Rick Kelo – Eating Like Kings in America

In the United States, consumers secretly control everything. This is a product of our capitalist system where individuals are constantly demanding more and more goods at cheaper and cheaper prices. Talk all you want about politics and the distribution of power, but capitalism runs our country and the leaders of that system are the people with money. One of the effects that this has caused on American society is obesity. While it may not come off as immediately apparent, obesity is a problem in the United States as a result of decreasing prices in food. Over humanity’s entire 200,000-year history, starvation has been the number one killer of humans. However, we now have seemingly more food than ever before, to the point where we are consuming it at unhealthy levels.

In his article, How Capitalism Makes You Fat, economist and financial expert Rick Kelo explains that there isn’t more food than ever before, we have just found ways of producing it more cheaply. “It’s not the glorious provision of nature,” he writes, “it’s more like the glorious division of labor”. For example, when adjusting for inflation, the price of a McDonald’s hamburger has dropped by 32%, and the amount of hamburger you get for that reduced price has doubled. Since the year 2000, Americans have spent less than 10% of our disposable income on food. Before that, food expenditures were in the double digits as far bas as economists have data

In contrast to the abundance caused by capitalism in the Western World, communist countries in the east experienced massive starvation into the modern age. Under Chairman Mao in the late 1950s, 40-70 million people died in China under communist rule, largely as a result of the Great Chinese Famine caused by the country’s efforts to industrialize at all costs. Countries like Laos, India, Vietnam, and North Korea have all experienced some of the worst Global Hunger Index ratings of modern times, and they’re either communist or partially socialist systems.

It is easy to villainize capitalism for it’s seemingly superficial goal of producing wealth. But honestly, are we so evolved as a society that we cannot appreciate that production of wealth is the secret to the vast majority of happiness and comfort we all want on a daily basis? People have to eat, and when you look at the numbers, there is no economic system more bountiful than capitalism. For more information  about Rick Kelo and other economics writings, visit his website.

Rick Kelo – The Return of Classical Liberalism

Despite the fact that the government is put in place to serve and protect the people, many of their institutional decisions and actions have drastically detrimental effects on large portions of the population. There is no simply answer as to why, despite their calling, the government makes these decisions, and often they are the consequences of a different, seemingly beneficial, piece of legislation. Many economists have remained vocal advocates for many of the financial decisions that the government has made in recent years. For Richard Arthur Kelo, tax recruiter atTaxScout Inc. and an expert on finance and the economy, these decisions are part of a larger and more systemic mentality that the government has and which he feels is ultimately detrimental to the people.

With an MBA in Finance from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Richard Kelo knows what he is talking about. He has worked in finance for more than a decade and is one of the most respected financial recruiters in the country. He believes in classical liberalism, the political ideology that values the freedom of individuals, including the freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and markets, as well as limited government. Classical liberalists such as Benjamin Franklin have warned the nation against the dangers of large governments and the effects of their over reaching policies on the nation. Rather, classical liberalists believe that the government should place their faith in individual liberties, rather than strangle the country with unnecessary taxation and fiscal policies.

He has created a solid online presence for himself as a respect economist and blogger, publishing articles on various topics and on a variety of blogging platforms and websites, including his own personal website. His articles speak to his philosophies on a more liberal economy and offer poignant insight into topics such as leadership, taxation, the economic collapse of the early 2000s, and the government’s slow creep toward socialist policies.

According to Richard Arthur Kelo,government policies that are suffocating the economy (Presentation on Issuu) are responsible for much of the economic hardship endured by the working middle class in America today. For more information about Richard Kelo and his political and economic views as a financial expert, turn to his articles such as, “The Minimum Wage Issue”, “What is the Optimal Progressive Tax?”, “Answering for the 2008 Global Economic Crash”, and “Free Market Capitalism and the Drive Towards Progress”.

Rick Kelo – The True Heart of Liberalism

Liberalism: a word that most individuals will only admit to vaguely understanding. Of course, it has something to do with freedom and equality among individuals, and most people will say that liberalism is something that they support. However, like many philosophical or political philosophies, when begin to probe the definition and look at the causes of this concept in specific situations, people’s opinions begin to deteriorate. This article attempts to explain the basic concept of liberalism by focusing the way in which it pans out in a variety of contexts: economically, politically, and socially. While this is by no means even a remotely complete explanation of the topic, the goal is to give a more a general understanding of the topic so that the average person might impress the next individual who asks them, “So what do you think about liberalism?”

A good place to start in exploring liberalism is looking at the current trend it plays in our political climate. According to Rick Kelo on Scoop.it, a growing trend is the realization that “the government often sues its policies to overstep its power.” Economic liberalism is the ideological belief in organizing the economy on individualist and voluntarist lines, meaning that the greatest possible number of economic decisions are made by individuals and not by collective institutions or organizations. With our country more divided than ever before, some individuals are calling for more government intervention in our daily lives. Many argue that this allows for some of the wealth in America to be distributed in order to compensate for institutional inequality across socioeconomic lines. This general falls in line with what is called social liberalism. However, classical liberalism emphasizes the role of pure liberty and many use this point to argue that true freedom comes from the individual’s ability to make their own choices with their resources and opportunities.

You can see how the same word is used to make completely different arguments. In an article about classic liberalism by Rick Kelo, he states that many great classical liberals such as Benjamin Franklin warned of the dangers to society and the economy of over-taxing citizens, and how it could damage a nation. In short, you have strong arguments as well as strong figures that fall on either side of the spectrum. When faced with someone asking, ”Are you a liberal?”, perhaps the best argument that you can put forward is asking whether or not that individual actually understands what he or she is asking.