Contributed by Wes Keller
I’m convinced everyone, including myself, struggles with something like cognitive dissonance when we try to decide if we are rich or poor. The way we feel about our “wealth” depends on so many variables: we may think we are prosperous one moment, and then, very sure we are poor at another. If we want to buy something we cannot afford, we feel poor; when, on the other hand, we are celebrating with family and friends, perhaps on Thanksgiving Day itself, we feel rich. Add the human tendency to compare what we have with what others appear to have, with the potential devastation of covetousness or pride, and we get even more confused!
Government authority factors into our evaluation of our “pursuit of happiness”. What is “money”? Some authority invents it, but why does it work? Do “We the People” (the sovereigns in our republic) have control of monetary policy? How much should be created per capita, i.e. our money supply? What does it cost to get money — interest rates? There is no intrinsic value in the money itself — the paper makes a poor firestarter and it is cheaper to drill holes in our coins than to use them to buy coin-sized washers we might need to build something. How do we protect ourselves from thieves who increase the money supply to pay for debts incurred based on pre-inflation values? These are lofty questions and confuse the question of deciding whether we are rich or poor.
Is our currently apparent “prosperity” real? Is it sustainable, or not? The market seems to be booming for recreational equipment, vacations, entertainment, campers, travel, houses, cars, food, energy… in spite of massive COVID-19 production shortages! “Business as usual” coexisting with production loss makes me uneasy. My theory is the is distribution of trillions of “covid dollars” (debt from the Fed’s printing presses) is robustly changing hands just as if we are continuing to prosper as a nation! If this was the intent, it seems to be working, at least for now. If the prosperity is sustainable, maybe we should do our part by spending more!? My guess is we are all trying to grasp the phenomena and wondering what the future will bring.
Money works ONLY because everyone, by consensus, trusts it. Buying and selling with “tokens” of promised value utterly depends on continued trust. The US Dollar works because it is backed by our US Federal physical assets and, more importantly, the historical credibility and reputation of our government — designed and working to protect and defend inherent, unalienable human rights! A dollar has the profound global value it has because of successful application of the original intent of our US Constitution — freedom. Our trust in US money is inseparable from our trust in the value of our government. Trust in our money system, or our nation, is appropriate only in the context of our greater trust in God — which is specifically stated on our money: “in God we Trust”. Politics, government, and God all matter when contemplating our prosperity — our “pursuit of happiness” is one of the inherent human rights of Declaration of Independence. The 1828 definition of the word “happiness” is about the same as ours: “That state of being in which our desires are gratified.” The founders, like us, presumed the pursuit of happiness included the ownership of property and money. Ultimate “happiness” however, is only artificially related to currency and has everything to do with what/who we are ultimately trusting. If you remember, this is precisely the message of the famous “Sermon on the Mount” in the Bible (summed up in Matt 6:33). The evening news confirms we have less and less reason to place too much trust in government, and more than ever this includes our American government, giving us every reason to think shrewdly about what we ultimately trust.
Long ago, “We the People” were extricated from the power to directly control monetary policy! Congress authorized the creation of the Federal Reserve system (the “Fed”) in 1913. Theoretically we could force reform and restructure our monetary policies by empowering lawmakers, but we would be hard-pressed to forge consensus on what ‘improvements’ to this entrenched institution would look like. We tolerate escalating deficit spending even though we don’t look too closely at how this results in more and more money being printed/minted, which is creating a bigger and bigger debt load.
We “ordinary folks” do not often admit to ourselves we do not have much more than nominal control over government spending! It seems more and more unlikely we will be able to stop the spending-debt spiral. It was a wise man who once said, "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." – Thomas Jefferson, US President [Robert G. Moscatelli, The Quote Manual (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2005), 193.]
Read the rest of this article at http://weskeller.com/are-you-wealthy-or-poor/.
Wes Keller | www.WesKeller.com