Patient Ferment; True Wealth
QUALITY TIME IS TRUE WEALTH
What matters in life is not simply the quantity of free time you have, but equally important, the quality of that time. You may have all the riches in the world but without your health, without friendship, without family, without the nonmonetary gems of life to enjoy the luxury and opportunity that riches can afford, you haven’t anything but poverty, an empty lifeless moted castle in the enormity of the cosmos of time.
Wealth is ultimately a measure of the quantity and of the quality of our time on this Earth. Like all things human, the quantity and quality of each person’s time is measured through a subjective ever changing self defined hierarchy of each of our deeply personal and private wants and needs.
We often mistakenly think of wealth in terms of only the monetary value of ones assets, and this is reasonable given that more assets will generally afford more optionality within one’s life. Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos certainly have the ability to choose among many options in life simply because of their monetary wealth.
However, when building wealth, it’s critical to keep in mind, as it will serve you well, for your own wealth building journey, just as it may for Elon and Jeff; without good health, both physically mentally and spiritually, without time away from work, without cherished relationships to enjoy, without grand challenges to pursue that may take years beyond ones life to complete, there is little that monetary riches can do for wealth, for the quality time we all desire.
This is often the missed critical component of most every Keynesian economist or talking head on main stream media.
The Keynesian fiatsplainers will speak of the jobs reports glowingly and unemployment numbers falling, and of GDP growth, and they will talk of all sorts of fanciful economic metrics to paint rosy pictures, but they never talk about the one thing that actually matters, your free time.
They are never concerned with the reason for all of that work in the first place, the quantity and quality of our time, spent with friends, family, our communities, and with the universe we are wrapped within and all of its wonders. It is this key non-monetary metric that they always miss. And it is the only metric that is relevant.
Ultimately wealth is simply the measure of the quality and quantity of your time, relative to where you were with your quality and quantity of time last week, or last year, or last decade, and where you want to be next week, next year, and next decade with that time.
Measuring wealth is the measurement of the quantity of quality time, of your precious and special limited time here, on planet Earth, not relative to others, but relative to your former self. Is future-you going to have more or less wealth than past-you?
What is present-you doing about building quality time? Do you have the patience to build true wealth?
WEALTH IS GOOD… SOMETIMES?
In this day and age, our instincts, our knee jerk reactions tell us that wealthy people are assholes who don’t care about anyone but themselves, that wealthy families are simply evil and greedy terrible people that sell their souls to attain their wealth.
The media and popular culture encourages us to hate the wealthy, portrays them as undeserving of their wealth in movies and television shows, encourages us to support a “billionaires tax” to support a tax on inheritance to “level the playing field” for the many of us “unfortunate” to have not been born into wealth.
News flash: wealth, the quantity of quality time one can enjoy for himself, is built upon a lifetime of small and good and consistent patient decisions.
There is a belief programmed into all of us that wealth is not the product of low time preference decisions, but instead the product of evil decisions, and for this reason we are encouraged to consider the wealthy to be evil people that should be vilified and chastised. We’re told to believe that children born into wealth were lucky, as if their parents didn’t spend a lifetime of sacrificing present consumptive pleasure for future prosperity.
We even tell ourselves crazy things like money is the root of evil, and that we shouldn’t try to obtain large amounts of money because it only leads to more problems. The reality, however, could not be further from the truth.
It is the wealthy that have improved everyone’s standards of living.
Without low time preference individuals saving, investing, and starting businesses to employ people and make things that people want, we would all be living in the forests or the jungles without all of the marvels of modern human society we are blessed with.
And again, wealth is relative.
Every person that voluntarily participates in the workforce is learning and improving their skills at their job, whether that is an accountant, a secretary, a cook, or any of the myriad of jobs everyone voluntarily participates in, each of us is working to improve everyone’s standards of living through the grand orchestra of the capital markets, of sacrifice today, for a better tomorrow.
The minimum wage employee is a billionaire in the eyes of the homeless and destitute. Wealth is a personal spectrum and everyone that delays immediate short term consumption for longer term building, is on his own personal journey of making tomorrow a brighter future for himself.
To some degree we intuitively understand that those with great wealth do provide great benefit to all of us, to all of the world, that their wealth was rightfully attained, that they built “good” wealth.
Although we might have hatred for certain wealthy people, we also have great admiration for other wealthy people. The root of this hatred for some and admiration for others stems from how wealth is obtained, or how we perceive it to have been obtained.
BUILDING POSITIVE SUM WEALTH
There are three types of value capturing activities:
violent theft — producing a negative sum transaction
deceitful theft — producing a negative sum transaction
voluntary theft — producing a positive sum transaction
We can think of theft as capturing monetary value. We can also briefly suspend reality for illustrative purposes and consider “theft” as a neutral activity, like a tennis shoe. Both the baker and the robber wear tennis shoes, but what they do with the tool defines it’s use case. Let’s present the notion here that theft is a tool to capture value, and the user of that tool can produce bad or good outcomes, depending upon the use case.
