How much is too much? Most people would say any amount is OK if it’s mine. If we’re talking fiat paper, the answer should be the opposite. ANY amount is too much, anywhere, at anytime.
I love it when they crow about the perfection of 2% inflation. Like I’m supposed to be happy with an ever increasing amount of my wealth being sucked away year over year.
Not one of my favorite ABBA songs, but bearable. The strange thing about money is that you only rent it for a short time. You do not own it, it owns you. If you have a whole lot, you need to constantly protect it. If you have little, you need to constantly earn more to survive.
It is perhaps a decent medium of exchange for any transaction but go ahead and have your millions or billions (if you have that much) stuffed into your coffin for the next life.
So you get to the gates of Heaven or Heck and all they take are green stamps. I should ask my wife...maybe they give you a clue in the Bible.
Interesting Chris - I see the demise of fiat currency (perhaps not globally) but definitely in what I would term legacy Western nations that are in decline .
Historically we can look at various nations in South America to Africa over the course of the last 30 to 40 years and how many of these once unflavoured places are starting to gain huge momentum.
At the same time the West is now becoming those places of 30 years ago.
Governments in smaller nations are actually investing in the people, are starting to use crypto and the new gold backed currency of Brics. Their roads, medical, housing, cost of living is increasingly very desirable to the millionaires of the West.
UK currently has one millionaire fleeing every 45 seconds.
The writing is on the wall.
I predict the west after its failing empires and the destruction of its way of life by deliberate policies and corruption, will eventually settle into trade based transactions.
I’ve always wanted to *internally* fight the idea of cycles, but alas the world indeed does move in cycles, and it is wise to understand them and plan accordingly 🙏
You say correctly that wealth will always be unequal because WE as individuals are not equal - not equally talented. That's the problem with "social justice". It demands equal outcomes from unequal input. Never gonna happen.
But I see another issue at play: Especially in America, we are taught that hard work will always result in wealth. Just keep your head down, work hard and you'll be rich. Well, most of us know that's a lie but a large percentage of people still believe the American Dream.
Believing this Dream also means that if they see someone who is fabulously wealthy, that person must also be incredibly hardworking, brilliant and ethical. Because bad people don't prosper, right?
These gullible people give their authority over to people like Elon and Bill Gates and every other mega-billionaire because for them, money means credibility. And they still believe if they just keep working hard, one day they'll be part of that club, too.
In the end, people will emulate those who have what they want. We're off grid growing potatoes in the dirt - not many people trying to emulate us! But everyone wants to go to Mars.
" It demands equal outcomes from unequal input. Never gonna happen."
—Absolutely correct. But they keep trying, and the end result, when carried to its fullest conclusion, always ends up in rivers of blood. And then their ideological descendants try to do the same thing, again and again.
"Well, most of us know that's a lie but a large percentage of people still believe the American Dream."
Thank you for touching on my favorite money subject, fiat currency. Do not put your savings into ANY fiat currency. Right now don't put your savings into anything on paper - if you can't hold it in your hand, or fence it in, it will lose a lot of value soon. Especially dollar bills! Gold, Silver, land, fine art, the list is endless of things to put your savings into that won't lose value over time, but not currency, and for me, not stocks. No, I don't mind people who have more than me, as long as they aren't trying to take from me. If a person worked their way from poor to rich, I know they busted their ass, and most likely spent many years working much harder than I would have wanted to. Becoming wealthy is not easy, and staying wealthy can be harder. You have to get to a certain level of wealth for it to become self supporting and grow, but most in that position spend all of their time worrying about and keeping up with their investments instead of enjoying the profits. And no, I've never been what I consider to be wealthy, but have known people who were. But I have never resented the wealthy, even those that got it by birth or really easy. Of course, I hate thieves, and those that rip off the poor or take advantage of them. But also remember, the rich make jobs for the rest of us, small businesses employ more people in this country than large corporations, and most of those are owned by individuals who have become high net worth through the business they started. Elected officials, or government employees who have become wealthy while in office or working, that is an issue I have a problem with.
