Caesar: The Ides of March are come.

Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar, but not gone.

George goes on to say it doesn't matter if you're paid in money or directly in wealth, because the money is a direct claim on the underlying wealth. It also doesn't matter if you get paid on commission. Imagine a whaling ship where each crewman gets paid a share out of whatever the ship catches.

— Julius Caesar, Shakespeare

'Money isn't real, George. It doesn't matter. It only seems like it does.' If only George had followed that advice, he would not have ended up an old broken down man in a prison dreaming of his daughter that never visits him. At the end, despite of all his mistakes, you can't help but feel truly sorry for George.
Fred Jung: Money isn't real, George. It doesn't matter. It only seems like it does. Young George: Are you gonna tell Mom that? - Fred Jung: Yeah, that's gonna be a tricky one.
The Intimate Apparel quotes below are all either spoken by George or refer to George. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one: ). Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer.
In the church, our least favorite topic to discuss is probably money. Part of that is cultural – we live in a culture where it is considered bad manners to discuss anything to do with money: how much we make, how much things cost, you know. Jesus didn’t have a problem talking about money at all – he did it regularly. SIXTEEN of the 38 parables talk about money and possessions.

GRANADA, NICARAGUA – Today, we stop the horses and circle the wagons.

For 19 years, we have been rolling along… exploring… discovering…

We began with the assumption that we didn’t “know” anything… so we kept our eyes open.

Now we know even less.

Campfire Tale

But we’ve covered a lot of ground. So, let’s take a brief pause to get our bearings… and to sit in front of the campfire and tell our tales.

New readers of the Diary are invited to pull up a log. You need to know what we’ve seen so far. It will help make sense of what you read tomorrow and in the future.

And, yes, this is going to take a little longer than a normal Diary…

We’ve been exploring a wilderness unknown to most humans – a money world that is very different from the way it is s’posed to be. In the press lately are reports of “fake news.” Well, guess what? The money system is fake, too.

If you are an investor… or preparing to retire… or just someone who is interested in how the world works, listen up.

Because it doesn’t work the way they tell you in the civics books… Economics 101… or in the mainstream press. It is much more complex, corrupt, and dangerous.

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Pareto’s “Foxes”

But let’s start with the government, which controls – directly or indirectly – about half the U.S. economy. It was not intended to be so big, so powerful, and so intrusive. But then, it hardly resembles the blueprint described in the Constitution.

Elections matter a whole lot less than you think.

As the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto explained, no matter what you call your government, over time, it will be taken over by the cunning insiders and hustlers he called “foxes.”

There are always some smart people able to manipulate, control, and subvert the government and use its police power (governments claim a monopoly on the use of violence) to get what they want.

What do these foxes want?

Money. Power. Status. The usual.

There is nothing underhanded about it. Nothing sinister or surprising. And you don’t need to believe in conspiracies to understand it.

The subversion takes place right out in the open. But because it is so different from what we are looking for, we don’t even see it.

But it’s really very simple: You spend your time earning money. The foxes spend their time figuring out how to get it from you – by taxation, legislation, regulation, or an ingenious phony-money system.

Deep State

The concept of the “Deep State” was first applied to countries such as Turkey and Egypt.

These are places where military-police-security insiders put screws to your thumbs, forcing you to do as you were told. Elections changed ruling parties and their leaders. But the real power was elsewhere.

Author Mike Lofgren popularized the use of the term in the U.S. But he had a much broader view of the Deep State. Lofgren:

The Deep State… is the story of our time. It’s the thin red line that runs through the war on terrorism, and a militarized foreign policy. Also the financialization and deindustrialization of the economy, and a social structure that has given us the most unequal income distribution in almost a century.

Lofgren worked as a Congressional staffer with “top secret” clearance for decades. He noticed that business went on as usual regardless of which party won the White House.

Gradually, he came to see that the public spectacle we see on TV and call “politics” is only a small part of the governing system.

The important decisions are made by the “foxes” – bureaucrats, lobbyists, campaign contributors, and crony businesses.

It was no accident, for example, that not a single member of Congress even bothered to read the Obamacare legislation – a sweeping program that affected almost everyone and altered one-seventh of the nation’s GDP.

They knew there was nothing they could do about it.

Hybrid Association

The Deep State is big… diffuse… and adaptable. Lofgren calls it a “hybrid association” of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry.

It is respectable – even prestigious – including university professors and think tank analysts as well as lobbyists and contractors. It doesn’t care which passport you hold, which party you vote for, or what you think.

It includes liberals and conservatives. Republicans as well as Democrats. Platonists and Aristotelians.

Internally, these different interests compete for money and power.

The “conservatives,” for example, want to direct more of your money to the military-security industries. The “liberals” want to favor cronies in the social-welfare industries.

Even within sectors, there is competition. The Navy may want more ships. The Air Force may want more planes. The Army may want more tanks.

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Bread and Circuses

Most of the news you hear focuses on these battles within the Deep State to see who will get the most of your money.

Elections shift the favors from one crony industry to another. The faces change. Budgets are adjusted, marginally. But the major goal of the insiders remains: to keep the power and money headed in

Money Isn't Real George It Doesn't Matter