Freedom costs money
Nina Paley [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
In one of my last posts a blogger responded to me and initiated a debate on the topic of "money". In specific I made the arguments that "money makes the world work" and made the statement: "I don't see a way to live free without paying fees.". In other words freedom is something which must be purchased with money and this desire to be free sometimes gets misinterpreted as "greed". A greedy person is a person who has enough money to be free but no matter how much money they make it is never enough because they have an endless appetite for more. The pursuit of happiness does not require an unlimited amount of money and according to science there is a spectrum or range which has different incomes and or net worths which for most people is enough.
Is enough for what?
To have enough to buy your freedom means you have enough money that you can do what you want to do with your life without the inner dialog of "if only I had enough money". For most people $125,000 yearly income is enough at the high end of the spectrum. If you have $125,000 a year there really isn't a lot that you cannot do or cannot experience due to not enough money. You can basically travel anywhere on the planet, you can afford to live in most places, you can afford luxury and comfort, you can even afford to raise a family in most places. Of course if you're trying to have something to leave behind (a legacy) then you might need more but for just your own happiness $125,000 a year at this time affords a very good if not one of the best variety of life experiences.
Freedom requires paying fees
What exactly do I mean by paying fees? In the most obvious sense paying fees is paying taxes. We have to make money in order to pay taxes and avoid prison. So it is necessary in the case for instance where you trade cryptocurrencies which are entirely virtual to create "taxable events", that now you've got to pay a fee to your government to keep your freedom. This fee is not something you can negotiate or fight, and you have to pay it in order to keep more of your money (and freedom). So in the most direct sense, you buy your freedom by paying taxes.
Other instances of this include buying a passport so you can travel, paying rent and for tickets so you can access certain places, paying for access is a major example. Access to people and places are not free. If you want to go to a certain place or interact with certain people they are fees to pay. An example of this could be to have a professional interaction with a lawyer where you are billed by the hour to ask questions. Another example could be a life coach, where you pay someone to mentor you and give you life advice. Anyone who you consult with or seek advice from is not always going to give you quality advice for free. In fact often the free advice is deliberately bad advice which explains why it's being given away for free (to manipulate rather than help).
Freedom isn't free so money remains necessary
Freedom is about the ability to say no to opportunities you do not want. Some opportunities require you put your health at risk, your life at risk, and even your freedom at risk. When you have no money you basically must take any opportunity no matter what the risks may be because you don't have the option to say no and keep paying rent, keep buying food, keep maintaining and providing for your family. In the end people are required to accept opportunities they may not even want, merely because they don't have the money to afford a conscience.
Freedom gives a person enough money to afford a conscience. They can say no. They can decide to be moral without opportunity cost. To be free is to have less obstacles in your way of evolving into a better person over time.
I still question our rights to freedom and how they can be expressed in society , sometimes the freedom we want we can’t have even though it’s proivded to us by Law .
As a lawyer you you know well that the ability to be free often depends on receiving good advice (often from lawyers). The law is so complex that compliance requires consultation and consultation costs money.
Money holds a lot of power in ever part of system and society . Hard to be free or working for freedom
Greed is a lack of contentment and the question of how much money is enough will always be subjective. In fact most people have more than enough, they just want more.
You are also totally right to equate freedom and money. Here, an adage in our local parlance says a man without money has no voice. Sad but true
Who would you call most people? 7 billion people in the world, most in developing countries, most cannot even afford a proper Internet connection. Yet in those countries maybe it is easier for them to be happy because they have large families, functioning healthy communities, lower cost of living.
Pursuit of happiness is different for everyone. For people born in a place with a high cost of living their culture and mentality will be adapted to that lifestyle while a farmer may adapt to a lifestyle which does not require as much money to pursue happiness. I think the number is for the most part subjective but someone who is greedy never is content, never has enough, if you give them 100 million they still feel poor, still feel inadequate, still can't find happiness, because their relationship with money is wrong.
True. That's why they're called greedy.
This summarizes your view point for me:
To be free is to have less obstacles in your way of evolving into a better person over
I am seeking of freedom that allow me to become better person with less obstacles each day of my life.
For me, this always becomes a topic with almost endless permutations. However, if we are going to explore true freedom, it seems to me that the dialogue might start with removing the obsessive (and often blind) "more" from our vocabulary and instead comtemplating the word "enough" more.
A brief story: Many years ago I had an import and retail business; it ended up doing fairly well. I was approached several times about expanding to multiple locations and franchising. The fact that I was "not interested" because I was making "a comfortable living" (about $80K, at the time) got me labeled as an underachiever and almost as a "slacker." For a couple of people, I was almost "unpatriotic" because I didn't "worship at the altar of greed;" I was satisfied.
So, I believe we need to change our social vocabulary and remove the "more" paradigm before we can become free. Why? In a world driven by "more" there will always be "less," and that means "fear of scarcity." And when we fear scarcity, we remain slaves to the "More Machine."
Your article just fits perfectly with some of my ponderings I did over the last two hours out in nature. Thank you!