My goal is land. I don't think I will convince my wife to liquidate all our retirement accounts, but I can do some bet-hedging with a big chunk of land and the things of survival.
As to the rest, agreed in all regards. This, for example, needs to get repeated over and over:
"No, I don't mind people who have more than me, as long as they aren't trying to take from me. If a person worked their way from poor to rich, I know they busted their ass, and most likely spent many years working much harder than I would have wanted to. Becoming wealthy is not easy, and staying wealthy can be harder."
Envy is an ugly thing, and humans are really good at it.
This too.
"the rich make jobs for the rest of us, small businesses employ more people in this country than large corporations, and most of those are owned by individuals who have become high net worth through the business they started."
And of course your last sentence is spot on. Why not be mad at the people who take $ under color of authority rather than at those who earn it? Because we "elected" them? More democracy-mystique blather.
Okay, now let us imagine a scenario in which involuntary governance withers away, or in which some number of us have managed to escape it. May we have a means of exchange other than barter?
While reading I was reminded of studying what is money in my Finance classes. One of the basic introductions to money that's taught in Finance and Economics came in the form of R.A. Radford's 1945 POW Camp cigarette currency account. I searched for a primer on it to share the concept here, first came up with this rendition that's pretty much what I was taught at a "public Ivy" business school in the 1980's:
Which drew largely from a much longer piece. While its focus is on commodity money rather than fiat money it exposes how even commodity-backed money has always been manipulated by governments for political advantage. Some excerpts from the beginning and end below. An otherwise dry read for the curious intellectuals:
Coin Reconsidered: The Political Alchemy of Commodity Money
"English sovereigns responded with reforms that supported and expanded liquidity by moving coin farther away from the commodity weight that had originally given money its measure. The Crown regularly ordered its mints to reduce the amount of metal in each unit of account, driving coin away from its starting point as a particular weight of metal that obtained a particular value in the commodity market. The tendency to dilute the commodity content of money was chronic and significant over the centuries; Angela Redish goes so far as to call the trend "inherent" to a system that bases money on a commodity.
Medieval coin was not, then, a "commodity money" as convention imagines it. Neither silver nor gold offered a commodity equivalent that became institutionalized as money; rather, their selection beforehand as the content for coin made them subsequently the touchstone for prices. Nor, once incorporated into coin, did silver and gold simply enter circulation as money. Rather, coin became money because of the unique channel it created between authorities and laypersons, and among people more generally. Nor did silver and gold, even as amounts within coin, offer a static base for value. They were part of a much more intriguing alchemy, catalysts for the creation of liquidity that was concerted by political authority among the participants who would use coin as currency.
The next pages explore the political innovations that produced early coin and the constitutional arrangements that allowed it to operate as money."
p. 408
"The practice of medieval communities — England among them — to solve their coinage problems by diluting rather than strengthening the commodity content of its coin was remarkably consistent over time. Depreciating coin imposed fewer costs directly on those bringing in old money; they would otherwise have exchanged coin worth a greater amount by count for fewer full-bodied coins. To be sure, depreciating coin exacted its cost in other ways: prices would rise as the mint cut more coins from the same amount of metal, all else being equal. But all else may not have been equal in medieval society: the thirst of people for liquidity absorbed the increasing supply of money, as people used available coin for a larger number of transactions. Prices did not increase in a sustained way between the early fourteenth and the early sixteenth century.
That circumstance suggests the more lasting reason that medieval communities — England among them — diluted their coin. Economic exchange was not an abstract, one that could be conducted with an absolute, a measure made out of a static amount of commodity. The progressive depreciation of coin during the Middle Ages hewed to another logic altogether. It acted out the notion that silver and gold were catalysts for the creation of liquidity, not commodities that constituted it. Indeed, once a commodity had been identified as the referent for money, it ceased to perform as a normal commodity. Its value was affected by the way it was produced, the range of exchange it allowed, the kinds of credit it engendered to expand in ambit, the strength of the measures that policed its circulation.
