May 15, 2022
Senator Paul Wellstone was once asked in an interview why Democrats’ solution to problems is too often to “throw money at the problem”. He simply replied that “money is a necessary condition, but it’s never a sufficient one.”
In practical real life terms you do need actual cash; actual money. To afford an apartment in Michigan right now you need to make $17/hr. That’s some data I saw. Not even $15/hour but at least $17/hour. But that is never enough. Money is never enough - not that the amount is too low - but rather that money itself as a category is never sufficient to have a satisfactory life.
It’s ridiculous that they tell us these days to follow our passions regardless of whether your can support yourself on that passion. But “following your passion” is what I’m all about. I want to follow my passions and do the work that brings me personal fulfillment. I know that working for money hasn’t made me happy. And every wise old man figure has told me that money won’t make you happy. And it doesn’t.
I want to explain this in terms that someone who even disagrees with some of my premises can understand.
Money is a small art of a larger category of things that you need in order to be fulfilled and have a meaningful life. There is money, but that is involved in a relationship between persons - and relationships don’t have to be about money. And most of the most meaningful relationships to anyone are not about money. Friends, lovers, family; and so on: it’s crass to make them about money.
I do have a sort of personal honor code or preference, that is: never pay for something you could get by honest work or effort. And in fact there is nothing even in the theory of contracts that says that a contract has to be an exchange involving money. You can exchange a good for a good, or a service for a good. Theoretically the goods don’t have to have any objective value: the parties only have to agree to make the exchange. Practically why else do it, of course, but that is often what happens when you “get a deal” on something: value is subjective on a strict theoretical level.
And why not be able to produce exchangeable value to exchange with others rather than paying with money? It is in all ways preferable. For example, I could pay for an entire college education, or I could try to earn the honor of a scholarship. That is clearly preferable from a logical standpoint.
There is no esoteric reason for thinking about money, as in putting it on a pedestal, nor for being overly concerned with it in practice or “the real world”. There’s also no reason to let money matter unduly in personal relationships. If you have friends, maybe they pay for your dinner sometimes. Maybe sometimes you split the bill because it’s fun to do the mental math. But do you regress your relationship to the level of a customer to seller relationship whenever “money” is involved? No, unless you are utterly crass.
Food, also, is an old classic example: when people gardened and farmed more regularly, people could more commonly treat food as an example of a real individual person’s production of value. In an industrial economy, common examples are sometimes manufactured things (extras, surplus, etc.), and, of course, tickets to something - like getting a theater ticket from a friend who can’t make it to a show, which is another classic example of this. It feels better and it should feel better to get stuff like that, and not reduce it all to money. Nowadays we swap passwords to subscriptions. It’s not all time-dependent what small notions are given and received as honors, and, it’s not all there is, in terms of supporting yourself: but isn’t it miles better than regressing it all to “money”? Yes, it is: because you’re satisfying a need with the additional value of a relationship added into the equation; and, in some cases like scholarships and grants, it is explicitly an honor - although I think it can in all cases be an honor in correct context - on top of satisfying a need.
Why do people, these days, ever, or at any time have this misguided notion that it’s only fair that something exists if they can buy it with money? That is so crass and misguided.
The Chinese use guanshi 關係 (“relationship”) as a business concept as well as a personal one. I’ve explained this so often to my friends in the past that I think it’s time to put an explanation in a public forum about how I feel about it now. Some people can’t get their heads around this concept and see it as corrupt. But they are insane to think that. Building a client base has always been about relationships - and, it is “better” personally, socially, and a better feeling, to have money not be the only thing you think about getting in terms of satisfying yourself. Guanshi should be something that you build, not something that you “just have”. Nepotism is something separate from guanshi, but when a society understands guanshi, nepotism is a sufficient reason to invalidate someone based on their performance. That’s bit difficult to understand if you don’t first understand guanshi, but the idea could be sort of casually explained like this: “not only did someone hand you this job, but on top of that, you can’t do the job? - and; why respect?” Guanshi is not all that there is to this category of “energy” or “potential” of which what we call “money” is some small part. Some of it is your personal skill, practice and fitness for a kind of work or specialized task. It can all get you this category of “stuff” that people think of as only “things you can buy with money” but really should be called “the knowledge that allows you to be a complete person” - or something like that, I don’t pretend to be an expert on all the things that any person could be, I’m just curious about them.
Really, you can trade for or acquire by work things that people think are all only “bought by money”. And they’re much better that way.
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