What is the #1 reason most people don't have money?
The answer is: They don't know what money really is!
Do you?
You might think so, but the odds are you really don't...
Real Money?
Let's reason this out together. What is the primary attribute of money?
If you said "value," you're only half right.
You see, value -- to have any real meaning -- must be enduring or lasting.
To be useful it must have two main attributes...
1. Able to be stored until needed while maintaining its value.
2. Able to be easily traded, spent or used when needed, without loss of value.
Both of these attributes have, as their main component, the concept of trust.
You must be able to trust in the value stored, and others must be able to trust in it enough to accept it as real value, and not something falsely posing or fraudulently misrepresented as valuable.
Real money fits all of these attributes like a glove.
Time Value
There is only one thing you and I both have, in common with everyone else, and that is time.
And you only have a limited supply of this precious commodity!
Why is it so precious?
One of the first rules of value, in this material world, is that when a thing is rare it has more perceived value than something that is plentiful.
Of course most people don't really consider time too valuable, simply because it doesn't seem so rare until there is precious little of it left.
The thing is, you don't really know just how much or how little time you have left -- even a child can have almost no time left on this earth -- and the older you are the less time you have left to live the rest of your life!
So many people squander so much of this most precious resource, without truly realizing just how much they are throwing away so frivolously.
Your Time or Your Life?
People in general -- and you may well be one of them -- think that money is what they trade their time for, either for a wage or a profit.
And most people accept and trade what they believe to be money for goods or services that, at their root essence, really represent the time others have expended to produce those goods and services.
So the ultimate commodity we all really value, in a round-about sort of way, is the time or lives of other people.
Sure, your skills or abilities can be valuable to you as well, but this has a limited value.
That's because the different and unique skills or abilities of others adds to your own that which you simply don't have enough time (or even the inclination, probably) to learn, hone and perfect.
We each bring our own unique and valuable "cards" to the "table" in the "game" of life, without which the results we can expect are that much poorer or impoverished.
Real poverty is found in the grave, where neither thought nor action contribute ought to the world, other than what was thought or done while still alive. All of which is of no value to the deceased, as long as they remain so.
A thief might say: "Your money or your life," but it would be a poor trade indeed to give up one's remaining time on this earth in a vain attempt to hoard anything else falsely thought to be money.
Valuable Stock
When you think of hoarding, what is the chief reason why you would do this?
A hoard, in reality, is a store of something with future value.
For instance, a crop has little future value if it is left to rot in the field, or is soon eaten by you, by others, or by insects, vermin or other animals before you or anyone else needs it.
First, a certain amount of each harvest must be saved as seed, to grow the next season's crop.
And another portion should be carefully stored and preserved to provide for all your needs -- and the needs of others dependent upon you or your skills -- through the intervening season(s).
When you are young, and in the spring or summer of your life, you should stockpile enough of your valuable time -- in the form of the results from your efforts, in a reliable store of value -- to see you through the fall and winter of your life.
Most people -- and again, you might be one -- fail to personally plan their lives wisely, by relying on others (usually those who like to call themselves "the government") to provide them with all their needs in their declining years.
Others perhaps unwisely rely too much on their stockpiles of what they misperceive as wealth, without realizing that some might envy, covet or hate them enough for their real or perceived miserly or uncharitable conduct, enough to harm them or steal away with their hoard and leave them with little or nothing, or a shorter than anticipated life-span.
Many who come to the later years of their lives in poverty may also discover that there are very few who will really care for them enough to share some of their precious stock or store to sustain them through their remaining years.
There is real wisdom, therefore, in using whatever talents and resources you have to buy friends for yourself -- through judicious giving and sharing, generosity and caring -- to win the loyalty and help of some in your declining days.
What Is Money?
That question seems to have many answers, but in reality it has but two.
Some think that plastic cards, pieces of paper, or precious metals, such as stocks, bonds, checks, contracts, or coins and bars of rare metals, are "real" money.
However this all depends on how valuable these things are as a reliable store of value, until needed to purchase some commodity or service, and how many others trust in their value enough to readily accept them as payment in full.
During troubling times, for instance, simple consumable commodities -- such as stamps, matches, soap or toilet paper -- when in short supply, have been known to serve in place of paper or coin money, when these have become too inflated or debased in value to be thought of as valuable, or have any real value as money.
Why?
Because real money is actually both your time and your concept -- in concert with most others -- of what stands as a generally recognized and accepted store of value, which nearly everyone will trust and accept in trade for goods or services.
Why Are So Many So Poor Today?
Let's say, for the sake of illustration, you and most others think olives are money (they are usually green to begin with, after all).
