Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The real use of money is to buy freedom

paraschopra.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 303 posts

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#261

Post by downandout »

Killah911 wrote: post #239
downandout wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well hopefully your experience will be reflective of mine one day. My entrepreneurial ambitions and coding skills combined with multiple failed projects have taken me on the opposite journey - from relative wealth to relative poverty. I got screwed out of the one success I created - a company I was the technical co-founder of that was acquired for $64 million - by an unscrupulous partner who basically stole my $12.8…

Well, I'd love to say it was my sheer wit and coding genius. But truth of the matter is, there's a good bit of luck involved as well. The secret to success: get lucky. I got unlucky too. Found myself scrubbing toilets for $4/hr back in NYC at one point. It's nice to not have to do that anymore. If you can code, sure you might not be overrun with money, but at least you can still earn a decent living. At the end of th…

Thank you for the well wishes. Hopefully I will get there. If not I may be scrubbing toilets shortly myself. All I have right now is my name on a patent that formed the basis of a company acquired for $64 million. Unfortunately, that doesn't pay the rent. But, I will keep taking shots until I drop dead. Hopefully I will get lucky.

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#262

Post by bmelton »

coldtea wrote: post #148
mathattack wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If have a $100,000, and somebody else has zero, neither of us have any value until I spend the money. If I spent the $10,000 to have someone do my laundry for the year (increasing my free time), then they have $10,000 with which to buy things that they might value more than the time doing my laundry. It may be groceries, it might be books, it might be a vacation. If I invest the remaining $90,000 (let's s…

> Nobody forces them to accept it. In fairy tales maybe. In real life, need to feed the family, debt, hunger, mortages, need for shelter, medical treatment needs, etc etc are forcing them to accept it. > Unless I stick the money under my mattress, putting money to use helps others. The same thing happens with giving slaves food. It helps them. That doesn't mean it's the best kind of help they can get.

And that's exactly why money is freedom, when you have it, at least.

Having money or, more specifically, not needing money means that you are free to engage in whatever business engagements you see fit. For the illegal immigrants, oftentimes, their options are "work for less than what is fair" or "not work at all". For them, the decision is easy.

For many Americans, overextended, and with no way to feed themselves without work, we see a similarly exploitative environment as well. The minimum wage is designed to prevent against that, and it does, though now people are suggesting it doesn't, but either way, economic freedom is freedom from having to enter into an agreement that you wouldn't do if you didn't have to.

Unfortunately, only having money buys you that economic freedom.

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#263

Post by mil3s »

Paras,

I enjoyed your article. I too grew up in a middle class family, much the same as you. I was taught to work hard and to use good motives when working.

I remember early on, deciding not to take part in activities because I just focused on the money, I was 16 years old. I consider it unfortunate that I repeated that decision many times until my late 30's.

Looking back I missed out on many of the experiences that later brought me much joy.

So now what?

I try to focus on the experiences, instead of just getting the money. I have experimented with less money, and the joy was still there. However I still need money, I still want and work to be comfortable. " I work with many that just focus on the money and point out that "with so much money you can do good for others." I think you can do good for others before you get 'the big pot at the end of the rainbow.'

Keep sharing.

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#264

Post by dnautics »

nexttimer wrote: post #80
miles wrote: post #21

Tim O'Reilly on money: It’s easy to get caught up in the heady buzz of making money. You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations! Source: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...

> The real use of money is to buy freedom The real problem is: This additional freedom you can buy with money means less freedom for somebody else. Inequality (wealth-based) means nothing else than domination. If you are richer, then you dominate the poorer people. And richer countries dominate poorer countries. This is the most basic and fundamental injustice [0] we seem to accept in our Western culture. Because we…

Wealth-based inequality is not domination. In order to wield your wealth, you have to give it away, or at least offer to.

political inequality, however, often results in domination.

Moreover, wealth is not a zero-sum game. In any free transaction, both parties are made better off (otherwise the transaction would not have occurred). With politics however, there can only be a limited number of any given political position. Therefore, it is a zero-sum game.

There are legions of wealthy people who conspire to trade in their wealth for political power, but do not confuse the nature of one form of power for the other.

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#265

Post by dnautics »

strlen wrote: post #184
nexttimer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real use of money is to buy freedom The real problem is: This additional freedom you can buy with money means less freedom for somebody else. Inequality (wealth-based) means nothing else than domination. If you are richer, then you dominate the poorer people. And richer countries dominate poorer countries. This is the most basic and fundamental injustice [0] we seem to accept in our Western culture. Because we…

> The real problem is: This additional freedom you can buy with money means less freedom for somebody else. There are three wrong assumptions here: 1) that wealth is zero-sum 2) that wealth is the only possible way to obtain freedom 3) that for each individual the same quantum of wealth buys the exact same quantum of freedom. Prime-facie, neither of these three are true. There are all kinds of problems with associate…

there's also the flawed assumption that freedom is a zero-sum game!

