Featured image by Eli Duke. Follow the link for more of this artist’s work.
Ted Cruz, Rashida Tlaib, Tim Pool, Michael Knowles. These four seemingly disparate individuals are rallying around the GameStop rebellion. For those not in the know, a group of Redditors have rallied stocks that about 5,000 hedge funds have short positions in. The funds borrow shares to sell, hoping that the value of the stocks drop in order to pocket the difference in values between the sold price, and the rebuy price. The Redditors, using their sheer numbers, mitigate the risk of their members. The firms, having consolidated their resources into many fewer hands, suffer losses to the tune of billions of dollars.
I have said many times, that a government that is large enough to give you everything is powerful enough to take it all away. Much of the same can be said of corporations. Companies that have unlimited funding have unlimited power. Their influence has a vast reach, as they can go on the airwaves, online, in social media, and through the press, telling you that the companies that they are targeting aren’t doing well, shifting public perception, encouraging people to sell stocks, lowering the price, and increasing their margins.
Decentralization favors the many. In business, in society, and in government. Decentralization offers many more choices, benefitting individuals because competition lowers costs and improves quality. We’ve lived for so long in a golden age, letting the centralization of wealth and influence grow and fester. Now that the age of bread and circuses is over, we see that we’ve lived fat and happy for a long time, and now that we are struggling, we see just how rife the corruption is.
The people are tired, frustrated, and driven to the brink from the never-ending and ever-shifting myriad of lockdowns, restrictions, and all we’ve had to show for it is two checks over the course of a year. The relief for the “little people” to “rescue” them from the government lockdowns. They’ve had enough. They don’t care. They don’t want the government to give them anything. They don’t want a check. They want to go to work, they want to support their families. They want to have structure, and more importantly, purpose.
Don’t forget the purpose. It is fun and funny to stick it to the man. But the purpose is to remind everyone that the consolidation of power, wealth, and influence is both counterproductive and morally wrong for the individual.