The financial dependence thing. I thought that it is a deeply engrained mindset to work in order to make a living in order to survive. Whether we enjoy our work or not, the entire mindset is conditioned by 'working in order to make a living in order to survive'. I don't want that! I want to enjoy my life and do things without attachment to money. Doing something we love is wonderful, but again, it is still 'working to make a living to survive'.
In order to do we have to BE, not vice versa. So we should get paid for BEING. Our mere decision to experience ourselves here on this separated planet and to help it with our Light energy is more than enough to earn the right of receiving everything we each need to live in a way that makes us happy.
Having said that, Steemit is surely wonderful and groundbreaking in itself, but I realize that it is not the definite solution against world unequality.
Which is why I love Manna, which you probably know about. It is a new emerging cryptocurrency which aims at creating a UBI(= Universal Basic Income) by freely distributing Manna on a weekly basis. The only condition in order to receive Manna is to sign up. The weekly distribution currently is ~11 Manna, yet as the price value increases the amount of weekly Manna distribution will probably sink. Mannabase's whitepater also talks of each Human's natural right to receive money very much like one's right to breath.
There are currently about 77,000 accounts, and the distribution started on March 1, 2018. Being an early bird is definitely imperative.
I highly recommend it too you, and personally think that Manna will be a core crypto currency in a not so far away future.
With your article, I just had to share my own thoughts! Best wishes to you!
Thanks for telling about Manna. I am gonna sign up soon :)
Money can not make us happy, but they can remove many things that make us unhappy...Money are energy and are not evil...And Freedom depends on our point of view but no matter of all views, without money we are put on basic instincts live of eating, defending, sleeping & reproduction...And if we are put on that level and we are if we don't have money than we live in jail...Freedom is paid...YES
When you do not have enough money, your life is busy trying to get more money. Rich people on the other hand, having already enough money, start worrying about other things. I think it is in human nature to be unhappy to some extent. Its just that our worries are masked by us being busy. I mean, a person who is worried about getting money for his/her next meal has little time to worry about anything besides that, while a person who has enough money, has enough time to worry about small things. Nowadays, such problems are called 1st world problems.
I sometimes feel that I am naive believing in a meritocracy and that freedom is mearly the ability to peruse what makes you happy and allows you to sustain yourself and earn your own keep! That your effort determains your outcome and yes there will be obstacles but why would anything worthwhile be easier? Isn’t it even more satisfying when you’ve beat the odds?
I think it’s too easy to sit back and point fingers, blame the system, blame those benefiting from the system, blame your lack of resources then doing something about your situation
I believe in meritocracy. We just have not yet created it. Mainly because we don’t understand what it is. Some good articles about it:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180309-your-hard-work-doesnt-actually-pay-off
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/
https://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase/2384-science-paths
A random pattern in data indicates that we are not measuring the dimension that create a causality/correlation relationship. We need to find this factor to create a meritocracy.
Graet post @dana-edwards keep it up
restem your post and upvoted
its a lil controversial to me though
In fact there are many differences between independence and money.
Yea. Freedom of any kind really comes with a price. Be it health, political, economical and in a whole lot of aspect. Every human has this fighting spirit embedded in them which gives us the zeal to fight for survival.
While I do agree with your sentiment regarding the necessity of fees and money, I think it is incredibly difficult to define what freedom is on an objective scale because it is closely tied to an individual's unique character and life experiences. If someone grew up on a rice farm in Bangladesh, their sense of freedom in a particular life situation would differ from someone who grew up on the 80th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper.
I think a question more actionable to ask regarding this topic is - what is freedom to you? What specifically makes you feel free? If the question is not worded in a very particular way there probably isn't a satisfying or actionable answer for it, which arguably makes the question futile to ponder over in the first place.
Good points. People work in jobs like slaves, because their employers know that their lives depend upon their jobs. Now, let's assume that you were a millionaire and were just doing your job for fun. In that case, your employer would basically have no power over you, since he/she knows that you have enough money to survive anyway. Now that is indeed freedom! So, you are right, having money = freedom!
But I am of the opinion that with increase in AI and tech, one day we would have a post scarcity economy. We already saw it to some extent with the advent of open source and free software. Once that happens, people could at least be given the basic necessities of life without any charge.
No one is going to give you anything though. Sure people could provide the basic necessities right now for everyone and aren't willing to do it. Don't assume people will give and just learn how to use the system (capitalism).
Money can be printed triilions by trillions. It is actually something of unlimited supply. How does it come to be necessary？ It is just a tool to govern civilians.
Money are the tickets to a better life. It doesn't matter how many tickets there are in existence. What matters is how many tickets you have relative to everyone else as a percentage value. So for example are you in the top 5%? The top 1%? etc...
Our freedom is all tied up with our jobs as mentioned that we need our daily needs to be paid. Cryptocurrency especially steemit for me gives me the opportunity to gain freedom from my day job one day. I hope to have a good passive income from steemit one day and I believe it is really most people's dream here. I want to freedom but freedom requires enough money to meet my basic needs especially for family man like us.
Eine gierige Person ist eine Person, die genug Geld hat, um frei zu sein, aber egal wie viel Geld sie machen, ist es nie genug, weil sie einen endlosen Appetit auf mehr haben.