JUST MONEY FOUR
Money and wealth are not the same thing.
Money is simply a medium of exchange – a legally accepted claim to wealth. Money doesn’t exist in nature and is generally created out of thin air by the central governments of nations. In our modern world 97% of money doesn’t physically exist. It’s just record keeping on computer screens. The distribution of money – who possesses it – determines the allocation and distribution of the wealth of a nation.
Wealth is the physical ability to provide for the wellbeing of the people of a society. Wealth is food, clothing, housing, healthcare, education, roads, bridges, airports, clean water and environment, art, music and all of the tangible things that contribute to a full, productive life.
Wealth is a product of physical resources – matter and energy in all forms – multiplied by the current state of human knowledge to utilize these resources for the benefit of the people of a society. Since human knowledge can only grow, the potential to produce wealth can only grow. The extent to which a society uses its available physical resources and knowledge for the betterment of its people, determines the wealth of a nation. Buckminster Fuller called this the production of “livingry.”
Unfortunately, there also exists what we can call anti-wealth. Fuller labeled this “killingry.” Anti-wealth, or “killingry,” is the application of a society’s physical resources and knowledge in the production of products and services that are harmful to, or reduce the potential for, a full, productive life. Anti-wealth, or “killingry,” not only threatens a society directly, it also reduces the resources and knowledge available to produce wealth, or “livingry.”
The extent to which a society invests its resources and knowledge in anti-wealth, in “killingry,” subtracts from the wealth of a nation. It subtracts from the wellbeing of that nation’s people. The most obvious example of anti-wealth is militarism and weaponry.
History shows that when a dominant nation or empire begins to invest a substantial percentage of its resources and knowledge in anti-wealth, in militarism and weaponry, that nation is in an irreversible state of decline – it is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The true wealth, the “livingry,” of that nation declines, civil discord ensues, and the government, the political system, grows increasingly dysfunctional. This is America, the United States, today.
The only real threat to America now comes from within. It is called the military/industrial/congressional complex. The epitome of anti-wealth.