Gold News

The Freedom of Money

If you're rich, it's harder for other rich people to tell you what to do...

"As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation."

– William Faulkner resigns from the Oxford, Miss., post office

ONE OF the rarely cited advantages of having money is that you're less beholden to others who have it too, writes Daily Reckoning founder Bill Bonner.

The more you have, at least in theory, the more you can ignore the other fellow with it and go about your business. Nor need you drink the same cocktail or rush to the same mall so you can outfit yourself in the same duds.

In short, with a little cash of your own... you can do what you want.

And the fellow who said "Money can't buy happiness" had apparently not read The New York Times:

"Broadly speaking, the data now indicate that as people get richer, they report getting happier too. Though it's not quite that simple. Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan who helps advise the US government on happiness statistics, told me that poor people in poor countries are not unhappy simply because they don't have wads of cash. They are more likely to have fewer choices, more children who die in childbirth and other grave problems. And while wealthier nations are generally happier, there is no evidence, Wolfers says, that an artist would be happier if she became a hedge-fund trader."

But we're talking capital, not cash flow. The trouble with cash flow is that it doesn't spring ab ovo, from nowhere. It comes to your hands from the greasy mitts of someone else. If they don't keep the cash flowing, you may not have any. Unless you're a government employee or a tenured professor, a job is just a job. You serve at the pleasure of others. If you give them displeasure, they can cut off your income.

Capital is different. If you have enough of it, you don't have to work for anyone. You can go fishing, pick your teeth, and maintain unpatriotic opinions.

Capital frees you from politics too. According to the most recent numbers, nearly half of US households now rely on other people's money for some or all of their income. They are beneficiaries of one or more of the feds' transfer programs. Money is taken from others; it is transferred to them, as if to a getaway car.

The feds even have the chutzpah to give the recipients of this stolen loot an electronic card called the "Independence Card." Independent is exactly what these people aren't. Instead, they are like feudal serfs, says Charles Hugh Smith.

"The core of American liberty is widespread private ownership of property," he writes. If you want to be free, you have to have your hands on the "means of production." Otherwise, you've got to learn to bend.

Imagine that you have zero equity in the house you own, he suggests. How free are you then?

Or imagine that you need to buy a house and need a mortgage. The mortgage market is almost 100% controlled by the feds. How free are you?

He does not mention it, but imagine that you rely on the feds for unemployment compensation, food stamps, health care, or Social Security? Are you a free man? Or a serf?

Smith says we live in a condition of creeping "neofeudalism." A few people own a lot of property. Most own very little. His attention is focused on housing, where he believes the feds are quietly taking more and more property out of private hands and putting it in the hands of rich, concentrated elites.

He's probably right about that. But it seems to us that even more neofeudalism is taking place right out in the open... where large groups now depend on the feds... and on Fed's EZ money... to maintain their current standards of living.

Balance the federal budget? Stop the Fed's printing presses? Let interest rates rise to a normal level? Forget it. The serfs can't afford it.

Get access to the lowest prices for gold and silver when you open an account today at BullionVault...

New York Times best-selling finance author Bill Bonner founded The Agora, a worldwide community for private researchers and publishers, in 1979. Financial analysts within the group exposed and predicted some of the world's biggest shifts since, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, to the collapse of the Dot Com (2000) and then mortgage finance (2008) bubbles, and the election of President Trump (2016). Sharing his personal thoughts and opinions each day from 1999 in the globally successful Daily Reckoning and then his Diary of a Rogue Economist, Bonner now makes his views and ideas available alongside analysis from a small hand-picked team of specialists through Bonner Private Research.

See full archive of Bill Bonner articles

Please Note: All articles published here are to inform your thinking, not lead it. Only you can decide the best place for your money, and any decision you make will put your money at risk. Information or data included here may have already been overtaken by events – and must be verified elsewhere – should you choose to act on it. Please review our Terms & Conditions for accessing Gold News.

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