Money

One of my favourite Pink Floyd songs ever.

I’m told there is an issue with commenting here, apparently Google and WordPress are each calling the other invalid. Best guess: one of them updated and ballsed something up. That’s usually the reason. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.

Anyway. Money. My favourite quote on the subject came fom an Andy Capp cartoon many, many years ago. Flo returns home from shopping and says ‘It’s frightening how the pound’s going down in value’. Andy responds: ‘Well it’s a good thing we don’t have many of them then, isn’t it?”

It’s pretty much how I’ve always felt about it. This feeling has only been increased by finding out about fractional reserve banking and how most money is simply created by typing numbers on a screen. I don’t need very much money. In fact, I need other people to have cash to spare because I’m always trying to sell something. If other people have no money, they can’t buy from me.

In the past I sold my knowledge as a microbiologist. I’ve retired from that now, not least because science has, by and large, become really quite silly. Food, drink, smoking, climate, and now vaping – it’s clear they are just making shit up. Not even very convincingly, I was more convincing when I explained the lack of roundabouts in America in terms of Roman invasion. This reflects on science as a whole so nobody trusts science any more. Maybe that was the plan.

These days I sell books. Mine and other peoples’ too. If there was nobody out there with disposable income, nobody would buy them. It’s tough enough now – I really don’t want other people to be poor!

Jerry Cordite has declared that there are 150 billionaires in the UK. There won’t be if he gets elected, they’ll be packed up and ready to go just in case. Can he stop them moving money? Hardly. It only takes a few keypresses these days and it’s moved to the other side of the planet. Billionaires don’t even need to book flights. They own planes. And yachts the size of cruise liners.

He also says there are 14 million in poverty. Poverty is when you have no shoes and you ride out the winter under a bridge dressed in rags. The New Poverty is where your iPhone is last year’s model and you can’t afford the latest Reeboks. There are real poverty-stricken people living on the streets but not 14 million of them. Thanks to the Green Agenda, this winter will reduce the real number significantly, as well as clearing out many of those over-70s who are too smart to vote Labour.

So Jerry thinks a fair country would have no billionaires and everyone is equal in the bread queue. Who the hell does he think owns the factories and other businesses that employ so many people and produce all that stuff? When he flushes out the billionaires, they take their business with them. There won’t be any bread at the end of that queue. Nobody is employing anyone to bake it.

I don’t care that other people are billionaires. I’ll never be one, I don’t want to work that hard and I certainly don’t want to employ other people. Not now that the Entitled Generation is looking for work where they expect to get paid for looking cool on Facebook and playing online games. I don’t want a yacht, I don’t need a Lear jet, I have no interest in owning a football team, I just need enough to pay the bills and have some left over for baccy and booze. Oh and toy trains.

In my almost-60 years I have paid higher rate income tax twice, both times on redundancy payouts. I will not work to reach the level of working for half pay. What’s the point? A huge house? The one we rent now is too big really, there are five rooms used only for storage of accumulated junk (must get around to clearing that out) and there is a vast attic we haven’t used at all. Cleaning it is a nightmare, you knock down cobwebs at one end of the house and by the time you get to the other end, the spiders have rebuilt the first ones.

How about a fancy car? Well I have a 2005 Toyota, it starts every time, it’s cheap for servicing and parts, and I don’t care if you drop a sandwich in it. I really do not want a car that I have to worry about, that I would have to maintain like a living room and which is worth more than most houses. Besides, those low slung things would lose their exhaust on the way up this driveway.

I never understood why millionaires have cars at all. Why bother? With that much money I’d just call someone and have the stuff delivered. I don’t need to go there myself. And I could take taxis to and from the pub. I’d never sober up again.

The whole world is obsessed with money. Most of which doesn’t actually exist. Everything is about money. It’s the biggest social construct of all and everyone acts as though it’s the only aim of life.

In one of the Batman films, the one with Heath Ledger as Joker, Alfred tells Batman that ‘Some men don’t care about money. Some men just want to watch the world burn’. The two things are not connected. I don’t care about money beyond having enough to live on but I don’t want to destroy things. I just want to be left alone.

The obsession with money is the downfall of all the political parties. It ‘costs the Treasury’. No it doesn’t. The Treasury takes in other people’s money. It isn’t a ‘cost’ if it takes a bit less. It ‘costs the NHS’. Well we’re all paying for it so it costs the NHS nothing. It costs us – and we’ve already paid.

All these policies, all these manifestos, are all about money. It’s not even real! It’s an agreed means of transfer, so a carpenter doesn’t have to build a chair a day to pay his rent. He can swap the chair for money and pay his rent with that. Since rent of a ‘chair a day’ is probably somewhat excessive, the carpenter can use the extra cash to get food and more wood for the next chair. It’s convenient. It is not meant to be your God.

When people like me say we don’t care about money, it’s like we are Money Atheists. ‘Oh so you can live without money eh?’

Well no. I have to pay council tax no matter what. I have to fuel, insure and maintain my car if I want to go anywhere. Especially here – two buses a day and the nearest railway station is 15 miles away. I have to buy food. I can grow and catch only so much here – and if I want fish I need to buy a permit to fish in the river.

It’s not the same as religious atheism. I can live without worshipping or even acknowledging any God. I can ignore religion entirely. But money, you can’t ignore. There’s always someone who wants to be paid for something – or in the case of politicians, they want to be paid to tell you how much to pay them. If you can’t pay they send the boys round to throw you in jail. It’s a feedback loop you can’t evict.

Corbyn and his drooling idiot gang seem to think that you just have to give everyone the same amount of money and it’s all fixed. Capitalism will be gone. But money is capitalism.

If you pressed a button and everyone had the same amount of money, what happens? Some will piss it away on fancy cars and booze. Others will invest in things they can then sell for more money. In a matter of weeks you are back to having a few billionaires and millions who are broke. Russia found this out, as did China, and they modified their systems to accept it. Neither are truly communist because communism cannot work.

It works for bees and ants because within those colonies, the workers are all the same. Humans are not all the same. Communes can work on a small scale if like minded humans get together to make it work, but on a countrywide scale, no chance. It has to be forced, as in North Korea.

If you have to force people to follow your Utopian dream, then it’s not Utopia. And it’s not a dream, it’s a nightmare.

The obsession with money is already killing the planet. Look at what the Greens are doing with their cobalt and neodymium mines and their hundreds of tons of concrete under every windmill. You know dead windmills go to landfill, right? The Greens make money on that too. Where does the money come from? Why, it comes from you, sucker.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were politicians who cared about people more than money?

Pipe dreams. Sometimes it’s all we have left.