Creating something from nothing

There is a long history of get rich quick schemes sold to the masses. The first and most famous is the South Sea Bubble of 1720, where worthless bonds were sold to finance a huge national debt (any similarities spotted already?) which of co...urse ended in tears for all except the few beneficiaries.

Modern examples have been best demonstrated by Enron, who created a form of accounting which used turnover to represent apparent profit, by hiding debts and losses off-balance sheet. This made the company value appear to grow by 750% in four years, encouraging many new people to invest, before the scheme unravelled in 2001 when discovered to be fraudulent.

Bernie Madoff revived the also ancient Ponzi scheme, where a high rate of return is guaranteed with no questions asked, and the new investors are paid by following ones until they stop and the lower levels are never paid as no new money is coming in to keep the momentum going.

Blind short selling requires offering to provide an item at the end of the month you not only do not have, but unlike normal short selling, are unable to procure. This means if the price rises rather than falls and you are obliged to sell the item you will not be able to, which will open you to a civil action but not automatically a criminal one as this is not essentially illegal.

What is illegal but still common worldwide are the simple get rich quick pyramid schemes, simply based on paying the person ahead of you. As this multiplies the number of members on each level by itself to keep going it has a natural end point where it requires too many thousands of people to join, when it will collapse and everyone below the top few levels lose their money.

Traditionally value has to be based on commodities or added value via converting them to goods, or providing services. But man has always wanted to get rich easily and quickly regardless of any actual production, so new means of fleecing the public, legal or otherwise, will always be thought up and many will succeed before blowing out.
The end result of all though is identical, the money ends up with the few who run the scheme and their friends who join it at the start, while everyone else loses all or nearly all of their 'investments'.

Carbon Trading is the latest incarnation of the South Sea Bubble, where something is being sold that doesn't actually exist and in fact never can. The trades are in taxation, where they initially rely on countries issuing tougher and tougher laws meaning the tax they've already bought or sold will change in value thus making the winner a profit. This of course as well as being immoral has no actual bearing on the ostensible purpose of 'saving the climate' as they are not stopping carbon being burnt, but charging to do so. The traders are mainly normal traders rather than energy users, so in fact are not connected to industry at all but are simply parasites on it like lice or leeches.

In this incarnation the people are the patsys, as they are the ones forced to stump up the end profits by law whether they like it or not. This is either carried out by direct personal carbon limits, which as yet are only in the planning stage but very likely to be imposed in the UK as the paper is already written, or indirectly as all carbon credit costs of industry are simply passed on to the customers who again can choose between heating their houses or turning on lights or sitting in the cold and dark, ie not a choice at all. So governments have found yet another method to create something from nothing, which hits the poor the most as the less income you have the more as a proportion it will take. This is compounded by allowing to trade it and inflate profits for those who do gain, until the same end as befalls all false finance schemes, the investors go broke.
This will happen generally, by causing a gradual rise in inflation as the value of every currency affected inevitably falls as based on no added production, and specifically by people losing all their savings on energy costs. As such this has created and will create even more poverty as it continues ultimately a Dickensian situation of people on the streets, begging and sleeping in shanty towns while the organisers and distributors become richer with their money. This is not communism of fascism but a grand scale fraud, where those running it are quite aware of what is going on but too well organised so far to stop.

Using the 'paedophile' formula, where you make people fear not for their own lives but those of their children, the 'average Joe' has clearly been shown to accept any solution offered to 'save their grandchildren' from a hypothetical hellfire, one which none of us will ever see as set too far in the future, yet if any look back when temperatures are still what we'd consider normal, some will say it had to be because the carbon trading must have worked. As long as the masses, for that is who they are using and relying on, are less interested in facts than fear they will win, and the only thing that can be predicted for the end of the century if carbon trading is continued then the average person will be living in shanty towns like anywhere in the third world today.