The first advantage of having money is that stuff costs money. If you want stuff, you will have to pay for it. This is the law of economics. People just don’t give their stuff away, they want something for it. Money is the universal trade item. You can trade money for almost anything. If you want a lot of stuff, you need a lot of money.
I know I’m stating the obvious. I feel simplistic today. There are other advantages to having a lot of money. One of these advantages is that you can do things. I’m not just talking about going on trips or going to the movies. I mean you can do things like go into business and build factories to make interesting gadgets like electric bicycles. You can have the best ideas in the world, but without money you will not be able to convince people to help you in your great plan.
Money is very useful for influencing people. If you want somebody to mow your lawn, you do not threaten them or try to talk them into it. You offer them some money and they mow your lawn. It’s very simple. Money is used to control people all the time. Think of all the people working at laborious and damaging occupations. Money can even get people to do dangerous things like strap themselves on live high tension power lines from the skid of a helicopter. Without money, you would have no linemen, and no power.
This usefulness of money for influencing people is at the heart of the idea that money is power. It’s not really the politicians who tell people to do things all the time with the threat of coercion, it’s corporations and businesses who get people to do their jobs every day with the offer of recompense. Money is very powerful for getting people to do jobs. It is in fact the sole reason people do most anything. This is not a modern phenomenon. Since money was invented it has been used for this purpose.
Money also can confer political power. There is no candidate who has a chance to get elected in America who has not spent millions of dollars promoting themselves. If you want votes, technically you can not just buy them from voters. You can however buy advertising to convince people to cast their vote for you. What is interesting is that most of the money that politicians spend on promotion comes from donations made by people who will be voting for that politician. The more people who want to vote for you, the more people you can talk into voting for you with advertising.
Money can also make a person famous. Look at Donald Trump. He has had several TV series and is on various programs on finance on a regular basis. You only have to watch CNBC in the morning and you will see comments by whatever billionaire they can get on their show. I saw both T Boon Pickens and Warren Buffet on the tube this morning. If they were penniless bums nobody would care about their opinions. This brings up another advantage of having money.
If you have a lot of money, people value your opinion on things. Perhaps this is just from greed. If a person has managed to make a lot of money in their life, other people pay attention to them to try and see how they did this. Most people would enjoy having anything they could want. On the other hand, most people who build up a fortune don’t go around just spending their cash on anything that crosses their mind. This is how they got their money, by not spending more than they make. People seem to not understand this principle.
If you want a lot of money, you will have to spend less than you make. This allows your fortune to grow. If you spend more than you make you will be in debt and will owe other people a lot of cash. While this seems obvious, many people do not understand this. I read a book on millionaires. They tend to invest their money in things that will increase in value. They might buy an older house in a good neighborhood, because they know it will be worth more the longer they own it. Still, there are exceptions to any principle.
Money confers a freedom of movement on a person. If you have enough cash to spend you can go almost anywhere in the world. The average person is likely to need more cash these days as prices increase. It costs a lot of money to live a comfortable life in this world. There are many advantages to having a lot of money. There are also some problems. You will have to pay more taxes. You will have to keep track of what you have. You may have to pay people to keep accounts of all of your holdings. You may be a lot busier than a bum who lives under a freeway bridge in a cardboard box. Still, it will be a good life, deciding what to do with all your wealth.
Without money the world as we know it would grind to a halt. Money is not going to disappear any time soon. With prices going up every day, it is certain that people will need more of these universal trade units to survive. The modern world runs on money. If you want to live a comfortable, easy, healthy, and fun life, money helps.
