Mr. Burns and Pals Forming a Tontina in WW II
We were talking about senility and dementia, sickness and health care - Canada vs. the US - and the future of work with underemployment permanently built into the way things are.
We were also talking about the disaster we face economically: some people say that we won't be back to where we were asset-price-wise in early 2008 until 2021 !
We talked about the New Feudalism and Creative Serfdom where we are tied to mortagages we can't afford - rather like "I owe my soul to the company store", don't you think?, and where we are forced to live in houses that are worth 50% of what we paid for them, and which we can't sell anyway even for the reduced figure - no one is buying.
If you need to move into a home for the aged, oh, well...... money's all tied up in the house, and who's going to take care of it anyway if you're not there?
So my sister-in-law said we should have a Tontine to take care of such eventualities: mad, insane, sick and imprisoned in our homes !
I got her point. It was just shy of the mark. The reason it was not exactly on the logical bull's-eye is that such things as she was talking about never existed before.
A Tontine - or Tontina in the Italian, I believe - was the beginnings of the life insurance industry. A group of people would ante up money, and the last surviving member of the Tontina would claim the pot after all others had passed on.
What my sister-in-law was aiming at was sort of an agreement to pull the trigger... I think. A mortal tontine where in the near-future, when assisted-suicide will the the growth industry, we have this agreement to assist each other. As our enslavement to the shreds of a decayed system continues without abatement, things will get real zero to the bone !
I said that in five years, we were going to hear a lot about these "terrible" tontines.
pic:
http://pacolopezbarrio.blogspot.com/2007/07/la-tontina-algo-ms-que-un-artilugio-de.html
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