[AnonT]

There seem to be a lot of arguments on this forum about money and economics, with some people equating taxation to extortion or theft and others saying that money is there to meet our needs and nothing more. Well, I thought I'd share a bit of my personal philosophy on money.

So, anyway, what is money? There's obviously more to it than just pieces of paper and hunks of metal. There are also a lot more things for money to be spent on than there are ways to earn it, leading people to take a lot more time thinking about what money is used for than about where it comes from.

Okay, so, aside from the mint, where does money come from? At it's most basic level - before you consider theft, charity, or taxation - money is given from one person to another in exchange for goods or services. When someone grows food and gives that food to others, those people give them money in return. When someone builds a house and lets someone else stay in it, that person gives them money in return. Once the person growing the food has money, they may pay someone else to build them a house. Once the person who builds the house has the money, they spend some of it buying food. Each of them has more money after they've just done something for someone, and less after they've gotten something in return. So money, in its most basic form, is simply a representation of how much more you've given to or done for others than others have given you in return.

As long as we consider giving things to others and doing things for others to be good things, this means that money (when earned honestly) is a representation of how much more good a person has done than they have received. This would make honestly earned money a good thing.

Unfortunately, in any society, you have people who want to seem as though they're better than they really are. You have people who brag, people who lie, people who buy fancy cars to make up for the fact that they have short penises - and people who steal money in order to make it seem as though they've done more for others than others have done for them when, in reality, they haven't. People hate extortion, because it allows someone to get something from society that they never put in, while hurting an individual's or business' ability to give to the people who help them give.

So, I think most people would agree with me that dishonesty with money is a bad thing. But, what constitutes dishonesty with money? Well, theft and extortion, obviously. But, if we consider money to be a representation of how much more you've given to others than what you've received, a lot of other things fall under dishonesty as well. Paying your employees less than they deserve for the amount of work they give is dishonest. Now, a blanket minimum wage doesn't solve this problem - not all work is worth the same amount, and not all workers work as hard, so there's no reason that everyone should be guaranteed a certain amount when they may not work hard enough to deserve it. So, in addition, demanding more than you're worth is dishonest (this is a problem that often affects upper management - not that organization isn't helpful or isn't worthwhile, but that many CEOs and upper level executives don't care how good a job they do because they make enough in a year to live off of for years if they lose their job. For you Ayn Rand fans out there, James Taggart would be the archetype of someone who expects more than they're worth, it's not just a working class phenomenon).

Now, when it comes to punishing people who are dishonest with money, the first thing we need to remember is that the people they stole from, tricked out of their money, etc. have done more than they've received, and need to be paid back. Since they were without their money for a period of time, something akin to charging interest to the dishonest person should be instated. Personally, I say that a thief should be forced to pay back ten times what they stole - five times as much to the person they robbed, another five to pay the cost of finding them. If they can't pay it back, they should do forced labor until they earn enough to pay it back.

For a lower class thief stealing the money he needs to survive, this would mean a few months or years of labor, followed by freedom. For a CEO who fudges the books and steals hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, if he can't pay ten times that much back, that will mean spending the rest of his life doing labor - so, hopefully, plenty of liberals will subscribe to this school of thought. For those of you who don't think it's fair to make a person spend their entire life paying off that theft, think of what happens when a CEO steals millions from a company. How many $20,000/year jobs will end up being cut because that CEO robbed the company? How many people then lose their jobs, and end up with their lives being ruined by his actions? Simply spending the rest of his life paying it back is chump change compared to the hundreds of lives made harder by his actions.

So, what does everyone think?