And let's also assume your home and family represents society as a whole, and a jar marked with your name contains your olive "account," held in your refrigerator "bank."
First, if someone else saw your store, and decided to help themselves to your olives, you might justifiably say that you were robbed.
All the more so if, as per our example economy, those olives represented your chief monetary currency, with which you bartered or traded for the goods and services of others in your family or community.
Now you might think or assume that this is the only way you can be robbed, but there is a far more subtle and sly way that not one person in a million would notice or really understand...
Let's also say that the olive farmer -- someone other than you -- managed to get a law passed that gave him the exclusive monopoly on growing olives, and also on producing little green plastic tokens to act as receipts for the olives in his field or storehouse, before delivery of the actual crop.
Imagine what would happen if, being a clever and conniving fellow, the olive farmer decided to give out these receipts as loans, which required a small percentage of additional tokens be repaid to him.
Three things would happen.
First, the actual olives would become less and less important as a commodity of exchange or store of value (as money) in most people's minds.
Second, due to the fact that the extra chips or tokens to be repaid for such loans (which you might call "interest" or "usury") are not somehow put into circulation, someone else must give up or lose some chips, tokens or "money" -- or real property pledged as security for the repayment of such loans -- whenever a loan is repaid in full, along with the interest.
And third, the farmer will become unjustly enriched from the defaults on a certain percentage of the loans made; those that eventually cannot find the way to afford repayment in full, plus interest.
The Law of Supply and Demand
Actually, this loss will be spread out and absorbed or suffered by many others, particularly those whose wages are fixed and cannot be easily raised, or whose savings are valued only in such chips.
Why?
Let's return to the family "community" in our analogy, after the jar of olives has been replaced by a lock box full of olive chips or tokens.
So long as those chips or tokens can be easily and readily traded one-to-one for actual olives, they will maintain or retain whatever value the olives are believed to possess as a reliable and trusted store of value.
But once this exchange (as a receipt for the actual commodity) is denied to those holding the chips or tokens -- such as by declaring them to be "legal tender for all debts public and private," instead of lawful payment in full for all goods or services -- they begin to take on an imputed value.
Such "legal tender" is really fraud "money," because it is not lawful payment in full for all goods and services (i.e. fraud money actually begets more debts)!
At first that imputed value will be more or less equal to the actual commodity that was once exchangeable "at par" (or equal in value) with the chips or tokens.
Yet when chips or tokens are taken out of circulation (as borrowers repay the principal and interest on their loans from the available currency in circulation), two things happen.
First, the supply of "money" becomes scarcer (and therefore has greater perceived value, to those who need it but cannot get enough of it), and second those unable to get a loan when needed will be forced to make do with less "money" (or goods and services), which consequently becomes harder to earn or come by than before.
In this way many become poorer than they were before, while the few sheltered from the consequences (because they are "the government," and can vote themselves raises while everyone else struggles to survive, or because they use their loans to hire the time and efforts of others to profit and increase their wealth, multiplied by the number of others they can hire and pay the least wages in return for their valuable time and talents) seem to prosper.
Taxing Your Resources
Let's add to this mix yet others who claim and demand you pay them a percentage of your wages in return for promised services (government "benefits"), leaving most -- possibly you -- with even less to save or spend after the tax man takes "their" piece of your pie.
This becomes even more onerous when the promised services or "benefits" are later reduced, retracted or abolished, even while the taxes you are expected to pay for them continues or, even worse, is increased!
Assuming a tax on wages is even lawful in the first place (and there is a valid dispute that it is only really intended and lawfully required of government workers, and is fraudulently imposed on non-government employees and employers), let's add yet another "wrinkle" to our economic example.
To "help" society (some argue, to help themselves), government borrows its olive chips or tokens, at interest, paying for them with real olives, but at only a fraction of the actual current perceived or generally accepted value of the chips or tokens (the actual value of the real olives being many times that of the chips or tokens after many years of unlawful inflationary taxation).
Then, to buy votes and kick-back favors from special interest lobbies and big multinational (unpatriotic, disloyal) corporate interests, this "money" is then granted, loaned or welfared into circulation.
When loaned, the interest to be repaid, and taxes paid (usually unnecessarily by those who don't owe it, and avoided by those -- corporate creations of the state -- who should) further enriches those who made and received the repayment of the loans, and those who receive the grants or welfare, while contracting the perceived "wealth" or currency of everyone else.
When granted or given away as welfare, a certain amount of perceived "wealth" is added back into the economy, but this is always inequable and at the expense of everyone who is the last to "benefit" (or are denied this by circumstance or position in the increasing social disorder), compared to those "favored" few (rich and "poor" -- or those who are unable, or especially who refuse, to work to support themselves).
