WEALTH VERSUS MONEY –
Alan Watts – 1970 In the year of Our Lord Jesus
Christ 2000, the United States of America will no longer
exist. This is not an inspired prophecy based on
supernatural authority but a reasonably certain guess. “The
United States of America” can mean two quite different
things. The first is a certain physical territory, largely
on the North American continent, including all such
geographical and biological features as lakes, mountains and
rivers, skies and clouds, plants, animals, and people. The
second is a sovereign political state, existing in
competition with many other sovereign states jostling one
another around the surface of this planet. The first sense
is concrete and material; the second, abstract and
conceptual. If the United States continues for very much longer to
exist in this second sense, it will cease to exist in the
first. For the land and its life can now so easily be
destroyed by the sudden and catastrophic methods of nuclear
or biological warfare, or by any combination of such
creeping and insidious means as overpopulation, pollution of
the atmosphere, contamination of the water and erosion of
our natural resources by maniacal misapplications of
technology&v. For good
measure, add the possibilities of civil and racial war,
self-strangulation of the great cities and breakdown of all
major transportation and communication networks. And that
will be the end of the United States of America, in both
senses. There is, perhaps, the slight possibility that it may
continue our political and abstract existence in heaven,
there to enjoy being “better dead than Red” and, with the
full authority of the Lord God, to be able
to say to our enemies squirming in hell, “We told you
so!” On the grounds of such hopes and values, someone may
well push the Big Red Button, to demonstrate that belief in
spiritual immortality can be inconsistent with physical
survival. Luckily for us, our Marxist enemies do not believe
in any such hereafter. When I make predictions from a realistic and hard-boiled
point of view, I tend to the gloomy view of things. The
candidates of my choice have never yet won in any election
in which I have voted. I am thus inclined to feel that
practical politics must assume that most people are either
contentious and malevolent or stupid, that their decisions
will usually be shortsighted and self-destructive and that,
in all probability, the human race will fail as a biological
experiment and take the easy downhill road to death, like
the Gadarene swine. If I were betting on it and had
somewhere to place my bet—that’s where I would put my
money. But there is nowhere to lay a bet on the fate of mankind.
Likewise, there is no way of standing outside the situation
and looking at it as an impartial, coldly calculating,
objective observer, I’m involved in the situation and
therefore concerned; and because I am concerned, be dammed
if I’ll let things come out as they would if I were just
betting on them. There is, however, another possibility for the year ad
2000. This will require putting our minds on physical facts
and being relatively unconcerned with the United States of
America as an abstract political entity. By overlooking the
nation, we can turn full attention to the territory, to the
actual earth, with its waters and forests, flowers and
crops, animals and human beings and so create, with less
cost and suffering than we are bearing in 1.968, a viable
and thoroughly enjoyable biological experiment. The chances may be slim. Not long ago Congress voted,
with much patriotic rhetoric, for the imposition of severe
penalties upon anyone presuming to burn the flag of the
United States. Yet the very Congressmen who passed this law
are responsible, by acts of commission or omission, for
burning, polluting, and plundering the territory that the
flag is supposed to represent. Therein, they exemplified the
peculiar and perhaps fatal fallacy of civilization: the
confusion of symbol with reality. Civilization, comprising all the achievements of art and
science, technology and
industry, is the result of man’s invention and manipulation
of symbols of words, letters, numbers, formulas and
concepts, and of such social institutions as universally
accepted clocks and rulers, scales and timetables, schedules
and laws. By these means, we measure, predict, and control
the behavior of the human and natural worlds and with such
startling apparent success that the trick goes to our heads.
