The Greatest Economic Crime
For most people, time does equal money under most circumstances. These people are paid for the effort they put into a problem, not the solution to that problem. Examples are hourly and salaried workers which comprise the vast majority of the workforce.
For the select few, including the one percent, we are compensated differently. We are paid for the solution, not for the effort. If a solution takes a day or a year, we are compensated the same amount. This difference means that time does not equal money, since the compensation is the same but time investment is differential.
Instead, a combination of knowledge and effort equals money. And interestingly, time contributes towards both. Knowledge is acquired through time including that spent outside of that applied directly to the problem at hand.
The effort invested is also interesting because unlike jobs where you are compensated for time, in these positions, there is a direct correlation between the amount of effort per time unit put into the problem and your compensation. If you can solve a problem in an hour just as well as you can in five by working very hard, you will, because you get to utilize those four hours for whatever you want. For an hourly or salaried employee, those four hours are expected to remain the property of your employer, be they spent uselessly at your desk, in ridiculous meetings to plan other meetings, or doing other work.
Therefore I conclude that for these select few, time does not equal money.
Time is knowledge or effort. Both of which can lead to money, but the direct correlation is no longer true.
For these people, time is best spent carefully between an investment in knowledge for application on the current and all future problems and in direct, concentrated effort applied to the problem at hand.
This will maximize your income, minimize the amount of time spent on it, and allow you to directly control the amount of income that you have.
Interestingly, this system already exists.
It is called equity.
Ownership.
If you own your time and your output, you can invest in yourself properly and have every motivation to increase your efficiency. Otherwise, you are simply increasing someone else’s efficiency at the cost of your own.
It is a concept never explained during primary school or even in college unless you take an elective economics course.
Economics lives at the heart of every transaction on Earth, of which we participate in hundreds if not thousands daily, yet we are not taught its basic concepts as part of our routine educational system.
Why is this heinous crime foisted upon the modern world?
Why is one of the most important sciences of everyday life left out of the educational system?
It could simply be a leftover of the fact that the classic humanities educational system has always looked at economics as a lesser science, or that modern economics is rather new and the educational system is rather old, or that the educational system is rabidly liberal and economics is classically conservative.
But, always being the one to ever question even my own existence and reality and see conspiracies around every corner, I see a much more nefarious purpose. I see it as a means of control. A crime on the greatest of levels.
See, society needs dumb workers. It needs people who will never demand ownership. The powerful people throughout history who have eventually learned the secret of equity have also learned that they needed workers to man the machines of the factories they owned. Sailors to guide their ships. And typists to write their letters.
There is only 100% of a company to go around which simply isn’t enough, especially when you want to own 100% of it.
Which means you need most of those workers to never understand that they should own their output. They should never be taught that if they don’t participate in ownership, they are being robbed.
This is a crucial difference between the 1% and the 99%: understanding that you must own your time and the output from it. That you must be able to invest it. That you must be able to define your own world through it.
99% of Americans probably do not own stock in the companies they work for anymore. These are the 99% who do not understand the true meaning of equity. That equity is the path to wealth. And wealth is the path to defining your own freedom. And that freedom allows you to control your destiny.
No billionaire or even multimillionaire ever got there by working hourly. A tiny minority got there by earning salaries and bonuses. No, the wealthy got there by ownership. Equity. Keeping a share of their hard work. Because once you keep part of it, it motivates you to work even harder.
This long standing custom of not teaching economics to eager young minds is, in my eager older mind, the greatest crime of all time, leading them down the path of believing that they have no need for equity and ownership.
It’s time that economics is taught in schools so that the next generation can all partake properly in the endless chess game of life and spend their time free of the chains of corporations and the powerful, their minds roaming free amongst opportunity.
