Free Money.

Apparently there have been numerous experiments giving away free money, a minimum weekly payment like an unearned wage with a surprisingly wide ranging of benefits. It seems a ridiculous idea yet we gave away free education and most people would agree it worked far better than our current fee-paying debt-incurring system. Giving free birthday presents is still seen as a great idea too. Even surfs and slaves were given their necessities for free after their long hours in the field but that’s stretching it a bit. But today we are paid a wage for work. It’s a tight merciless link, no work, no pay though our necessities remain. This engenders a feeling that we only have value in the work we do, and in turn that as a human being we don’t. This creates a fundamental juxtaposition between value and wealth so that individuals of wealth are valued more than those without. We even value ourselves in these terms thinking ourselves valueless if we lose it like the bankers in the great depression. This runs deep in our psychology. Sure we can value friends as people irrespective of wealth but only because we know them. All this sets up a chain of values. We value having expensive things because they are a product of our wealth. We value buying things, throwing things away and buying new ones all because we value ourselves on the work we do. We value ourselves on long hours, on our position even on the stress we undergo. And all this myriad of secondary self-valuations leads to a stressful inefficient and wasteful lifestyle. It’s most likely this is why experiments with ‘free money’ are so successful, and why in the long run they, counter intuitively, boost the economy, are less wasteful and promote happiness and human growth. It’s because we should value ourselves for the quality of ourselves as people not for the size of our wallet. It’s not centralised communism or greedy capitalism, it’s the natural way EVERYTHING ELSE works. Even in the jungle everything’s free.