All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with
the world as it is. As semanticist Alfred Korzybski used to
say, it is an urgent necessity to distinguish between the
map and the territory and, I’ve might have added, between
the flag and the country. Let me illustrate this point and, at the same time,
explain the major obstacle to sane technological progress,
by dwelling on the fundamental confusion between money and
wealth, Remember the Great Depression of the Thirties? One
day there was a flourishing consumer economy, with everyone
on the up-and-up; and the next, unemployment, poverty, and
bread lines, What happened? The physical resources of the
country the brain, brawn, and raw materials were in no way
depleted, but there was a sudden absence of money, a
so-called financial slump. Complex reasons for this kind of disaster can be
elaborated at length by experts on banking and high finance
who cannot see the forest for the trees, But it was just as
if someone had come to work on building a house and, on the
morning of the Depression, the boss had said, “Sorry, baby,
but we can’t build today. No inches.” “Whaddya mean, no
inches? We got wood, We got metal. We even got tape
measures.’ “Yeah, but you don’t understand business. We been
using too many inches and there’s just no more to go
around.” A few years later, people were saying that Germany
couldn’t possibly equip a vast army and wage a war, because
it didn’t have enough gold. What wasn’t understood then, and
still isn’t really understood today, is that the reality of
money is of the same type as the reality of centimeters,
grams, hours, or lines of longitude. Money is a way of
measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of
gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever
to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft He needs real wealth, in
the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with
gas, and a female companion. But this ingrained and archaic confusion of money with
wealth is now the main reason we are not going ahead full
tilt with the development of our technological genius for
the production of more than adequate food, clothing,
housing, and utilities for every person on earth. It can be
done, for electronics, computers, automation techniques, and
other mechanical methods of mass production have,
potentially, lifted us into an age of abundance in which the
political and economic ideologies of the past, whether left,
middle, or right, are simply obsolete. There is no question
anymore of the old socialist or communist schemes of robbing
the rich to pay the poor, or of financing a proper
distribution of wealth by the ritualistic and tiresome mumbo
jumbo of taxation, If, if we get our heads straight about
money; I predict that by AD 2000, or sooner; no one will pay
taxes, no one will carry cash; utilities will be free, and
everyone will carry a general credit card. This card will be
valid up to each individual’s share in a guaranteed basic
income or national dividend, issued free; beyond which he
may still earn anything more that he desires by an art or
craft; profession or trade that has not been displaced by
automation. (For detailed information on the mechanics of
such an economy, the reader should refer to Robert
Theobald’s Challenge of Abundance and Free Men and Free
Markets, and also to a series of essays that he has edited;
The Guaranteed Income. Theobald is an avant-garde economist
on the faculty of Columbia University.) Naturally; such
outrageous proposals will raise the old cries, “But where’s
the money going to come from?” or “Who pays the bills?” But
the point is that money doesn’t and never did come from
anywhere, as if it were something like lumber or iron or
hydroelectric power. Again: money is a measure of wealth;
and we invent money as we invent
the Fahrenheit scale of temperature or the avoirdupois
measure of weight. When you discover and mine a load of iron
ore; you don’t have to borrow or ask someone for “a thousand
tons” before you can do anything with it. By contrast with
money, true wealth is the sum of energy&y,
technical intelligence; and raw materials. Gold itself is
wealth only when used for such practical purposes as filling
teeth. As soon as it is used for money; kept locked ill
vaults or fortresses, it becomes useless for anything else
and thus goes out of circulation as a form of raw material:
i.e., real wealth. If money must be gold or silver or
nickel, the expansion and distribution of vast wealth in the
form of wheat, poultry; cotton; vegetables, butter; wine,
fish, or coffee must wait upon the discovery of new gold mines before it can proceed. This obviously
ludicrous predicament has, heretofore, been circumvented by
increasing the national debt a roundabout piece of semantic
obscurantism by which a nation issues itself credit or
purchasing power based; not on holdings in precious metals;
but on real wealth in the form of products and materials and
mechanical energy. Because
national debts far exceed anyone’s reserves of gold or
silver; it is generally supposed that a country with a large
national debt is spending beyond its income and is well on
the road to poverty and ruin no matter how enormous its
supplies of energy and material resources. This is the basic
confusion between symbol and reality, here involving the bad
magic of the word “debt,” which is understood as in the
phrase “going into debt.” But national debt should properly
be called national credit. By issuing national (or general)
credit; a given population gives itself purchasing power, a
method of distribution for its actual goods and services,
which are far more valuable than any amount of precious
metal. Mind you, I write of these things as a simple
philosopher and not as a financial or economic expert
bristling with facts and figures. But the role of the
philosopher is to look at such matters from the standpoint
of the child in Hans Andersen’s tale of The Emperor’s
New: Clothes. The philosopher
tries to get down to the most basic, simple principles. He
sees people wasting material wealth, or just letting it rot,
or hoarding it uselessly for lack of purely abstract
counters called dollars or pounds or francs. From this very
