Free Your Mind and Think...

 (c) 2011 by Tom King

 Saw this little gem (right) posted on the Internet. The author should take his own advice to FREE YOUR MIND AND THINK.

Mr. Lester demonstrates a profound lack of understanding as to what money really is and how it works.  Mr. Lester (I'm not sure what the "B" stands for, but here, I think I'll call him, Bob) seems to think money is like cats or old newspapers - something we collect that has little or no purpose once we've hoarded it up. If we keep control of large amounts of money, old Bob assumes we keep others from having any. Bob apparently subscribes to the idea that money and economics is a zero-sum game. Either that, or I suspect Mr. Lester's been watching "Hoarders" on TV, looked around his apartment, felt threatened and needed someone else to identify as a hoarder to take the heat off his own conscience.

Actually, wealthy people, by and large (and with the possible exception of Scrooge McDuck), do use their money - spreading it around, if you will. They buy goods and services, they build businesses that hire people, they lend their money to cities in the form of municipal bonds so our cities can spread the wealth they don't have and keep your streets clear and repaired, your sewers and water pipes working. They buy shares in companies that allow those companies to hire employees to make goods and sell them to us in places like Wal-Mart. Their money builds stores where we buy food. Their money is lent to states and counties (bonds again) so they can build bus lines, airports and rail transit. They pay virtually all of the taxes in this country. More than half of us pay no income tax at all. Bob imagines that wealthy people have these big giant buildings in their backyards, like Scrooge McDuck, where they go and swim in their cash once in a while.

It isn't so.  Bill Gates is fabulously wealth, true. He's becoming a bit of a megalomaniac in his attempts to use his money to meddle in the culture. But at the same time, his enterprises support the state of Washington's welfare programs practically all by themselves through the property and sales taxes Microsoft pays. If Microsoft's, Amazon's and Boeing's owners gave away all their money, as Bob suggests, their companies would soon shut down. They would stop making money and employing people and pretty soon all the money they gave away would be used up and Washington would have to stop feeding the poor, running transit lines and homeless shelters.  State health care and all the state-run liquor stores would have to shut down because they would no longer be subsidized by taxpayers like Boeing, Amazon and Microsoft. Poverty, like some kind of economic vampire, drains the economy of resources with precious little return. The free market economy depends on its members exchanging their labors, their work for food, clothing, shelter, utilities and recreational opportunities. If we build up a huge class of folks who do nothing for those things, the whole thing will one day collapse. We should, of course, help the poor and there ARE those who can give little back in the way of work, although, you'd be surprised how much even the disabled and homeless could give back. I worked in vocational rehab for years and in a pinch, most people can find something to do to help earn their keep, even in a small way.

Good cow, people. Money is not like cats.  If you hoard cats, you have to feed them, take them to the vet and clean up their crappy litter boxes. A cat never hired anyone, never started a company, nor built a road. They consume, producing only good feelings and a lot of soiled kitty litter for the cat owner.  Money is most useless when it is sitting in a vault. Most money is imaginary anyway - just numbers in a computer that tells you how much money you would have if there were actually that many greenbacks in their vault and not just in their computers. Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon. He's not a real billionaire, though many of our Marxist friends firmly believe that he is.

If everybody tried to turn everything of value into cash so they could swim in their money, the U.S. treasury would be up printing hundred dollar bills nonstop, 24 hours a day for months and months and months to create the piles o' cash Bob imagines are sitting around awaiting redistribution. Money has value because it works. Even sitting in a savings account, your money helps me buy my house because it is used to fund my mortgage. I pay it back with interest. If you check it out of the bank so you can take a swim, you don't earn interest and that's all a savings is good for anyway. That and I don't get to build my house, the carpenters have lost their jobs and so on and so on.

There's a serious flaw in Mr. Lester's logic.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King