The one thing I picked up from my mate was how to look at money.

He has a political head on him and was at times strong-minded with his views, but not in the, everything is sh*t, and everyone is out to get us kind of way.

He has an obvious logic on how the world is set up to make the wealth rise to the top tier and for only very little money to trickle back down. 

This is fixable.

But most countries chose not to fix that; it is very much a choice thing. Some countries do choose the right thing; check out Scandinavian countries. Other than that – the solution is labelled bad because the answer sounds like socialism, and the press has trained us to think that this is evil.

“It just doesn’t work unless you force it. Relying on philanthropy from the super-wealthy to fix things will not cut it because they will pick and chose their pet projects and ignore everything else. They will be the kingmakers, and the wider population will always suffer.”

This was always backed up with great logical views on how to organise things in a better way. No, he is no Karl Marx, just someone who feels the world should work better for all instead of the few.

There was always a matter of fact about how he positioned his argument and who knows, what is right or wrong, but he at least had thought out logic. Unlike many of us that just ignore the situation of wealth equality and grumble our way through life, he at least has a view.

I used to be one of life’s grumblers. I have changed and take more ownership of my own situation. 

He always seems at peace with things. I guess knowledge helps.

“The rich always get richer”, he would say, “so by that we mean the poor always get poorer” and then he would pause for effect and finish with “It is how it is, and we have no desire to change it, and so it remains, for now.” – he would emphasise the yet!!

Without going down a political rabbit hole here, the reason for saying this was the one big take away for me. I took lessons from how he would talk about the continuous movement of money.

He would always talk about looking at money as a ‘wealth transference’. 

Until recently, it was something I stored in my deep memory but never really visited in any depth. 

I have dusted off my memory of the conversations and started to think more about money as a wealth transfer.

I recalled how he would say, people transfer money to you, and you chose to move it on. Some of the transfer is not your choice to make, and some of it is. That is just a fact. When you transfer your money on, they have the options to play-it forward and transfer that wealth to others, and the expectation is to always get things back in return. The thing is, he would say, is that what you get back in return is never equal to the wealth that you transfer upwards for it. Everybody has to get paid.

Everyone has to take their cut off money on the way up. That’s economics. That is how the world works. Think of this as a pyramid, and the wealth transfer has to stop somewhere. It stops when it gets to the pinnacle, even if it is just a digital number on a computer somewhere. 

Someone owns that number.

It always stops somewhere. The person or place it stops with, their main essence of being, ensures that the slices out of the principle (the original cash number) are minimised. This is so that they get the bulk of the wealth at the top end. This comes in the form of things such as cost-cutting, austerity, financial collapses or bubbles. All of which are vehicles of wealth transference. 

When these things happen, the pyramid’s broad base loses out as they drop more of their wealth and a more significant slice transfers up, so it begins again. 

A never-ending cycle of the little people getting shafted.

I would think it all very f*cking heavy; however, there was always niggling of common sense somewhere in there.

My recent reflection on this conversation is; keep your wealth, don’t transfer it unless you absolutely have to. 

Frame every purchase with this idea: what you are getting back is less than the value of the wealth you are passing on to gain that thing and ask if it is genuinely worth it…

And if you really want to be political about it, just keep your wealth because it takes a small chunk out of that pyramid, and if enough people do it, things might just change.

After all, every Empire crumbles.

It is just a matter of time.

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