The Reason History Repeats Itself

The advantage of being an old man is that you can remember the past. This gives you a different perspective on current events. But if that old man is foolish enough to share his thoughts, the average person will smile tolerantly and pat him on his head and tell him that he is just “a lovable old dinosaur who is out-of-touch and living in the past.”

Screw it. I’m going to go ahead say what I’m thinking.

A few years ago, Big Data was going to change the world. Big Data came and went.

Then we got excited about ideas that were “disruptive.” Slash-and-burn disruption by a bunch of young pirates was going to change everything.

The Blockchain was going to change everything. You couldn’t go anywhere without someone blathering about Crypto and NFT’s.

Now AI is going change everything. And it definitely will, for awhile.

Technology saves money by reducing labor costs, which is just a fancy way of saying that technology allows you to replace people with machines. Unemployment will increase, and Trump will blame Obama.

And so it goes.

I had an appointment in 1977 to meet with a loan officer at First National Bank in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, to borrow $1,000.

The greeter at the bank sat me in a chair in the waiting room. I was 19 years old.

Smart phones did not exist. My only option was to paw through the pile of old magazines on the coffee table in front of me. Can you believe that every one of those magazines was about banking? The banker puts his banking magazines on the coffee table in his lobby when he is finished reading them. And the dentist puts his dental magazines on the coffee table in his lobby. This is how the Business Titans of Smallville keep their costs under control.

And they do it for our convenience.

I began reading a magazine about banking and it catapulted my brain into a tumbling somersault from which I have never recovered. The feature article was about ATM’s, but it didn’t call them ATM’s. It referred to them as automated teller machines.

“The modern bank executive can now reduce his payroll significantly because these new automated teller machines work without pay 24 hours a day, and they never make mistakes.”

My eyes were jacked open so wide that I was unable to blink.

ATM’s were not invented for our convenience! They were invented so that banks could fire 60% of their bank tellers!

“These new tellers require no health insurance, no air-conditioned offices, no telephones, no sick days, and they take no vacations. Your customers will thank you for giving them the ability to make deposits and withdrawals 24 hours a day from a variety of convenient locations.”

The man I saw in my mind was the banker in the old Monopoly game by Parker Brothers. The way to win the game of Monopoly is to gobble up all the things that people cannot avoid, then take everything they own when an unlucky roll of the dice puts them at your mercy. It’s perfectly legal.

I played Monopoly when I was young, but I don’t play it anymore.

Parker Brothers began selling Monopoly in 1935. But that game’s origins trace back to an earlier version called “The Landlord’s Game” created by Elizabeth Magie. She crafted her game back in 1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was making his mark on history by curbing the excesses of the richest and most powerful men in America.

Google, Apple and Meta still play Monopoly. As do the insurance companies, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the medical corporations that control virtually all the doctors. But the version of Monopoly they play isn’t sold by Parker Brothers.

To win, all you have to do is gobble up the things that people cannot avoid, then take everything they own when an unlucky roll of the dice puts them at your mercy. It’s perfectly legal.

Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are the Republicans on Mount Rushmore.

One of them freed the slaves and the other one freed us from the grasp of the monopolistic robber barons who were choking the life out of us.

The reason history repeats itself is because we didn’t pay attention the first time.

Roy H. Williams

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