A commodity was not acting here as a universal equivalent with any independent value. Rather, it was acting as a mechanism, an instrument of alchemy, one that produced a very particular medium because of the way public and private organized to make it into money. That medium in turn irrigated a domestic and international landscape, as it flowed to certain hands and with certain rhythms. England’s money and its market, far from entities that sprang spontaneously or apolitically into being, thus "made" each other, creating a political economy that waits to be decoded in that light."
Even with a degree in Finance from a public Ivy I don't know that answer.
The simplified Radford cigarette money tells the basic truth that money, above all things, needs to be practicable. It has to survive contact with the real world of exchanging value between buyer and seller, products, labor, ideas, creation. Widespread agreement, belief in whatever value the free market money has that can be transferred. The commodity-backed currency discussion speaks of the alchemy effect that a unit of exchange undergoes once it becomes widely agreed upon. And then the gaming of the money that will always happen. Whether it's by rolling cigarettes with less tobacco, lowering silver content in coins or central banks printing more paper or confiscating it and reducing it to pixels on a screen.
Valaurum makes goldbacks and sells them. They promise 1/1000th of a troy ounce in their smallest denomination.
If the money is free-market (others can break into the goldback business) and Valaurum were to start debasing their goldbacks, then people could switch to another competitor, right? Market forces keeping them honest………???
In my business career, most aspiring young professionals—at least men—had a number. If you ask them in their twenties or thirties what they’re working towards they’ll give you a number. If they somehow hit it they will rarely stop—cuz if 5 is enough—10 is better. If they don’t hit it, or the writing is on the wall then they get resentful and make do with 2. The problem is mostly with the people that hit the number and exceed it. They rarely have “enough” and will seek more at all costs to themselves and others.
And the personality types who are good earners are usually the ones who can’t stop, because the can’t-stop personality type is part of what made them a good earner!
It’s why you see multi-millionaires still working their a$$es off when they could clearly retire and be set for more than the rest of their life.
Indeed, money in scarcity has a function. Sadly, irrespective of the form, because the need to exchange to survive gives haves power over have-nots, psychopaths will be promoted to the top. They will do literally anything They can get away with to garner the most, lusting - LUSTING!!! - after power over Others as They do.
It may start out even, but will, sooner or later, devolve into psychopaths buying the things and the People They need for agendas...like.... Plannedemics. Bankers' wars. Creating food shortages with lies of viruses (they do not exist, and neither does contagion). And on and on.
And why resist free energy removing the need to account for Our energy (with any money)?
Not so. In abundant systems where there is no accounting for energy, promoting all the ghastliness, the caring Ones took care of things and the psychopaths, not able to pay for the things and the People to Their agendas are merely petty criminals if They break the three Laws.
Sure, problems came up, but the caring Ones worked to solve the problems the best way and not the cheapest/most profitable.
I certainly agree that we should end any system that gives some people irresistible power over others. Because those systems inevitably get dominated by psychos.
Personally, I don't think the degree of wealth is the issue, but it's the actions one can take to acquire / maintain it. Same can go for anything, if it's considered to be the ultimate incentive--esp. if it implores people to treat each other solely as means towards ends.
For instance, things like poverty and starvation are facts of nature, but I think a CEO who doesn't pay his employees a living wage is still worth criticizing, because s/he fails to value the latter as an end in and of themselves--perhaps not active coercion, but it's still making use of power asymmetries as opposed to mutual benefit.
Of course, here's a cool song to accompany my ramblings--that band actually got started thanks to Patreon, so money is pretty good, haha:
“ it's the actions one can take to acquire / maintain it. Same can go for anything, if it's considered to be the ultimate incentive--esp. if it implores people to treat each other solely as means towards ends.”
Exactly. Well said.
“ I think a CEO who doesn't pay his employees a living wage is still worth criticizing, because s/he fails to value the latter as an end in and of themselves--perhaps not active coercion, but it's still making use of power asymmetries as opposed to mutual benefit.”
—Right. You might not owe anyone anything, but you can still choose to be nice.
