All my life I've heard things like, "money makes the world go 'round" and "money can't buy happiness, but it can make the down payment". My parents philosophy of money seemed to be that you could never have enough. Strangely, this also seems to be the attitude of David Rockefeller and Lord Rothschild; and while it has served them well, my parents never made it out of the middle class. I think the difference is in attitude and philosophy. My parents had moral and ethical standards. They would not take advantage of people. They worked with their bodies and with their minds to make a living without ruining the lives of other people. I know an argument can be made that Rockefeller and Rothschild have made the world a better place, but there seems to be a willingness on their parts to sacrifice whatever it takes to gain the monetary supremacy. This is why they are part of the one per cent that controls 99 per cent of the worlds wealth and I am not.
I have never had a great deal of respect for money. I think this is because I have never known need in any appreciable way. I have also been willing to take jobs that others would not do to ensure that I had what I needed. Other than that, I have never been a financial planner. It has always been one day at a time with me. I do have a 401K and a couple of pensions in the retirement waiting room, but beyond that, I do not have massive savings, gold or silver stores or property holdings. I have always lived like a college student in some ways. This made it easier for me to come and go or just go as the case may be. I hate things that tie me down or obligate me to terminal responsibility. This is probably why I never advanced very far in my career. I have always viewed work as a job where you make money for the things outside of work. I never wanted a career of ever expanding promotion and salary. I just want to pay my bills and stay out of debt. Debt makes one a slave don't you know!
It's for this reason that I always shunned home ownership. This practice leads to mortgages that last anywhere from 15 to 30 years - talk about slavery. The very word "mortgage" literally means "death pact". Even if you renegotiate your mortgage for better terms, it's still a death pact. The worst part about home ownership is the continuing maintenance and property taxes. Something is always broken or falling apart and on top of that the government actually is charging you a kind of rent to live in a house that you allegedly own. And I know financial advisers will tell you that home ownership is the single best investment anyone can make, but really, is it? You have no idea what that home will be worth in 30 years and the fact is that it's not exactly what you would call a liquid investment. Turning a house back into capital is time consuming and it can even be costly. Once you sell it, if you do not reinvest the money back into some other related item, you are penalized with a tax of 50 per cent on what you make.
When you cannot use your money or your property in the way that you want to when you want to without being penalized with heavy taxation, something is terribly wrong.
To my mind, money just represents debt. The purpose of it is to pay debts. If you had no debts, why would you need it? But we need food, clothing and shelter and a means to get it, so we work and we pay and we get penalized when we try to escape that cycle.
I am sorry, but money is not a good thing in the present financial context. The problem is that it's use and supply are strictly controlled by the one per cent I mentioned earlier. We need to take that control away from them, but that is for another blog post...not sure when that will be.
So I don't have a lot of respect for money. I need it to live, but it is in it's very nature a corrupted instrument.
Well, I have to go to the doctor now. Wish me luck. I have not been in awhile and I am well past my sell by date. My warranty is expired. I to feel OK, but I have no doubt he will be pedaling some kind of pill for something I did not know I had. We will see.
No comments:
Post a Comment