[Crowbob]

I am of the opinion academia and bureaucracy are similar in that neither creates wealth to any great degree. What passes as 'research' is laughable in most instances. Likewise, bureaucrats spend almost 100% of their working hours satisfying bureaucratic 'policies' and 'procedures' most of which are mandated by administrative fiat and have nothing to do with accomplishing their professed 'missions', the intrinsic 'value' of those missions being dubious at best. The same can be said for the legal 'professions' which protect themselves by fear, intimidation and threat of costly entanglement in increasingly undecipherable 'law' which they themselves promulgate. By extension, investment and other brokerage firms, including private investors, siphon off the top by manipulating 'commissions' just as the real estate industry does. At some point, it all became an abstraction backed only by numbers and words on paper (or bits of 'ones' and 'zeroes' in a virtual cyberuniverse) imploding upon itself. This is where we are today. The modern American mantra is "I am worthy because this here (word or bit) says I am."