I am not even particularly right-leaning (I have my fair share of commie-sounding statements, haha), but the combination of incivility and certitude is off-putting from any side of the political aisle!
I never understand this weird interpretation of the word "capitalism" that is certainly not contained in the strict definition of the term. By itself it just refers to the fact that it takes a certain amount of capital (accumulated or borrowed resources that make possible production of goods and services people want or need) and to many of us it means or meant a free market where you can safely accumulate or borrow those resources needed to start a productive enterprise and be rewarded for your intelligent work (profit.) Within even the most overt communist system in order to survive at all some capital is needed and a way to reward those who help, or starve in poverty. We do not live in a world where incentives do not matter. You can incentivize with a reasonable profit for ones productive work, or get the needed capital by the threat of violence and punishment needed to confiscate it or if you don't work as labor in most communist slave societies. Both can be said to be a form of capitalism I suppose, since it seems to me both require capital goods (tools, buildings, means to pay those who assist in production (unless you can simply force or guilt trip them into doing the necessary labor as in some socialist societies)
Though the terms capital, capitalist, capitalism, etc. existed earlier, leftists have been using the term in increasing earnest since they were popularized by Marx and Engels.
Not coincidentally, since that same time, leftists have been pretending that the incentives of survival and productivity do not exist. (In their minds, everything can just be plucked like fruit from a magic tree.)
And since the 1970s and Postmodernism, they have been pretending that that reality itself does not exist.
Many people get caught in the event horizon of their madness, and there isn't much you can do for them until they at least escape that event horizon.
Someone who doesn't acquire resources (e.g. the bottom rungs of Maslow's hierarchy) will, left to their own devices, have less than someone else. What I do think is that even if I wasn't responsible for pushing a child into a pond, I'd be morally defunct if I didn't help them out (this is assuming that my life isn't in danger). Same goes for the CEO, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily *caused* their employee to be poor.
The mere existence of inequality isn't evidence of coercion, but it can pave the way for exploitation (at the extremes, at least), is what I'm saying. We don't have to agree, but I'd appreciate it if you could refrain from the derisive tone; it's not necessary when disagreeing with someone on the internet (and not conducive to changing minds! :P).
How much is too much? Most people would say any amount is OK if it’s mine. If we’re talking fiat paper, the answer should be the opposite. ANY amount is too much, anywhere, at anytime.
And so much for wishful thinking.
Fiat robs us of wealth!
Indeed it does.
I love it when they crow about the perfection of 2% inflation. Like I’m supposed to be happy with an ever increasing amount of my wealth being sucked away year over year.
Especially when you learn about the Cantillon Effect, and how inflation is DESIGNED to enrich them at our expense.
Not one of my favorite ABBA songs, but bearable. The strange thing about money is that you only rent it for a short time. You do not own it, it owns you. If you have a whole lot, you need to constantly protect it. If you have little, you need to constantly earn more to survive.
It is perhaps a decent medium of exchange for any transaction but go ahead and have your millions or billions (if you have that much) stuffed into your coffin for the next life.
So you get to the gates of Heaven or Heck and all they take are green stamps. I should ask my wife...maybe they give you a clue in the Bible.
“ you get to the gates of Heaven or Heck and all they take are green stamps.”
Green stamps 🤣🤣🤣
And yeah, not one of my ABBA favorites at all. Also, weren’t they all rich men and women when they wrote this? 😆
Interesting Chris - I see the demise of fiat currency (perhaps not globally) but definitely in what I would term legacy Western nations that are in decline .
Historically we can look at various nations in South America to Africa over the course of the last 30 to 40 years and how many of these once unflavoured places are starting to gain huge momentum.
At the same time the West is now becoming those places of 30 years ago.
Governments in smaller nations are actually investing in the people, are starting to use crypto and the new gold backed currency of Brics. Their roads, medical, housing, cost of living is increasingly very desirable to the millionaires of the West.
UK currently has one millionaire fleeing every 45 seconds.
The writing is on the wall.