Inflation Is Born
Going back to our limited family "economy" example for easier understanding, to help you grasp what happens next...
Let's assume that a few wake up one day to find their supply of chips or tokens has "magically" doubled (due to a loan, grant or welfare). While others still have the same amount as they had before.
Know what would happen next?
Well, first those who found their supply of "money" increased would decide they could now afford some of the finer things in life, without having to work harder to earn or produce them.
As they spent their extra "money," those without the extra chips or tokens -- who sell their goods and services -- will tend to raise their prices or wages to absorb the higher costs they will be expected to pay their employees, or for necessities such as food, travel and utilities or other bills, who are all in competition (in this unfair or biased "contest") for the same goods and services.
And these price hikes (otherwise known as inflation) will filter down the chain of supply -- while both sides (employers and employees), encouraged by the ignorant news media, begin blaming each other for the inflation -- to those who provide the raw materials and labor to produce the goods and services.
Needless to say, those who have political clout (including the "poor" on welfare), or are unionized, can eventually demand and get special perks, "benefits" or higher wages to compensate for some of the rising costs, while others not so protected must somehow struggle along and -- through no fault of their own -- must make do by being able to buy less on the same income they had before inflation raised its thieving and biased head.
Unfairness and Inequity For Most
Who pays the final "bill" for government and "money" lender-created inflation?
That's easy:
-- The disenfranchised working middle class, who are in reality the nouveau poor!
Everyone whose wages, or retirement, or savings "income" is fixed in terms of chip or token "monetary" value, and nothing else, are slowly and gradually robbed of a percentage of their living budget every year -- the same percentage as real inflation, the true amount of which is often far greater than government accounting statistics are able or willing to admit.
Some are inevitably pushed over the economic brink and either become slaves, prisoners, or wards of "the state," without recourse.
And we all pay in more ways than one.
First, to maintain the guise -- if not the actual fact -- of "prosperity" for "all," businesses start to engage in sharp or deceptive retail practices.
Packages may stay the same size (until this pretense can no longer be maintained), while actual contents other than air shrink in amount.
Cheaper quality materials replace longer-lasting, better quality materials.
And cheap foreign labor is either imported into the country, or valuable jobs are outsourced to cheap labor cost foreign countries, while factories are relocated to third world countries where not only labor and materials are cheaper, but less restrictive laws make more dangerous, polluting or degrading manufacturing practices possible, and harmful products thus produced to bypass lax, indifferent or bribed officials are imported in unfair competition to domestically produced goods.
Meanwhile, a once wealthy manufacturing society is slowly, stealthily and silently converted into an impoverished service and consumption-oriented society of lazy, diffident and bored entertainment addicts, living quiet lives of fearful desperation and frustration, punctuated by violent and self-destructive -- and occasionally mass-murderous -- outbursts of rage and hostility toward the often mistakenly perceived causes of their anguish.
Who's To Blame?
You could blame the government-manipulated "public" schools for all the ignorance that created this mess. Yet those who teach cannot be expected to teach what they also never learned.
You could also blame the selfish, self-serving, lying politicians who like to "feather" their own "nests" at the expense of everyone else. Not all are so inclined, however.
You could certainly blame the courts and most power-hungry or tyrannical judges, who first devised or have upheld as "legal" the scheme of permitting otherwise unlawful acts under the guise of corporate or partnership (even governmental) pseudo-"PERSONS" (and for converting your name into something these now mostly corporate courts can sue, fine and punish, so long as you ignorantly stand as surety for the debts of their monstrous creation)!
Yet some judges have struggled to suppress and disempower this growing and increasingly monstrous jurisdiction, as best they can.
And the banks, trusts (monopolies) and "news" media certainly deserve their share of the guilt and blame, along with drug and chemical manufacturers, so-called "medical" and "religious" alleged "authorities," and even supposed "peace officers" who now have been mostly transformed into, and act in the autocratic -- even despotic -- guise, of police or cops whose real agenda is raising funds and maintaining the continued existence of the oppressive governments and their countless agencies, agents and bureaucrats, with all their endless rules, regulations and statute "laws."
Every governor or president, and all the attorneys general, who have failed to fulfill their sworn duties -- to bring foreign and domestic (especially governmental) perpetrators and actual traitors to justice -- to date, each bear their share of responsibility for the actual and impending collapse of social order as a result of their inaction and actions in concert with this great evil.
Let's face it, government leaders will take full advantage of the "little people," and rob them blind, so long as they know they're looking the other way, not paying real attention, and aren't guarding their wealth.
So most of all, the final blame rests on you and I...
