In this week’s Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

• Cartel-driven Politics
  • The debates reveal the agenda of the deep-pocket donors
• Our Broken Health Care & Education Systems
  • They serve the cartels at the expense of their customers
• ‘Burnout’ Is Becoming An Epidemic
  • And this is during the “good times”?
• We Need A Movement Focused On “Meaning”
  • Isn’t that (and happiness) what really matters in life?

This week Chris and Charles take a close look at the platforms being promoted by the bevy of presidential hopefuls, and lament the lock-step commitment to the same “business as usual” that is destroying the prospects and well-being of everyday Americans.

Rather than looking critically at the “borrow and spend” addiction that is drowning us under an unserviceable mountain of debt and liabilities, the candidates are hustling to out-compete each other in spending $trillions more. All, of course, in service to the corporate cartels donating to their campaigns:

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Executive Summary

• The 4 higher education solutions of the Nearly Free University
• How higher education can be both cheaper & better than today's alternatives
• The catalytic roles played by both networking & network theory
• Making decisions for yourself/your children in this new emerging education spectrum

If you have not yet read The (Needed) Revolution Emerging in Education, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part I, we surveyed the foundations of Higher Education and its obsolete Factory Model.  We described its predatory reliance on student loans to feed its bloated cost structure and its failure to provide students with the skills needed in the economy of the 2010s; i.e., the emerging economy.

In essence, the foundation of higher education has been completely upended.  Knowledge and instruction, once costly and scarce, are now abundant and nearly free. The only pricing power left to Higher Education cartel is the artificial scarcity of credentials.

That is not the power of a productive system; it is the power of a predatory system.

The Four Higher Education Solutions of the Nearly Free University

There are four broad technology-enabled solutions that would free higher education from its current cartel limitations on opportunities and accreditation…

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In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles discuss:

• Our Social Contract is Broken
  • Has been re-written to benefit those in power
• Trust is Eroding
  • Faith in institutions like our justice & money systems is waning
• New Models are Needed
  • Starting with education

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Executive Summary

• Understanding the Fed's ability to impact (or not) health & education, pensions, and inflation
• What you can do to insulate yourself from the impacts of the Fed's financial interference
  • Mindset
  • Major expenses
  • Debt
  • Resilience
  • Income

If you have not yet read Part I: The Fed Matters Much Less Than You Think, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part I, we found that the supposedly omniscient Federal Reserve is irrelevant to the engine of real wealth creation (innovation) and actively inhibits the allocation of capital and labor to innovation by incentivizing speculation and malinvestment.

In Part II, we’ll look at what else matters that the Fed either negatively influences or does not control, as well as specific actions we can take as individuals to insulate ourselves from the collateral damage caused by misguided central bank policies.

Health and Education

We all know health and education are vital to individuals and the economy, and like everything else that matters, the Fed’s influence is limited to financial repression of interest rates that enables the Federal government to avoid the sort of healthy fiscal discipline that higher rates would demand. In other words, the Fed has widened the moat around government spending, protecting it from the hard choices that would accompany massive deficits and bond issuance in a free-market economy.

Public and Private Pensions

By at least one measure, the Fed’s repression of interest rates (designed to recapitalize the banks at no direct cost to the Fed or government) has cost savers $10.8 trillion in lost income. Since the majority of savings in the U.S. are in public and private pension plans, 401Ks, and IRAs (individual retirement accounts), the Fed’s repression of interest rates has pushed these income-security savings into risky speculative asset bubbles in stocks, bonds, and real estate, and critically undermined the financial health of pensions by radically reducing their low-risk, safe returns.

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