If you walk into a strangers home with a gun, you are building wealth through involuntary overt, violent theft. This is a negative sum transaction. Negative sum because you are forcefully reallocating someone's monetary wealth from them to you. This is a negative sum wealth building activity because the person whom has been stolen from, had already devised plans and intentions with the wealth taken, and he now will need to spend time to either recover his stolen property or work to replace it, which in both cases, is counterproductive as it requires additional energy that could have been applied to something more productive, to include the activities of sitting around and relaxing.
Remember, the ultimate goal of wealth is to improve ones quantity and quality of ones time.
Having to work to replace ones monetary wealth is likely not a time improvement for the person stolen from. The satanic Keynesians would conclude that this theft is a net positive on society because it generates more work, as if work was the ultimate goal of life. This is very much the broken window fallacy popularized by Bastiat.
Keynesians down bad. Lol.
Another type of theft, is covert, or deceitful theft. Extracting value through lies. A simple example is selling wine that is cut in half with water or gold wrapped tungsten. A more modern example, is legalized monetary unit expansion, for example the latest debt ceiling increase.
Another example is the continued rise in government taxation. In all of these examples, the perpetrators disguise their theft as something other than theft. In the case of monetary expansion, the overlords will fiatsplain why you must work for money that steals from you. Lol.
And in the case of taxation, the overlords will fiatsplain to you the necessity for taxation as “muh cost of freedom.” In either case this is full of half truths, to covertly steal from you. This theft once again forces you, the peasant victims, to work more than you otherwise would, and therefore steal your wealth building activity, taking more of your time from you that you would otherwise use for something else. This deceitful value transfer is therefore another type of negative sum theft.
The last type of value capture is voluntary or innovative theft. Again, we are being purposefully obtuse here to point out the similarity between the value building activity of covert or deceitful theft, that the reason so many people don’t see covert theft for what it is, is because it is providing the same sort of innovative solutions that voluntary theft is providing. The only difference is that the covert theft is a negative sum transaction where as voluntary “theft” is positive sum.
Have you ever walked away from a deal and think to yourself “I got a steal of a deal!” You paid so little for something you felt like you stole it. But you didn’t steal it because it was a voluntary exchange. The other guy is thinking “thank god I got rid of that piece of junk.”
One mans trash is another mans treasure.
With voluntary actions each party is willingly engaging in the trade because each party is receiving a perceived benefit within their personal and private value hierarchy. This is the magic of free trade, of the employee and employer relationship, of all voluntary exchange. This is the positive sum nature of these types of transactions.
This invisible magic of voluntary trade is also why so many people see “good” wealth builders as bad people, because they see them as “stealing” profits from the public, or from “underpaying” their employees.
The issue is that these people are projecting their own preferences onto other peoples decisions. Just because an outside third party person views a transaction as deceitful theft, does not mean that the people involved in the transaction view it that way, and if you’re not involved in the transaction, stay the hell out of other peoples voluntary business, you freaking Karen! Lol.
We all agree that pointing a gun at someone and taking their money is obviously a “bad” value transfer, it’s obviously negative sum. But why is the roundabout gun to the head with taxation not seen as theft by some? The answer is that they are happy to pay their taxes, because they are fine with the transaction. The problem is that those that are not okay with the transaction are forced to do what they otherwise would not.
In other words, capturing value, “theft” if you want to use that framing, is positive sum if the parties involved voluntarily participate in the transaction, and negative sum if one or more of the parties involved is coerced into the transaction. And, importantly, those that capture value through positive sum transactions may be viewed by others not involved in the transaction as negative sum transactions because they perceive the transaction as deceitful, as negative sum to one or more of the parties involved in the transaction.
But here’s the neat part, if you are not involved in the trade, keep your damn nose out of the business of those that are voluntarily involved in the trade!
PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE
Money provides us with less uncertainty about the future. It provides us with more certainty in the quantity and quality of how we may spend our future time.
Wealth is the measure of each of our subjective valued quality and quantity of our time. Though we often compare our wealth with our neighbors wealth, or with a strangers wealth, what is relevant is our own time, and whether we have more quality amounts of it in the future or less, and if we are building more quality amounts for our children and our children's children.
The more monetary value we acquire, as money can purchase any economical good, the more of any goods we can purchase to secure more quality time for ourselves and our loved ones for the future.
The best way to secure monetary value, in an effort to increase our wealth, is to do so in a voluntary way as this is a positive sum outcome for all of the participants. The more that people operate on a positive sum transaction policy, the fewer negative sum transactions we might all find ourselves captured within.
As each of us works to build positive true wealth, we lift up the community and culture around us. Although it might seem appealing to print money, to pour some water into our wine, or to raise a tax on a particular group you might not agree with, your transaction is having a negative sum impact on those involved in those transactions that would not do so voluntarily, and the net result is an impoverished society.
With a little patience, and understanding, all will find the power in positive sum transactions. In this patient ferment we will all find true wealth.