I predict the west after its failing empires and the destruction of its way of life by deliberate policies and corruption, will eventually settle into trade based transactions.
Money will be cobwebs. 2C
It seems like the cycle of civilizations is unavoidable! Or, at least, no one has yet figured out how to avoid it.
I’ve always wanted to *internally* fight the idea of cycles, but alas the world indeed does move in cycles, and it is wise to understand them and plan accordingly 🙏
Yup. We must react as things are, not as we would wish them to be.
You say correctly that wealth will always be unequal because WE as individuals are not equal - not equally talented. That's the problem with "social justice". It demands equal outcomes from unequal input. Never gonna happen.
But I see another issue at play: Especially in America, we are taught that hard work will always result in wealth. Just keep your head down, work hard and you'll be rich. Well, most of us know that's a lie but a large percentage of people still believe the American Dream.
Believing this Dream also means that if they see someone who is fabulously wealthy, that person must also be incredibly hardworking, brilliant and ethical. Because bad people don't prosper, right?
These gullible people give their authority over to people like Elon and Bill Gates and every other mega-billionaire because for them, money means credibility. And they still believe if they just keep working hard, one day they'll be part of that club, too.
In the end, people will emulate those who have what they want. We're off grid growing potatoes in the dirt - not many people trying to emulate us! But everyone wants to go to Mars.
Please do.
" It demands equal outcomes from unequal input. Never gonna happen."
—Absolutely correct. But they keep trying, and the end result, when carried to its fullest conclusion, always ends up in rivers of blood. And then their ideological descendants try to do the same thing, again and again.
"Well, most of us know that's a lie but a large percentage of people still believe the American Dream."
—I think more of it may have to do with fiat currency than we care to imagine: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Thank you for touching on my favorite money subject, fiat currency. Do not put your savings into ANY fiat currency. Right now don't put your savings into anything on paper - if you can't hold it in your hand, or fence it in, it will lose a lot of value soon. Especially dollar bills! Gold, Silver, land, fine art, the list is endless of things to put your savings into that won't lose value over time, but not currency, and for me, not stocks. No, I don't mind people who have more than me, as long as they aren't trying to take from me. If a person worked their way from poor to rich, I know they busted their ass, and most likely spent many years working much harder than I would have wanted to. Becoming wealthy is not easy, and staying wealthy can be harder. You have to get to a certain level of wealth for it to become self supporting and grow, but most in that position spend all of their time worrying about and keeping up with their investments instead of enjoying the profits. And no, I've never been what I consider to be wealthy, but have known people who were. But I have never resented the wealthy, even those that got it by birth or really easy. Of course, I hate thieves, and those that rip off the poor or take advantage of them. But also remember, the rich make jobs for the rest of us, small businesses employ more people in this country than large corporations, and most of those are owned by individuals who have become high net worth through the business they started. Elected officials, or government employees who have become wealthy while in office or working, that is an issue I have a problem with.
My goal is land. I don't think I will convince my wife to liquidate all our retirement accounts, but I can do some bet-hedging with a big chunk of land and the things of survival.
As to the rest, agreed in all regards. This, for example, needs to get repeated over and over:
"No, I don't mind people who have more than me, as long as they aren't trying to take from me. If a person worked their way from poor to rich, I know they busted their ass, and most likely spent many years working much harder than I would have wanted to. Becoming wealthy is not easy, and staying wealthy can be harder."
Envy is an ugly thing, and humans are really good at it.
This too.
"the rich make jobs for the rest of us, small businesses employ more people in this country than large corporations, and most of those are owned by individuals who have become high net worth through the business they started."
And of course your last sentence is spot on. Why not be mad at the people who take $ under color of authority rather than at those who earn it? Because we "elected" them? More democracy-mystique blather.
The religion of money has to go
Let's unpack that, for it has several implications.
Do you mean that the use/existence of money of money must end? Or that some particular behavior or beliefs associated with money must end?
Money is a religion. The value attached to it is imaginary, a belief.
It's just another religion of control that has to go.