For those who willingly trade their freedom for alleged "security" -- or a leaky, holey bag of supposed "benefits" -- in an insecure domestic world, deserve neither and will reap the exact opposite sooner or later (perhaps much sooner than most would care to admit or realize)!
Modern Money-Changers...
The Messiah drove the money changers of His age out of the Temple, because they had turned it into a "den of thieves and robbers".
Consider how you might feel, if your paper dollar were still redeemable for one silver dollar on demand at any bank (as they were until the mid-1970s), if the bank teller handed you back a .50 cent piece, or a quarter, or even a dime.
Even if the coin they handed you was silver, because you were expecting your dollar to be worth a dollar in silver coin, wouldn't you feel cheated?
Today, that's just what happens when you take a silver dollar coin to a coin dealer, who profiteers on it by offering you only half its current value in modern FRN (Federal Reserve Note) "dollars", to insure them a profit (gain) on the transaction.
Is it right that anyone should profit off of what is, in reality, the only truly lawful currency our nation has?
And what about states which tax your purchase of silver dollars in FRN "dollars" (or fractions thereof)?
These are the same states that are forbidden to make anything but gold or silver coin a Tender in Payment of Debts, according to that bothersome piece of paper called the United States Constitution (Article 1, Section 10 [1]).
Furthermore, the value of FRNs is constantly degraded by means of the unlawful tax of inflation, by the government borrowing them at interest from the "Fed", so that every time one is spent to pay income taxes (which only go to repay the national debt for borrowing the country's supposed currency), or repay interest on a loan, their value is degraded that much more.
You could justifiably say this makes the paper dollar America's real Public Enemy No. 1...
And you probably thought it was some petty crook or criminal (by comparison)!
What Can Be Done?
Once society as a whole reaches the "tipping point," where more than 50% (the majority) of the population become deceitful, duplicitous or dishonest in their dealings with one another, that society (or economy) cannot long survive.
Most likely it will finally be attacked and conquered by a more disciplined and aggressive nation, or group of nations.
Why would they bother?
Because, in the process of becoming poor, a once mighty but still proud nation that has fallen under the delusion that its place as a leader in the world is some sort of irrevocable right, gradually becomes more conceited, cruel and despotic toward other nations, as it becomes more vain and impoverished, turning from a creditor into a debtor nation that expects -- even demands -- the rest of the world pay for its many indulgences.
Those nations or peoples who take upon themselves the burden of becoming creditors to such a nation, perhaps in the hopes of stealing some (or all) of its former power and glory, along with its riches and wealth of natural and human resources (what is left of them), gradually learn to despise and hate the increasingly arrogant and dangerous debtor nation.
Sooner or later -- as the Medo-Persians did with Babylon, and the Greeks later did with the Medo-Persian empire, and the Romans later still did with the Greeks, and finally the Vandals and Visigoths did with the Romans -- the creditor nation(s) will decide to finally cancel all their burdensome debts by killing off their mostly useless, pleasure-oriented, now weaker but still proud and haughty debtors (usually when they are "sound asleep" and least expect it).
And that, I'm afraid, is where America is now headed pell-mell, without hesitance, wisdom or foresight by the majority.
For those who fail to learn history, and be guided by its many vital lessons, are doomed to repeat it.
Which inevitably leads to the greatest poverty of all, for the majority.
That is death for the many, and slavery for the survivors.
There is, I'm sorry to report, no happy ending to this tragic story of national ignorance of the real #1 reason why you don't have money!
Right Knowledge = True Wealth
All the time of your life -- all the wealth you possess -- including your cellular memories, called skills or experience, can be summed up as the most valuable "money" or "currency" you can gain or have.
And of all the knowledge you possess, only that which is right or true can be considered real wealth.
The only way this wealth will not die with you depends entirely on your ability to pass it on to the present and all future generations.
Truth, such as what you have just read, is uncommon wealth, and the pure truth is the most precious, rare and valuable of this very real wealth.
Yet paradoxically it is generally despised, discouraged and rejected by most deceived people, those who are too fearful of giving up their impoverishing ignorance and destructive -- even self-destructive -- arrogance to embrace such truth.
So with all your getting, though it costs all you have, it is far better to get true understanding (Proverbs 4:7), which alone can serve to preserve this real wealth for the benefit of all.
The real reason you don't have money, therefore, is not just because there is no real money in circulation as currency today.
The actual reason you don't have money is ignorance of what money really is, and this ignorance isn't just because you were never taught.
It's because you never had the curiosity to question "authority" and seek answers on your own, and accept them even if they were uncomfortable and upset the world as you thought you knew it.
After all, the blind can only lead the blind if those they lead are willing followers!