basic or, if you will, childish point of view; I see that we
have created a marvelous technology for the supply of goods
and services with a minimum of human drudgery. Isn’t it
obvious that the whole purpose of machines is to get rid of
work? When you get rid of the work required for producing
basic necessities, you have leisure time for fun or for new
and creative explorations and adventures, But with the
characteristic blindness of those who cannot distinguish
symbol from reality, we allow our machine/y to put people
out of work not in the sense of being at leisure but in the
sense of having no money and of having shamefacedly to
accept the miserable charity of public welfare. Thus as the
rationalization or automation of industry extends we
increasingly abolish human slavery; but in penalizing the
displaced slaves, in depriving them of purchasing power, the
manufacturers in turn deprive themselves of outlets and
markets for their products. The machines produce more and
more, humans produce less and less, but the products pile up
undistributed and unconsumed, because too few can earn
enough money and because even the hungriest, greediest, and
most ruthless capitalist cannot consume ten pounds of butter
per day. Any child should understand that money is a
convenience for eliminating barter, so that you don’t have
to go to market with baskets of eggs or firkins of beer to
swap them for meat and vegetables. But if all you had to
barter with was your physical or mental energy
in work that is now done by machines, the problem would then
be: What will you do for a living and how will the
manufacturer find customers for his tons of butter and
sausages? The sole rational solution would be for the
community as a whole to issue itself credit money for the
work done by the machines. This would enable their products
to be fairly distributed and their owners and managers to be
fairly paid, so that they could invest in bigger and better
machines, And all the while, the increasing wealth would be
coming from the energy of the machines and not from
ritualistic manipulations with gold. In some ways, we are doing this already, but by the
self-destructive expedient of issuing ourselves credit (now
called debt) for engines of war, What the nations of the
world have spent on war since 1914 could, with our
technology, have supplied every
person on earth with a comfortable independent income. But
because we confuse wealth with money, we confuse issuing
ourselves credit with going into debt. No one goes into debt
except in emergency; and therefore, prosperity depends on
maintaining the perpetual emergency of war. We are reduced,
then, to the suicidal expedient of inventing wars when,
instead, we could simply have invented money provided that
the amount invented was always proportionate to the real
wealth being produced, I’ve
should replace the gold standard by the wealth standard. The
difficulty is that, with our present superstitions about
money, the issue of a guaranteed basic income of, say,
100,000 per annum per person
would result in wild inflation. Prices would go sky-high to
“catch” the vast amounts of new money in circulation and, in
short order, everyone would be a pauper on 100,000
a year. The hapless, dollar-hypnotized sellers do not
realize that whenever they raise prices, the money so gained
has less and less purchasing power, which is the reason that
as material wealth grows and grows, the value of the
monetary unit (dollar or pound) goes down and down so that
you have to run faster and faster to stay where you are,
instead of letting the machines run for you. If we shift
from the gold standard to the wealth standard, prices must
stay more or less where they are at the time of the shift
and miraculously everyone will discover that he has enough
or more than enough to wear, eat, drink, and otherwise
survive with affluence and merriment. It is not going to be
at all easy to explain this to the world at
large……… For more go to Beezone –
Money
vs Wealth See video below of Alan Watts talking
about the confusion of money vs wealth Also read: MEASURING REAL WEALTH Money Versus Wealth Instead of creating wealth, our money system is depleting
our real wealth: our communities, ecosystems, and productive
infrastructure by David Korten What is this madness? The economy is booming. The stock
market is setting new records. The US is again heralded as
the world’s most competitive economy. We are assured that we
are richer than ever before and getting richer by the
day. Yet we are also told there is no longer enough money to
provide an adequate education for our children, health care
and safety nets for the poor, protection for the
environment, parks, a living wage for working people, public
funding for the arts and public radio, or adequate pensions
for the elderly. According to the official wisdom, even
though richer, we can no longer afford what we once took for
granted. How is this possible? What’s gone wrong? A quick hint. The problem most definitely is not a lack
of money. The world is awash in it. The world’s 450
billionaires alone have combined financial assets greater
than the combined annual incomes of half of humanity. The problem is this: a predatory global financial system,
driven by the single imperative of making ever more money
for those who already have lots of it, is rapidly depleting
the real capital – the human, social, natural, and even
physical capital – on which our well-being depends. read more: and more: Money and wealth are two
concepts that are often confusing as they are often confused
to be the same thing. However, this is not true. Money and
wealth are two different concepts. Money and wealth have
similar meanings according to the dictionary, which is in
majority what causes the confusion. A person who has enough
money can often afford wealth, but in some scenarios money
won’t be able to attain wealth. Confused? Let’s
try and clarify. Money is considered as an exchangeable
commodity, which can be traded for certain things. Now,
wealth is vaguely defined as a person who has money and
possessions. However, there is a second meaning put forth by
author Robert Kiyosaki, “The ability to survive a
certain number of days forward.” Let’s look at
them separately. more…..>>> And MONEY and
Wealth