Okay, now let us imagine a scenario in which involuntary governance withers away, or in which some number of us have managed to escape it. May we have a means of exchange other than barter?
I would say that there is no legitimate form of exchange other than barter/voluntary agreement.
The key is accepting that which actually has real intrinsic value. Which is human endeavour, knowledge, skill.
Purpose instead of profit.
This earth is bountiful. Nature and it's natural resources is what should be valued.
Okay, but without the evils of government money, money is just an agreed upon means of exchange that solves certain problems.
For example—it's divisible.
If I make beautiful, handcrafted wooden bed frames for a living, how do I barter for a dozen eggs?
It's not a means of exchange. It's an inanimate object with belief based value.
It's a limiter of energy depending on the believed value.
People would do whatever needs doing.
If they don't then no one eats. It's 100% responsibility, effort and purpose.
While reading I was reminded of studying what is money in my Finance classes. One of the basic introductions to money that's taught in Finance and Economics came in the form of R.A. Radford's 1945 POW Camp cigarette currency account. I searched for a primer on it to share the concept here, first came up with this rendition that's pretty much what I was taught at a "public Ivy" business school in the 1980's:
https://www.finance-watch.org/blog/the-perfect-draw-when-cigarettes-became-a-war-camp-currency/
Then I read this piece that called to question much of Radford's presentation of monetary theory:
https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/04/was-cigarette-money-in-world-war-ii-pow-camps-a-case-of-commodity-money-origination.html
Which drew largely from a much longer piece. While its focus is on commodity money rather than fiat money it exposes how even commodity-backed money has always been manipulated by governments for political advantage. Some excerpts from the beginning and end below. An otherwise dry read for the curious intellectuals:
Coin Reconsidered: The Political Alchemy of Commodity Money
De Gruyter, January, 2010
https://web.archive.org/web/20240401075720/https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3685820/desan_coinreconsidered.pdf?sequence=2
p. 373
"English sovereigns responded with reforms that supported and expanded liquidity by moving coin farther away from the commodity weight that had originally given money its measure. The Crown regularly ordered its mints to reduce the amount of metal in each unit of account, driving coin away from its starting point as a particular weight of metal that obtained a particular value in the commodity market. The tendency to dilute the commodity content of money was chronic and significant over the centuries; Angela Redish goes so far as to call the trend "inherent" to a system that bases money on a commodity.
Medieval coin was not, then, a "commodity money" as convention imagines it. Neither silver nor gold offered a commodity equivalent that became institutionalized as money; rather, their selection beforehand as the content for coin made them subsequently the touchstone for prices. Nor, once incorporated into coin, did silver and gold simply enter circulation as money. Rather, coin became money because of the unique channel it created between authorities and laypersons, and among people more generally. Nor did silver and gold, even as amounts within coin, offer a static base for value. They were part of a much more intriguing alchemy, catalysts for the creation of liquidity that was concerted by political authority among the participants who would use coin as currency.
The next pages explore the political innovations that produced early coin and the constitutional arrangements that allowed it to operate as money."
p. 408
"The practice of medieval communities — England among them — to solve their coinage problems by diluting rather than strengthening the commodity content of its coin was remarkably consistent over time. Depreciating coin imposed fewer costs directly on those bringing in old money; they would otherwise have exchanged coin worth a greater amount by count for fewer full-bodied coins. To be sure, depreciating coin exacted its cost in other ways: prices would rise as the mint cut more coins from the same amount of metal, all else being equal. But all else may not have been equal in medieval society: the thirst of people for liquidity absorbed the increasing supply of money, as people used available coin for a larger number of transactions. Prices did not increase in a sustained way between the early fourteenth and the early sixteenth century.
That circumstance suggests the more lasting reason that medieval communities — England among them — diluted their coin. Economic exchange was not an abstract, one that could be conducted with an absolute, a measure made out of a static amount of commodity. The progressive depreciation of coin during the Middle Ages hewed to another logic altogether. It acted out the notion that silver and gold were catalysts for the creation of liquidity, not commodities that constituted it. Indeed, once a commodity had been identified as the referent for money, it ceased to perform as a normal commodity. Its value was affected by the way it was produced, the range of exchange it allowed, the kinds of credit it engendered to expand in ambit, the strength of the measures that policed its circulation.
