Piggy-Bank 101

Money should make sense: don't let any government official tell you he could spend it better than you can. Enjoy.
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An early draft of the constitution enumerated property as one of our unalienable rights. It was ultimately replaced by "pursuit of happiness" in the final copy because of the way "property" could be misconstrued. You see, you have a right to pursue happiness and property, not the right to have happiness and property. It doesn't mean our founding fathers were anti-happiness. All they wanted to know was "who is going to pay for it?"

If we lived on an island in the South Pacific, where there was one rock that represented the only tradable currency, we would be pretty miserable I think. Simple systems like this, where one person at a time owns a rock and trades it to the next person for goods and services, may work for banana republics that don't have any goods but coconuts or trades but coconut harvesting. In an economy that's flooded by an innumerable amount of goods relative to an immeasurable demand, you need more than one rock.

So in a complex economy, where everyone is buying and selling everything from all corners of the earth, how do you know that the rock you're getting in return for your service would work the same way on the other side of the country? Furthermore, who's to say that rock will be worth anything in a year's time? (rock trends are harder to keep up with than women's fashion) For this, our founding fathers enumerated government's duty to preserve our right to pursue happiness, and print a standard currency to keep us from going nuts.

In exchange for the services we ask the government to perform for our benefit--namely raising an army, paving roads, delivering mail, etc--we pay our cumulative expenses in the form of taxes. In a perfectly fair world, you and I would only pay for the goods and services we want and need through an even consumption tax. In addition, kind hearted people with reasonable means would help those who can't afford to pay for that which they need to consume.

The problem arises when someone starts forcing you to pay for things you don't want at a time when you can't afford it. Whether you like it or not, you need to pay the salaries of 14,000 new IRS employees who are there to invent ways for you to pay them more. You are trusting that 535 people in Washington whom you've never met before are going to distribute your charitable donations through Social Security and Welfare more morally and efficiently than you could do through your church or synagogue.

I guess that's the cost of doing business...in you're own company. There will always be people out there who can't help but "look at a fat man standing next to a skinny man, and believe that the fat man could only have gotten that way by stealing from the skinny one(R. Reagan)." Those same obese people take pictures of themselves standing next to some skinny ones to make anyone in between seem like the bad guy. From that moral high horse, lawmakers in Washington can raise the price of their services into the trillions because they don't have to compete with another government for our patronage.

In November, however, you could choose a less pricey government the way you shop for bargains on ebay. Government can't buy happiness any better than money can. But the founding fathers obviously saw some merit in earning your happiness and your money, whereas the demagogues in Washington think they can just poof both into existence as a viable mean to solving any economic crisis. This egotism is of course subsidized by working people, the only people who actually have money to spend.

And so, we end our lesson with November on the horizon, piggy-banks cracked but not depleted, and a couple bullies who want our lunch money to give part to charity (where the other part goes is not something we need to concern ourselves with, of course). The only logical conclusion in my mind is to beat up the bullies and then put some of our own money toward charity because we would do that anyway. Perhaps we can call this my kindergarten logic, but I don't think your right to happiness is much more complicated than that.