MONEY OR YOUR LIFE. Chapter Two.
WHY BOTHER ABOUT MONEY.
Your first task is to understand the true value and importance of money.
At present most of us have a love hate relationship with money and one way or another we have strong feelings about the stuff.
I have known people who will not even touch money and even pretend it doesn't exist.
They of course tend to be the wealthy ones who have inherited money or married money.
I have heard for example from Mr. Rockerfeller's personal private secretary, that when she is sent out to buy the great financier an emergency supply of cigars, it never occurs to him that she has to pay for them, and there is no money at all in his pocket to help her out.
I met this lady at the Captain's table during a Caribbean cruise. Making polite conversation with the lady sitting next to me, I was rewarded with this interesting item of intelligence.
The lady did not believe that Mr. Rockerfeller knows that cash even exists.
All his money is electronic money. I will explain electronic money later in the book.
But the reason this book has to be written lies in the fact that we are all to some extent emotional about money.
You work all your life so that you can enjoy your retirement with a good pension and then you find that one of the money men has already spent your pension money. Maxwell drowned his conscience in the sea, diving off the luxury yacht bought with your money and left you up the creak without a paddle.
In so many ways money or the lack of it can be a source of grief and woe.
We say that money is the root of all evil or that the love of money is the root of all evil.
We can get very emotional about money. And most of all we don't seem to have an accurate statement in our language of what money actually is.
Let me give you two examples of the strange consequences of such an omission.
In a recent personal letter written on behalf of Eddie George, Governor of the Bank of England, it says "The trouble with money is, that money is not really money." You cannot get more confused about money than that, can you.
In another personal letter from a Shadow Chancellor, he refers to "national sentiment concerning monetary money." Where does sentiment fit into the balance sheet and what sort of money is monetary money? It can all get very confusing.
There is no need to imagine that Cabinet Ministers and Governors of the Bank of England are being dishonest about money, they don't need to be. Their intellect is so befuddled by emotional confusion over money that they have lost the ability to think straight on the subject. And of course so have you, and you will find that your emotions about money will make this book difficult.
That which happens to a person when the meaning of a word in his vocabulary becomes corrupted, can be very interesting.
Let us take, for example, when that word is a key word in any subject, for then the whole subject becomes corrupted. The mind sort of goes blank on the subject when a basic key word in that subject is not correctly understood.
Possibly the key word in the subject of economics is money and because the subject of economics does not possess an accurate and precise definition of money the whole subject is flawed and unsafe.
This is obvious for all to see because the very, very best brains in the business cannot see a way out of the recession. The blind lead the blind without even knowing they are blind.
You too must consider the possibility that the subject of money is heavily charged with emotion and that you too may have difficulty in looking at what I say with cold, hard logic.
But the whole purpose of this book is to clear the air on the subject of money so that we can devise a better approach to the subject of economics.
So don't throw the book down in disgust because it seems to disagree with your existing concept of the subject of economics.
I will make you a promise. When you persevere and come to understand money clearly and without passion or confusion, you will have enough understanding of economics to ensure freedom from poverty for every man, woman and child on the planet.