I’ve been struggling with how to write this piece for a while now, because it is simultaneously very simple and very complex. Here’s the simple part:
Our currency, and, by extension, our society, in its present state is worthless.
The complex part is how to explain it.
Money is a representation. In and of itself, it has minimal value (you can burn the bills for warmth, but that’s about it). We used to peg money to an arbitrary gold standard, but that’s fool’s gold (all it takes is one captured metal-rich asteroid to shatter that bubble). What money represents, what all currencies ultimately represent, is time. There are always going to be about twenty-four hours in the day here on Earth (yay leap seconds), and everyone has an equal amount of time each day that he or she is alive.
When you exchange money for a good or service, you’re trading the time you spent doing whatever job it is that you do for the time the people you’re paying spent doing whatever it is that they do. Society places a value on how much your time is worth in relation to what you produce. Let’s look at how we value time in this country. (If you want to find these numbers, just Google median [ job] compensation. The numbers are the closest approximations I could find; I use median because average tends to skew the numbers higher. The numbers will likely have changed from the time I wrote this piece, and I’m betting they’re not closer together.)
Median CEO salary—$9.6 million
Median NBA player salary—$2.33 million
Median NFL player salary—$770,000
Median physician salary—$278,000 (figures vary with specialties)
Median farmer/rancher salary—$60,000
Median teacher salary—$55,000
Median firefighter salary—$42,000
Median janitor salary—$22,000
So what do these numbers tell us? That for every one year a CEO works, a doctor has to work around 34, a teacher or farmer or firefighter has to work around 175, and a janitor has to work around 436.
This is ridiculous. We value the people who keep us healthy, fed, and educated far less than those who tell others what to do or those who play children’s games. You’re telling me that one year of my life spent kicking a football (I make a bit above the median) is worth almost four years of a doctor’s services? That what I do on a football field is more important than twenty-two years of teaching classrooms of children? That someone can spend six lifetimes cleaning up after people and preventing the spread of germs and disease and still barely approach a year’s worth of shuffling stock portfolios and mergers, of making conference calls and speculating (wildly at times) on bonds and futures?
I say no. While I spend a lot of time honing my craft, there is absolutely no way what I do even comes close to benefiting society as much as the work of a doctor or a teacher or a janitor. I clean no floors; I cure no sick; I put out no fires. But society continues to pay me and people like me obscene amounts of money. People give us their time! They’re telling companies and con men, “We would rather be entertained and distracted than focus on building a better future. We would rather elect politicians who pass morality laws and tax cuts to help the rich get richer and vote for a quick fix that makes us feel good now than address the root problems of our system.”
That is why our money is worthless. We value the short term, the shallow, the parasitic leeches of society more than those who actually contribute to long-term stability and growth. We value time spent obfuscating and concealing more than time spent creating and teaching. And what’s worse is that we’ve made it a given in politics that only those who can afford to play get to run. Want to hold office? Better get that money for radio and television ads.
We’ve created a feedback loop that inevitably spirals down into oppression and decay, as those with money become ever more concerned with getting more money, more power, more control over laws and regulations until the whole house of cards comes crashing down. Take a look at the current election cycle, at the voter-ID amendments and bills being proposed, at the efforts to gradually narrow the vote down to those who have cash. As someone who has studied history, I can tell you that every time a society places short-term gains over long-term stability, turns exclusive instead of inclusive, and resorts to petty factionalism and bickering (in this society, that means arguing over who deserves to be called a “real ’Murrican”)—well, let’s just say it doesn’t end well.
PS: Some may call me a hypocrite for being a part of the system, for entertaining rather than teaching. To you I say this: Change the system. Put me out of a job. Pay the teachers and firefighters and doctors and janitors what you pay me, and I’ll gladly do those jobs instead. Value the useful and not the merely entertaining or self-promoting; give a voice to the currently voiceless. Unfortunately, as it stands, I can operate only in the framework we’ve all created, the society that millions upon millions of Americans erect every Sunday, every election cycle, with every bailed-out bank and golden parachute funded while bridges crumble and schools shut down.
Are you not entertained?