into a monster turning subjects into slaves and feeding off them.  In the United States, with the original constitutional checks and balances all but gone the government has become a giant parasite with two corrupt organizations in a death match to wrestle controls of this monster out of each other’s’ hands while feeding the sheep the fairy tale of “democracy.” Which brings us to the last point: what, if anything, can one do to shake of this biggest parasite off your back?

Eduardo Saverin knew exactly what to do – he just dumped the US citizenship. Whether he was looking to save a bunch of millions on taxes from Facebook IPO windfall or just got tired of the increasingly hostile anti-business environment in the US is not very important. But the reaction of those who have built their careers on being corrupt parasites, buying votes of pawn parasites and thriving on class warfare was quite predictable:  Chuck Schumer and the likes were quick to bully Saverin and propose draconian measures for those who just want freedom from the regime that only exists to ensure its own power. But that is exactly what parasites do when you try to remove them: they dig in even deeper!

Conclusion

If you have talent, stamina, and motivation, there will always be hordes of parasites of all sizes, both individuals and organizations all the way up to the government determined to feed on you because they don’t know any other way. It is their nature. Some of them are easier to spot and avoid, while others are masters of disguise.  Preventing those who can be thwarted from feeding can enable a dedicated individual to grow one’s wealth faster and in a less wasteful way.  Then at some point that person will be in the position to laugh in the face of the father of all parasites and sail into the sunset away from the decaying society the giant parasite is feeding on.

It all sounds good in theory but in order to follow Saverin’s footsteps one needs to be financially strong enough and to be prepared to deal with the temporary inconvenience of envenomation by chuck schumers of the world.  Until that happens, there is no point complaining about the Great Parasite. Indignation only wastes energy and creates the paralyzing feeling of powerlessness. The ultimate goal should be to get strong despite all the blood suckers, big and small, feeding off you and not fret about them until you are strong enough to tell them to shove it from a safe location somewhere in a tropical paradise.

Tags: financial freedom, freedom, personal freedom