Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Of all the vices, gambling is the biggest. Being addicted doesn’t stop someone from being productive; neither does lying nor any of the seven deadly sins. Gambling, however, produces nothing. It’s ironic then that capitalism is gambling at its most evolved state. People know this but, like all addiction and avarice, they gleefully engage in it. The fact that investing is considered more noble than work is also very problematic. The biggest issue is, of course, that an investor’s goal is to not have to work. Investing is not productive except in the sense that an imaginary thing called “money” is bandied about. Somehow this investing game supersedes the requirements of real life. The man out in the fields growing & harvesting food is at the mercy of people who do absolutely nothing but still benefit from his labor, exploit it even. The parasitic nature of investing is bad enough even if all of the players in the game were playing by the same rules, but making the ethical situation worse, many of them are insiders, con men, or outright thieves. Supposedly, there are legal consequences to engaging in these unsavory activities but when you consider that members of the U.S. House and Senate are explicitly allowed to engage in insider trading at the expense of their constituents, it’s oversight for thee but not for me. Also, it’s impossible for the average person to know what’s a Ponzi scheme, which as it turns out, most companies are. Plus many of the people who have made fortunes by manipulating stocks are taking it from the retirement funds of the people who work. It seems unlikely that a society that praises the exploitation of its productive members by the gamblers can continue for long.