John Steward of Jesus
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Movement to and from cities

May 14, 1980

The effect of the community on the individual is analogous to financial leverage.

The use of “OPM”--other people’s money--gives one financial leverage. This permits greater gains in a market of rising prices but accelerates a destruction of wealth in a market of decreasing prices.

In a similar way, the larger community of individuals accelerates one’s increase in prosperity in a time of growing production, community building, and general prosperity. But, when the curve of history begins the downward cycle of wealth— destruction, decadence, and community breakdown, then the larger community only hastens the erosion and collapse of the structure of individual wealth that any single man may have constructed during the time of prosperity.

Hence the movement of knowledgeable individuals toward the cities as prosperity approaches and away from the cities as times of adversity approach.

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