by R Jazz Biel, 9/28/11
Money makes America go around. We all use money every day, from bills and groceries, to our TVs, computers, clothes, and more. Americans and our modern lifestyle has become 100% dependent on money, and this an unhealthy place to be. At the rate our government has spent our tax dollars, the American dollar has declined in value in the international market, which means our money is almost insignificant in trading with other countries. Currently, our absurd system of money barely supports the majority of our population, and without it, life as we know it would cease to exist.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a minuscule .32%
of Americans are employed in the area of farming, fishing, and forestry. These few people have the knowledge and skill set to survive without money, by farming, gardening, fishing, and ranching. Large corporations now own most farms and factories in the U.S., and when these companies fall, their products will not be available to the consumers. Our society has to spend money on basic survival; paying our electric bills, water bills, buying groceries, buying gas, purchasing clothing, and more. Without money, we would need to know how to live from the land itself. No more microwavable meals, no more buying undies at Walmart, no more HD televisions, no more iPhones. All of our modern-day technology and fancy belongings will someday be too expensive to afford, and we would be just making it to survive. Even now, a growing 11.6%
of U.S. Citizens are unemployed and looking for a job. That is about one of every ten people that doesn’t have a way of supporting themselves.
If you really think about it, our monetary system is truly ridiculous. Our dollars are not worth anything. Their value could go up or down, depending on how much money the government prints. The government is $14.3 trillion
in debt to China alone, and if the Chinese government wanted its money back, our entire economy would fall quickly. Americans never see most of the money; most of our money is hidden away in banks. These banks misuse our money, which is why the government had to bail them out. The money isn't real to us most of the time; its stored in a bank's internet server, which hides our money in layers upon layers of dense binary code. We never see the money, just the numbers on a computer screen. Even the paper dollars that we store in our pockets are representative of gold hidden away in the U.S. treasury. This is why every time the U.S. prints a bill, the value of every bill gets smaller, and the price of gold gets higher; because we only have so much gold to represent in dollars. When I say the government "prints" bills, I mean that they create more money and raise the taxes to pay off their debt to other countries. From my perspective, this entire process of our modern monetary system is absolutely absurd, old-fashioned, and unstable. The more independent from money we are, the better.
The value of our U.S. dollar has become very low on the international market. In 1990, one U.S. Dollar was worth 144 Japanese yen, but in 2009, one dollar was only worth 93 yen
, and this number continues to drop. Imagine living in one of the 3rd-world nations in Africa, South America, or the Caribbean. We wouldn't be able to buy food for ourselves, and few of us know how to make food from scratch, because our society has been especially spoiled. We would die from starvation, malnourishment, disease because of bad hygiene, and the lack of good medical practice. More people than ever would turn to drugs and alcohol as a means of escape, leaving children to wander the streets for scraps of food and getting into “productive” hobbies like pick-pocketing and robbery, which thens turns into assault and eventually murder. Our biggest fears would have come true, and if we are not prepared by using the resources and advantages we have now, we might not survive. The pending nightmare should serve full warning to learn how to survive on your own, without the dependency on money.
As our own Declaration of Independence states, "They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government... as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." This means that we have the right to pursue our own happiness. We may not go as far as to overthrow the government and install a new order, but the least we can do is to be prepared for whatever may happen, and work toward surviving from what has already happened. We have the right to provide for ourselves safety and happiness, and we should take pride from this, even with all of the destruction and havoc that may occur in the future, we can provide our own happiness.
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