A commodity was not acting here as a universal equivalent with any independent value. Rather, it was acting as a mechanism, an instrument of alchemy, one that produced a very particular medium because of the way public and private organized to make it into money. That medium in turn irrigated a domestic and international landscape, as it flowed to certain hands and with certain rhythms. England’s money and its market, far from entities that sprang spontaneously or apolitically into being, thus "made" each other, creating a political economy that waits to be decoded in that light."
So then the only solution is purely free-market money, yes?
Even with a degree in Finance from a public Ivy I don't know that answer.
The simplified Radford cigarette money tells the basic truth that money, above all things, needs to be practicable. It has to survive contact with the real world of exchanging value between buyer and seller, products, labor, ideas, creation. Widespread agreement, belief in whatever value the free market money has that can be transferred. The commodity-backed currency discussion speaks of the alchemy effect that a unit of exchange undergoes once it becomes widely agreed upon. And then the gaming of the money that will always happen. Whether it's by rolling cigarettes with less tobacco, lowering silver content in coins or central banks printing more paper or confiscating it and reducing it to pixels on a screen.
Tough question.
Hmm—quick thoughts…
Valaurum makes goldbacks and sells them. They promise 1/1000th of a troy ounce in their smallest denomination.
If the money is free-market (others can break into the goldback business) and Valaurum were to start debasing their goldbacks, then people could switch to another competitor, right? Market forces keeping them honest………???
In my business career, most aspiring young professionals—at least men—had a number. If you ask them in their twenties or thirties what they’re working towards they’ll give you a number. If they somehow hit it they will rarely stop—cuz if 5 is enough—10 is better. If they don’t hit it, or the writing is on the wall then they get resentful and make do with 2. The problem is mostly with the people that hit the number and exceed it. They rarely have “enough” and will seek more at all costs to themselves and others.
And the personality types who are good earners are usually the ones who can’t stop, because the can’t-stop personality type is part of what made them a good earner!
It’s why you see multi-millionaires still working their a$$es off when they could clearly retire and be set for more than the rest of their life.
Yup
Someone very close to me seems to be becoming this!
Yeah me too. Several friends that spent their entire careers on the Street.
Tell them it's time they start investing in Substack authors. Massive ROI !! 🤣
Ha! They do read me—that’s a start I guess
Indeed, money in scarcity has a function. Sadly, irrespective of the form, because the need to exchange to survive gives haves power over have-nots, psychopaths will be promoted to the top. They will do literally anything They can get away with to garner the most, lusting - LUSTING!!! - after power over Others as They do.
It may start out even, but will, sooner or later, devolve into psychopaths buying the things and the People They need for agendas...like.... Plannedemics. Bankers' wars. Creating food shortages with lies of viruses (they do not exist, and neither does contagion). And on and on.
And why resist free energy removing the need to account for Our energy (with any money)?
The End of (Social) Entropy (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/the-end-of-entropy
No matter what the system, psychopaths and sociopaths seem to rise to the top!
Not so. In abundant systems where there is no accounting for energy, promoting all the ghastliness, the caring Ones took care of things and the psychopaths, not able to pay for the things and the People to Their agendas are merely petty criminals if They break the three Laws.
Sure, problems came up, but the caring Ones worked to solve the problems the best way and not the cheapest/most profitable.
I certainly agree that we should end any system that gives some people irresistible power over others. Because those systems inevitably get dominated by psychos.
Moneyed systems are a guarantee that to one extent or another, that will happen. And given money is archaic, I just see no logic in retaining it.
Thank you for another Excellent Article Christopher! To me money is energy and can be utilized for Good or Evil. The money entities are Beings.
Good or evil. Exactly! It’s not the money, it’s how you get it and use it.
So True.
