Another Corporate conspiracy

For three score years I have never needed glasses for much of anything.

Suddenly I find myself stocking my car, the table by my bed, my briefcase - even my toolbox - with reading glasses.  I need them to read economist, I need them to read the printing on prescriptions, the list of contents on food.  With cans of paint or other hardward store items I sometimes feel like I need a microscope to read how to avoid being poisened, or properly use the product.

It seems to me it all happened in the last couple years.  I have figured out it must be a conspiracy by the 1%.  I thought it might be the government conspiracy but couldn't figure out how they would make the print on everything smaller without passing a bunch of laws that CNN would be talking about 24/7 endlessly, so I would have heard about it.    My eyes have worked fine for 60+ years so the problem clearly couldn't be me, so it must be the 1%.

I figure that since the economy sucks the 1% don't want to risk putting their money into expanding businesses and hiring people.  Not much money to be made there and it is a lot of risk.  So instead they have looked for every possible way to pump up the profits of their corporations.  I would imagine they were all sitting around the country club one day jawing about how tough it was to make more money when one of them had a brilliant idea.  If they just started making the print smaller on everything their corporations make they could cut their costs by squeezing more words on a smaller piece of paper - saving both ink and paper. 

But the side effects where the best part of their insight.  All they had to do was increase their holdings in companies that make glasses, and bask in the boom of sales of reading glasses caused by the smaller print.  And as a further side affect they could fill their packaging with disclaimers in print so small no one would read it, and use the disclaimers to avoid lawsuits if someone is injured.  After all, one of the real failures in the American way is that there is always some sharp lawyer with a golden tongue who wants to make the people that create things pay when people get hurt.  Those lawyers have no idea how hard it is to keep profits up if you have to make sure what you are selling is safe.

I haven't had a chance to check my theory, but it's a damn good theory so I am going to assume it is correct until I get a chance to check it.  Don't have time to let a lack of facts keep me from understanding what is happening in the world if I am going to become part of the 1%.