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Money…

June 21, 2019   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

The whole thing about money is really strange. A couple living a reasonably basic life wins $65 million and shares it amongst the family – eight of them, to the tune of about $8 million per person. The winning couple had already won one million dollars two years ago.

A hockey star is tempted to stay put with an offer of $192 million over eight years.

Members of the Raptors are, likewise, being made offers of monster money to hang out in beautiful Toronto and continue to play with this winning team. Just to play a sport, something that started with bouncing a ball or shooting a puck with their pals, with their dads. Of course, it’s not about the sport, it is about the advertisers. Actually, it doesn’t matter what it’s about. What matters, is how much damage that kind of money for one person will change the person.

Accounting goes back a very long way. Tally sticks dating back as far as 30,000 years to the Aurignacian (43,000 to 26,000 years ago, depending on where in pre-historic history you are visiting) have shown that we have been haggling with each other for many ages. Actual coin has had a varied birth, from rough clay discs, shiny pebbles of semi-precious stone to different weights of bronze to, eventually, silver coins with Caesar’s head on them….

Very fast forward to now when the whole deal with money has reached the preposterous. It has become a myth, an illusion, something so outrageous as to be irrelevant.

The numbers are so huge that, pretty soon, we will need another way of counting: just how many zeros does it take to reach the end? Or is money like the universe – an unknown length of string that might go on forever?

Not that long ago, a million dollars sounded like a lot of money. Now, it only does when a family of average means wins them.

Governments don’t spend a million on anything of note, consultations, maybe, but can you believe how fast those billions add up? As to millionaires, forget it; now, the world’s billionaires are numbering in three (?) digits.

Hard to believe there isn’t enough money to eliminate poverty. When a government throws around gigantic numbers – and I want to see the figures on paper of why some actions or plans cost so much – yet, cut tiny sums off programs that truly better the little lives some people lead, it is either a puzzle or a crime. 

The real offence is the rationale of the crime: the so-called savings where huge sums of taxpayers’ millions are being wasted in court battles between our different layers of governments; or by a government taking a charity to court or prosecuting citizens who protest against the crime.

Money. One of the best tools for fear mongering; for corruption, absolute corruption; for dissension among family members cheating each other over a will; for all sorts of ails.

Money is the reason for wars. Money is the foundation for power; rather than benevolence for good governance. Money is the tool for acceding to the throne; not wisdom, not worthiness. Especially now – just look around.

As for the money that does good, and goodness knows there are plenty of folk in the business of trying to help the needy, the ill, the planet, those people will always be scraping to find the money, to manage a consistent flow of money into the cache they use to heal. 

How about how money is stolen by governments from students: the very people we need to be well-educated so they can finally do a good job of governing, of cleaning up the messes, of bringing order to world in disarray.

All the time, we of the little money are being robbed and conned. Banks are the masters of this. By George, they really are amazing how they understand so well that every penny pinched thousands and thousands of times makes billions in profit. The kind of numbers of profits bank are boasting tells how fastidious they are at pinching.

Meanwhile, I really hope that the $8 million winners in Montreal will be able to enjoy their fortune without the hounding and chasing for every cent the rest of us suffer. I hope they will have the chance to live their now comfortable lives and follow their dreams a lot.

Money. What is needed is a complete overhaul, and let me rush to say that bitcoin and its ilk are not the answers; they are only more of the same. 

No, a whole new philosophy that finds a way to unplug a system we have used – more or less – since we were, more or less, sentient. It needs to be so extraordinary that accountability is no longer a factor because what was available as ill-gotten gain is gone. So, bribery and corruption, for example, would be impossible. 

Well, give it some thought and get back to me.

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