Thank you for your help with Substack - it seems to have worked.
Wow—cool!!
Personally, I don't think the degree of wealth is the issue, but it's the actions one can take to acquire / maintain it. Same can go for anything, if it's considered to be the ultimate incentive--esp. if it implores people to treat each other solely as means towards ends.
For instance, things like poverty and starvation are facts of nature, but I think a CEO who doesn't pay his employees a living wage is still worth criticizing, because s/he fails to value the latter as an end in and of themselves--perhaps not active coercion, but it's still making use of power asymmetries as opposed to mutual benefit.
Of course, here's a cool song to accompany my ramblings--that band actually got started thanks to Patreon, so money is pretty good, haha:
https://youtu.be/jtNVfDb8C5o?feature=shared
“ it's the actions one can take to acquire / maintain it. Same can go for anything, if it's considered to be the ultimate incentive--esp. if it implores people to treat each other solely as means towards ends.”
Exactly. Well said.
“ I think a CEO who doesn't pay his employees a living wage is still worth criticizing, because s/he fails to value the latter as an end in and of themselves--perhaps not active coercion, but it's still making use of power asymmetries as opposed to mutual benefit.”
—Right. You might not owe anyone anything, but you can still choose to be nice.
“ https://youtu.be/jtNVfDb8C5o?feature=shared”
—Fun!
Thanks so much for adding my recommendation to the article! :D
🤘
Aaaaaaaand now I got the block from Wolfe. Why insult someone *just* to block 'em?
Your response to her was more than reasonable. Blocking was unnecessary!
You boot lurker you. Lol.
Leftists don't debate.
"Boot lurker" had me in stitches XD
I am not even particularly right-leaning (I have my fair share of commie-sounding statements, haha), but the combination of incivility and certitude is off-putting from any side of the political aisle!
No poverty isn't a fact of nature🤣 It's a creation of CAPITALISM. Capitalism CREATES poverty and then criminalizes it for profit.
I never understand this weird interpretation of the word "capitalism" that is certainly not contained in the strict definition of the term. By itself it just refers to the fact that it takes a certain amount of capital (accumulated or borrowed resources that make possible production of goods and services people want or need) and to many of us it means or meant a free market where you can safely accumulate or borrow those resources needed to start a productive enterprise and be rewarded for your intelligent work (profit.) Within even the most overt communist system in order to survive at all some capital is needed and a way to reward those who help, or starve in poverty. We do not live in a world where incentives do not matter. You can incentivize with a reasonable profit for ones productive work, or get the needed capital by the threat of violence and punishment needed to confiscate it or if you don't work as labor in most communist slave societies. Both can be said to be a form of capitalism I suppose, since it seems to me both require capital goods (tools, buildings, means to pay those who assist in production (unless you can simply force or guilt trip them into doing the necessary labor as in some socialist societies)
Though the terms capital, capitalist, capitalism, etc. existed earlier, leftists have been using the term in increasing earnest since they were popularized by Marx and Engels.
Not coincidentally, since that same time, leftists have been pretending that the incentives of survival and productivity do not exist. (In their minds, everything can just be plucked like fruit from a magic tree.)
And since the 1970s and Postmodernism, they have been pretending that that reality itself does not exist.
Many people get caught in the event horizon of their madness, and there isn't much you can do for them until they at least escape that event horizon.
Someone who doesn't acquire resources (e.g. the bottom rungs of Maslow's hierarchy) will, left to their own devices, have less than someone else. What I do think is that even if I wasn't responsible for pushing a child into a pond, I'd be morally defunct if I didn't help them out (this is assuming that my life isn't in danger). Same goes for the CEO, but that doesn't mean that they necessarily *caused* their employee to be poor.
The mere existence of inequality isn't evidence of coercion, but it can pave the way for exploitation (at the extremes, at least), is what I'm saying. We don't have to agree, but I'd appreciate it if you could refrain from the derisive tone; it's not necessary when disagreeing with someone on the internet (and not conducive to changing minds! :P).
🥾👅🤣