Leadership 101: ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

[ROFCB Commander 664]

Today is Day Ten of the twenty-day "Leadership 101" series I'll be posting. This series expresses my thoughts on some topics important to the successful leadership of a local unit, and asks other unit leaders to post their thoughts, ideas, and experiences on the same subject in hopes that together we can help those who are starting from scratch with unit-building.

 

Today's topic is "All About the Benjamins".

 

I'm going to digress a bit from how I've been posting up to this point. I've pointed out truths, to be sure, but they've been pretty material; today I want to point out a truth or two that are anything but material. In fact these are concepts that some people find hard to wrap their heads around--but as soon as you do, and adopt them as universal human truths from which there is no deviation, you'll be well on your way not only to making your unit stronger, but your own life apart from that as well. I've also, to this point, made my posts all about "do this, don't do that" with regard to starting and running your unit. This piece is a complete departure from that. In fact it has little to do specifically with your unit at all, and doesn't give specific advice as to what to do, so much as how to think.

 

"All About the Benjamins" is a statement about money, "Benjamins" being hundred dollar bills. When someone says it's "all about the Benjamins", he's saying it's all about money.

 

I'm about to share with you two abstract realities that will, if you let them, change your entire position on what money is and how to acquire it. Neither of these is fantasy--both are absolutely well-documented and studied phenomenon that science can explain but most people still can't wrap their heads around. If you can, you'll be absolutely amazed with the results.

 

Let me start by making a bold statement that, again, is absolutely true.

 

You have exactly as much money as you are supposed to; exactly as much money produced by you or someone in your history.

 

Make no mistake--the Federal Reserve, the U S Government, the mint in Philadelphia do not produce money. They produce a physical representation of money, and nothing more. Money is produced entirely by you and me, and every other person who is or was on the planet at some point in time.

 

To understand this concept, you have to also wrap your mind around another--that "money" is not a zero-sum proposition. What does this mean?

 

Pizza is a zero-sum proposition. I buy a pizza that has eight slices; I eat one, and now there are only seven. When those seven other pieces are eaten, the pizza is gone and will never be again.

 

Money does not work that way. Money is unlimited. You can always produce more, and so can everyone else. Money never "runs out".

 

We are currently experiencing a nationwide coin shortage. I'm not going to get into why this is, other than to say that it's a symptom of the loss of "the velocity of cash" (which is itself the symptom of a slow economy), but I will say that it is not indicative of a shortage of money--and in fact can be used to demonstrate that money is indeed unlimited and you can create it at will any time you want.

 

Let's say you own a store and you're running the register. A customer comes to the store and buys $3.11 worth of goods. He doesn't have 11 cents in coin, and you don't want to part with the precious 89 cents you'd have to give him if he pays you $4. So you take $3 from him for the total and send him on his way.

 

You've just "created" money.

 

It really is that simple; you've used your ingenuity to pull 11 cents out of the air. He went home with 11 cents he wasn't otherwise entitled to, because your ingenuity allowed him to.

 

Now I can hear you saying that someone still has to "pay" that 11 cents, and that may be true, but down the line someone else will create 11 cents worth of value--in other words, money--to make up for the shortfall. How? They'll make the effort to work 11 cents harder doing a task, or to bend down and look under the store shelf to find 11 cents that was lost there, or to solve someone's problem in a way that saves them 11 cents, etc.

 

Commit this to memory, and repeat it often throughout your life; money is nothing more than the effort or ingenuity you bring to a task.

 

Remember how I said you have exactly as much money as you are supposed to, and no more or less? That's because either you or someone from whom you've inherited brought exactly as much ingenuity or effort to the world as the amount of money in your life right now. Paris Hilton doesn't have to work in any way--she'll never have to bring effort or ingenuity to anything--because someone before her did (and quite a lot of it, at that). Someone who is poor did not have the benefit of someone coming before them who brought enough effort or ingenuity to the world to create (or protect) such a large amount, and has not brought it to the world themselves.

 

It sounds like I'm saying that to be wealthy you merely have to work hard. In some ways I am, because people who work hard typically have more money than people who do not. But there are very wealthy thieves and politicians (one and the same?) who have never worked a day in their lives; they brought ingenuity to the problem of "how do I get money without having to work hard?". Sell your influence to Burisma, for instance, and your son will never have to work a day in his life and can run around the country getting strippers pregnant. That's just one example of using ingenuity to create money. Yeah, it's immoral and illegal--but it is creating money  nevertheless, and that's the point.

 

Invent (or buy for pennies) a system to make operating a new device called a "personal computer" easy, and you'll soon be the richest man in the world. Create a system that makes it easy to pay people for purchases on an online auction site, and you'll soon be rich enough to start building electric cars and flying people commercially into space. Make it easy for people to connect and share their stories, photos, "status", etc. online and you will be filthy rich in no time. See a problem, solve a problem. That's applying ingenuity to create money--no different than the eleven cents you "created" in your store a few paragraphs ago.

 

How about "effort"? We all know coal miners who worked their fingers to the bone and wound up with nothing but bony fingers. That's because their effort was inclined solely toward survival. This is the disease of poor people as a rule; they work to survive, rather than thrive. The poor coal miner made too many mistakes--he settled for his lot, or settled for his wage, or opted for the convenience or "necessity" of the company store, or spent money he should have saved--who knows? One way or another, he lived to survive, not thrive. Most of us do, in reality. We don't bring the effort or ingenuity necessary to create more abundance in our lives, and that's why we have what we have and not more. In fact far too often we squander our effort, or fail to use our ingenuity to realize we're making the mistakes that keep us poor and wanting.

 

What about the wealthy mine owner who underpaid and overcharged (in the company store) the miners, and got rich in the process? Well, he brought ingenuity to the problem of creating money by convincing a thousand people to live with less, work far too hard, and "buy" their way into debt in the company store! Again, it's immoral--but it's bringing ingenuity to the problem. That's how he created the money he had--by exploiting someone else's effort.

 

Are there ways to create money that do not take advantage of other people? Of course there are--I just laid three of them out in the paragraph above. The supercomputer is nothing more than a creative use for sand. My neighbor, who works a whole lot harder and far longer hours than I do, has a much larger yard, newer car, nicer pool, and better lawn tractor than I do. None of these things (with the possible exception of Bill Gates buying someone else's work for far less than he knew it was worth) is immoral. But exploiting the labor and ingenuity of others is one of the age-old ways to create money, and all of the richest people in the world know it. This explains, in many ways, what we're seeing going on in the country right now--some of the wealthiest people in the world (Bill Gates is now one of these, and could very well be among those I'm about to describe) want to exploit the labor and ingenuity (or in this case, the lack thereof) of the American people to make themselves even richer. This is the basis behind the whole "global government/new world order" effort that's been underway for decades. Centralized control at the top by the super-rich, and eight billion slaves working for those ten or twenty powerful men at the bottom.

 

What does any of this have to do with the militia?

 

I'll answer that tomorrow, in "Being Sergeant York". Think of it as "All About the Benjamins, Part II".

[Cb85 136]

Can't really comment without part 2