Money: Everyone wants it and those who have it want more of it.
Money: Has more to do with numbers than anything else. Numerical value of the note, numerical value of the cost, numerical value of its quantity.
Cost: The amount of money has to pay for a service or product.
Everything costs money. The system we live in is based on money. Everything is valued with it. Value goes up and down with supply and demand. Which means that a billionaire has more rights because he can afford something that has high demand but low supply while a person who is in more dire need of it cannot.
We pick up the phone to talk to an old friend, we pay the cost.
We live in a house or apartment, we pay the cost.
Transportation, costs.
Keeping good health, costs.
We take a dump and flush the toilet and we pay a cost, the cost of the water we just used to flush the toilet, the cost of waste our body generates from the food we bought over the phone for delivery to eat at the house we live in. apparently our fesses has monetary value.
Banks: An entity that takes our money, makes money off of it in the form of interest, gives us money in the form of loans which we pay back with interest so that the bank can make more money, sells our debt to someone else to make money out of.
Government: an entity that we set up to offer necessary services to the people so that we may live comfortably. It also collects taxes on everything including the money we make. sadly governments run more like profit making corporations and are just as corrupt so the people end up paying the government and getting no services to low quality services when we should be getting the best service, especially when the taxes we pay almost burn a whole through our pockets.
Dyscalculia, a form of dyslexia, means difficulty with numbers and calculations. I am a full fledged dyslexic. Not only do I have difficulty with words but I also have difficulty with numbers, among many other things. So handling money, being an object of a pure numerical nature, presents a problem for someone like me who has difficulty with numbers. So just imagine a person like me trying to make sense of a system of numbers on which everyone relies on and everything runs on. I can never be a financial adept person because the system we rely on for daily life is all about numbers.
We throw away our lives, our dreams, our hopes our aspirations and restrict ourselves to studying what will make us more money rather than what will benefit humanity. Think of all the university students who are forced by their parents to study a profession that is contrary to their dreams. University students follow the field that will make them more money; few follow a career that they are really interested in despite of the money factor.
We are told of our inalienable human rights, the right to exist, the right to good health, the right to education, the right to live a happy life, the right to be equal. But no one has his rights, not even in the most democratic of countries we do not have our right, not as long as daily life is based on something called money. A millionaire throws a banquet that costs $300,000 to celebrate his vanity. Caviar, Champagne, gourmet cuisine, large quantities of food and drink, much of which ends up not being consumed. Billions of dollars are spent on insuring the “security” of G8 and G20 meetings of the worlds “greatest” heads of state, who meet to discuss the state of the world economy. Meanwhile a family gets evicted to the street from their homes because they defaulted on loan. Millions of people starve to death in poor countries where there are severe droughts. Children starve to death while the millionaire throws a banquet to satisfy the vanity of his ego and the G8/20 heads of state laugh and dance and “discuss” the state of the economy while business men indulge their vain egos so that they may make more money while people get evicted and others die of hunger. With the amount of money wasted by the wealthy to indulge their vanity they could feed the world many times over. They could provide education for poor children many times over. They could provide more than adequate living conditions for everyone many times over.
Equality.
We are told that all human beings are equal. That we live in a mostly democratic world and that everyone has the opportunity to be what they want to be. This is a lie.
A poor starving child from Africa is not equal to the son of a billionaire. the child from Africa has to work, be sold, scrounge garbage for unhealthy dirty food, while the son of a billionaire has to do nothing as everything is provided for him. A billionaire can afford to send his son to the best university while the hungry child of Africa gets no education other than hunger. A billionaire can buy anything he wants any time he wants, a middle class man has to think a hundred times before buying what he needs, not what he wants, or take a lone from the bank so that the billionaire can make more money from the interest the middle calls man will end up paying back to the bank. A billionaire can live in comfort, have his own swimming pool, several cars, several, homes, expensive toys, while the middle class man buys a car with money he does not have, has a home he cannot afford with the money he does not have, needs tools to improve his efficacy so that he can make more money to pay off the bank for the money it lent him to buy the things he needs with the money he does not have. A billionaire does not need to work and employs people to mange his affairs while he, the billionaire, has a good time. The middle class man has to work a 9-5 job that is not secure, has no one to mange his affairs, is only allowed an occasional vacation too short to be significant or enjoyable. 9-5 jobs kill the spirit of a dreamer. meanwhile people are dying of hunger.
Where is our equality?
I am a dreamer. I dream of traveling from one place to another, studying people, their history and their culture. But there is no job that will give me this privilege, or rather there are too few of these jobs so many people like me end up without it even if they merit it.
