Gustav Klimt - The Kiss, 1907-08
It’s tempting to try to put a price tag on every activity. Therapy seems expensive, because it costs a bunch of money. As always, the question to ask when evaluating transactions is “compared to what?” Rent in New York City is expensive, but when I compare it to living anywhere else in this country, I blanch. Value is subjective.
This is still the most visited post on my blog. I wrote about the value of investing in the self, by going to therapy and living with integrity, as an alternative to speculating in securities.
I’ve been thinking more about Tribes, entrepreneurship and my hierarchy of values. I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that money as it exists now is rarely an accurate measure of value. Monetary transactions are subject to taxation and all sorts of other onerous regulations. Federal scrip can be devalued at will by government-authorized banks. When the thugs ratchet down the interest rates, cash becomes scarce, even when the productive capacity of the world has not altered one iota.
Cash may be scarce, but I have not become less productive.
The government is destroying resources and stealing money at a higher rate than ever before. Money is going to be difficult to come by in the coming years – but so what? Money has such limited utility. It can’t buy loyalty, friendship, love or virtue. It can buy goods, housing and mercenary services, but its value is constantly in flux due to currency manipulations both domestic and international.
We are socialized to see money as the sole arbiter of value, but it’s not. A job that pays well but teaches you very little is not giving you a very good deal. I’m struggling to understand what is valuable to me and how I can bring the most value to other people with the time I have alive. I have some ideas of how I’d like to go about this and how to improve my abilities, but it’s as much a process of self-discovery as it is one of learning more about the world.
I want to create value for the world, even if it doesn’t mean that I end up getting paid for it. I could make good use of a fresh wad of bills right about now, sure, but the project that everyone reading this blog is engaged in is not one that holds many prospects of great wealth, even though it involves extreme effort, fanatical commitment and personal financial investment into therapy, literature and donations to further the cause.
What is most valuable to me – truth and virtue – has massive dis-utility to many if not most people, many of whom have careers that would not exist without pervasive societal violence. If that which is valuable to me spread further, those people would be out of a job. Their most valued social connections would be disrupted or destroyed. Their cherished beliefs would be exposed to them as mere bigoted myths.
Values are a matter of personal economics. Nurturing rational values is a productive activity. In entrepreneurship, it often takes years if not decades to create a market for a product. It can be something transcendental, clearly superior to everything that has come before it, but the psychology of previous investment and raw fear prevent it from catching on – or perhaps some technology critical to monetizing it has not yet been invented.
If an Apple Factory were magically transported back through time to medieval France, the market for iPods would not be transported back through time along with it. A provincial warlord would probably raze it within weeks, putting the black turtlenecked, differently-thinking workers to the sword.
The market has yet to be cracked. This is a damned good time to be in the business of making markets, especially seeing as the US banking system is insolvent, almost every established business model is taking a buzzcut and the government is about to collapse. It’s much better to get used to living hard and close to the ground in unexplored territory than to lean back and relax in a burning building.
Once King Obama finishes nationalizing the banks, the paper economy is fucked. The US will become Soviet, and the above-board economy will become undead. As more capital accumulates to the government, the state will set the rules for the economy. Corporations, small businesses and others will essentially be thwacking at state-hung Piñatas that will explode with green scrip. It can’t last for long.
This is also a good time to be in the business of spreading ideas. It has never been easier to spread knowledge, to communicate with others and to nurture relationships. No generation has had as much access to as much information at a lower cost.
Even though cash is becoming harder to come by, it is no less possible to create value, to build new things, generate new ideas and spark passions.
3 Comments
February 10, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Great post and perfect for LLC
February 18, 2009 at 4:54 pm
[...] For more please see the original article! [...]
February 19, 2009 at 9:39 am
[...] You Can’t Tax a Kiss [...]