IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY America is obsessed with riches and wealth, which is one of the primary reasons the country is so dislocated. As it turns out, there is a little feature about riches (lots of money) that most people do not understand. But then again, how could they understand? They're living in America, where nobody seems to understand anything but money. But here is a little newsflash for you about money:
It doesn't really exist. It's something we made up.
Now the fact that we made it up isn't - taken by itself - all that bad. The problem is the way we use our impish abstraction. We use money, you see, to access wealth. That, my friend, is precisely what money truly is, access to resources. Wealth, reduced to its finest principle, is resources. And the more money you have, the more resources you may access. A guy like Bill Gates has enough money to access half the state of California. (Yeah, I know, I'm exaggerating, but what the hell.) What the greedy citizens of this crass (and utterly tasteless) country do not stop to consider is the fact that resources are finite. I'm talking material resources here, not the human kind, and last time I checked, the earth's material resources had not increased by a single smidgen in response to its population topping the 6-billion mark. And the United States has not increased the area of its principle land mass since 1776 to accommodate its current population of 300 million inhabitants. But we still go on and on about making a lot of money, about getting rich, about getting as much access to resources as we can, oblivious to the fact that those resources are finite, which means that we cannot all have an equal share, even a fair share, if a handful of lucky or skillful or entrepreneurially cunning somehow manage to get their hands on excessive amounts, which is the essence what it really means to be rich; that you have excessive access to resources. And what this means is that others get poor. Think about this whenever you come across one of those infomercials about getting rich, in the real estate market, with stocks and bonds, or whatever. The essential perspective of all those programs is utterly myopic. If the resources are finite (or the money-making opportunities, which is just another form of access to those resources), it doesn't matter how clever you are, how much education you have, how diligent at reading and following instructions or how talented. If somebody else was ahead of you in line, they took your share. It's that simple. All the stories and testimonials about certain individuals who succeed, who somehow end up making a lot of money (i.e., gaining access to a lot of resources) are highly deceiving. For every person who succeeds we must never forget that many others (many others) fail. If someone got the sale it means that another somebody did not get it (actually, a lot of somebody else's, very likely just as skilled, qualified and so on). So enough with all the bullshit about all this opportunity in America. Capitalism has never done a damned thing for the poor, except create them to begin with. We need something to unmake the poor, and it sure as hell is not going to be capitalism. Capitalism doesn't give a hoot-and-a-holler about anybody who does not succeed. When you give all that advice about how to get rich you do nothing but brag about how to force a bunch of people into poverty.
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