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#266

Post by dnautics »

malandrew wrote: post #159

The entire basis of money is a Pareto Optimality, thus I would amend that statement to be "The real use of money is to buy freedom at someone else's expense." Now it's also possibly that if we view money through the lens of a Nash equilibrium, that in the long term we are doing what is best for all of us by constantly seeking greater productivity. Therefore, "On a long enough time scale, the real use of money is to b…

you should read Debt: the first 5000 years, and you will find that you are wrong; the entire basis of money is NOT Pareto Optimality. The author of this book I think makes a criticism that the economic just-so story of money exists to self-justify economics as a field (while conveniently ignoring that he's doing the same thing for anthropology) but the book is nonetheless an excellent treatment of the muddled history of money.

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#268

Post by velis_vel »

bmelton wrote: post #205
reginaldjcooper wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? But the GP was asserting minimum wage is a willful transaction also. Actually if the laborers don't like their minimum wage, they cannot opt out of it either, they need to eat, pay for housing, and get medical insurance from somewhere. It's absurd to me that someone would assert that Bill Gates is being dominated by paying taxes whereas these other people are somehow not being dominated by accepting a low wage…

They can't opt out of minimum wage because there are laws, not because it's otherwise coerced. There are compelling arguments in favor of abolishing the minimum wage, just as there are compelling arguments in favor of increasing it. Neither position is necessarily wrong, and each requires making trade-offs for the other, but either way, the imposition of a minimum wage is not voluntary to those upon which it is impos…

> They can't opt out of minimum wage because there are laws, not because it's otherwise coerced.

You missed the point. Let's get rid of the minimum wage. Suppose Alex is looking for a job, but all the jobs they can find that will hire them pay less than what they think is fair. Does Alex have a choice? No; if they doesn't get a job they will starve and die.

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#269

Post by bmelton »

velis_vel wrote: post #268
bmelton wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't opt out of minimum wage because there are laws, not because it's otherwise coerced. There are compelling arguments in favor of abolishing the minimum wage, just as there are compelling arguments in favor of increasing it. Neither position is necessarily wrong, and each requires making trade-offs for the other, but either way, the imposition of a minimum wage is not voluntary to those upon which it is impos…

> They can't opt out of minimum wage because there are laws, not because it's otherwise coerced. You missed the point. Let's get rid of the minimum wage. Suppose Alex is looking for a job, but all the jobs they can find that will hire them pay less than what they think is fair. Does Alex have a choice? No; if they doesn't get a job they will starve and die.

The point I made was that workers can't opt out of it because that would be illegal. There are, I'm certainly, many who are starving that would otherwise be thrilled to earn $4 an hour, but they can't. There are also a myriad of scenarios wherein paying someone less than the minimum wage doesn't mean that they starve and die. The minimum wage prevents those earners from finding a place in the market. Even further, there are a myriad of people who are thriving while currently sell their work for less than minimum wage, but they simply disguise the tasks as 'firm fixed bids' or 'flat rate bids' against a projected contract.

I acknowledge that there are bad actors in the system, namely Wal-Mart, who I'm guessing would be happy to pay workers as little as they possibly could, regardless of the burdens it imposed on them (I say because I believe their union-busting activities were unethical, not because I in any way despise their pay practices as they currently exist), but for the most part, a free exchange helps small business compete against bigger business.

In summation, hamstringing employers and employees is unnecessary. It's a shame, because in the tech community, we've already seen the value of a less-regulated workforce with things like oDesk and such. Companies who just need a Wordpress site are free to hire from oDesk, and will likely receive bids in the sub-$50 range which, in a more traditional arrangement, would violate labor laws. Similarly, we've seen it illustrated that those bottom-end producers aren't necessarily cannibalizing sales from up-market producers, as they're able to better distinguish themselves through marketability, experience and references. The artificial pay barrier we've imposed prevents many of the existing low-skill earners from getting experience and/or transitioning into higher-skill earners.

Re: The real use of money is to buy freedom

#270

Post by dredmorbius »

gress wrote: post #153
trevorstrohman wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Hans Rosling talk from a few years ago shows how most indicators are improving worldwide (e.g. reductions in child mortality, GDP per capita). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Depression is also rising to epidemic proportions, suggesting that improving economic indicators may simply not have anything to do with quality of life.

GDP in particular has some huge problems as a measure of economic good.

There are numerous alternative measures which have been proposed, though none have been widely adopted: FISH, GPI, UNHDI, GSDP, GESDI, etc.

"Nobel Laureate: Examine Alternatives to GDP"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=nob...

Post reply on HN