Being a dream does not mean I am lazy. I do my share of work to the best of my abilities, and I am very successfully at any job I do. But the money system that makes slaves of us all is not something I can deal with.
Being dyslexic does not mean I am stupid, it just means that it takes me 10 times the effort than a normal person to deal with a system that was designed for normal people.
I am not a cripple. Just because the system we live in is not designed for someone with my difficulties it does not mean I am crippled, it just means that those who design things for the least common denominator of the masses does not take in to account people like me. I am not a least common denominator. I have legitimate needs a dyslexic. for me to survive in this un-egalitarian world system I need tools, to get the tools I need money, money are numbers and I, by the nature of my makeup, have difficulty with numbers. I work for my needs. I work hard to get what I need. What I need will help me improve my life and my chances of making more money. But that is not my objective. I would rather not make money and just be. I would be willing to work for free for something I believed in and that has meaning for me rather than work just to make money without feeling alive or interest in the job that I am doing. In spite of my hate for my 9-5 slave job I still, with my sense of dignity, honor, and professionalism, do the job more than the best that I can. I work to make money to buy the tools I need to make my life easier, but i also have living expenses; rent, groceries, food, clothes, transportation, taxes. Keeping the balance is difficult for someone like me and usually it means that I do not get the tools that I need till much, much later. By the time I have what I need, my spirit would be broken.
We are equal. By no means are we equal. Not while children die of hunger while rich mean indulge their vanity with lavish and wasteful banquets. By no means are we equal. Not when “wealth” is unevenly disturbed. Not when some people have it easy and most do not. Not when some can afford to go to ridiculously expensive universities.
If we had equality, then education would be free and it would be on par with the best Ivy League university.
If we had equality, then the starving child from Africa (or anywhere else for that matter) could throw the same feast as the billionaire.
If we had equality, then a dyslexic like me would not have to worry about loosing focus and ending up on the street because my mind is not made to deal with numbers.
I should not have to worry about dealing with money. Education is not a commodity. The poor and less fortunate should not have to starve to death or live off of garbage.
I am not a financially minded person. I cannot give numerically sound solutions to the money problem. I can however give suggestions that no non-dyslexic would ever grasp. Ideas that are so removed from the reality we live that no one can even fathom it. For instance; one way to make things more equal would be to base all prices on a percentage of what the person buying the item makes. For example, to buy a house one would have to pay say 30% of their annual income. If someone makes $100,000 a year he would pay $30,000 while a person who makes $1,000,000 a year would pay $300,000 for it. If the house was priced at $300,000 the lower wage buyer would not afford it without resorting to a loan. But with a percentage price everyone can afford what they need and thus everyone would be equal. You no longer need hefty amounts of money to do anything. Just a percentage. This would also not adversely affect the person selling because he or she would also be buying things at a percentage form others. With a percentage based system everyone can afford what they want or need. The starving child in Africa can have a banquet equal to that of the billionaire for almost nothing and can buy that same proverbial house discussed above for a percentage of what he makes, even if it’s just 30% of one dollar.
If you do not see how this works then your mind too stuck in the system we are slaves to. Actually your situation would be more comparable to the people in the caves of Plato’s allegory of the cave where they know nothing more than their environment of a poorly lit cave. Remember, because of my dyslexia, dificulty with words, I cannot explain this concept in complete detail that would make sense inside my mind, the idea is far more compete and details but all I can offer is a solution with out details. It is up to others to fill in the details or to confront me with questions that would bring out the details. For me, a dyslexic, saying that a percentage based solution would make us all equal is enough to explain all the details that are stuck in my mind. This is how my mind works. Sorry. Make the effort and meet me half way and you will discover that there is more to my idea than the simplistic explanation I have already given. And if you think this solution is weird enough as it is, wait till you hear my more radical solutions like how we can eliminate the need for money entirely……. but that idea I know is very far fetched and long before its time.
Why people cannot grasp my idea? Well because everyone has been brought up to believe that money is everything and everyone should strive for more of it. So we go back to supply and demand, which is an artificial method of placing value on something and which can be manipulated. We are brought up to believe that money is everything and that the more we have of it the more privileged we become and the more “equal” we become. meanwhile our inalienable human rights become more alienable.
Regardless of whether my idea is sound or implausible. There exists a massive world wide problem that requires a solution soon before the world crisis becomes worse.
I invite you to debate this “crazy” suggestion of mine. Use the comment box. Let’s discuss if this idea will work or not.
Addendum: OK OK… I know what I’m suggesting is ludicrous at best. I am just trying to promote the idea that something needs to change and that humanity can no longer go on living with this ugly system or to be slaves to money.
