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WHY GOOD PEOPLE WANT 'LOTS' OF MONEY

In our current society that is based on money, and in which money is power, there are bad people who want lots and lots of money (billions of dollars if they can get it) for a bad reason--to have power over other people, to be able to hog wealth at the expense of others and enforce class inequality by treating ordinary people like dirt.

But there is a very different and good reason why ordinary people--good people--want 'lots' of money (maybe one or two million dollars by the time they retire, for example.) Here is an example of one such reason:

A friend of mine named Ron (not his real name) is 76 years old and is now living in a nursing home with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease.) He's mentally fully alert and has important goals in life he still wants to accomplish. But he suffers terrible pain everyday from the ALS, as well as physical weakness.

The worst thing, however, is that when Ron activates the call light to let the nurse know that he's in pain and needs the morphine that has been prescribed for it, the nurse often doesn't show up for hours! Think about that. And when he complained about this once he was told, "the nurses were all at a meeting" (as if that were the proper way to run a nursing home.)

An ombudsman admitted to Ron that the nursing home was totally under-staffed with far too few nurses because it would cut into the profits to have proper nurse staffing.

You see, the problem for Ron is that he's in a nursing home for people who don't have enough money to pay for a good nursing home. He's in a nursing home for have-nots.

For Ron to be able to pay for a good nursing home, he'd have to have what some people might call a "lot" of money. And this is one reason that good people want to have a "lot" of money by the time they retire or get old. I worry about what might happen to me (I'm 73 years old) in the coming years too, and I want to be able to afford a good nursing home if I ever get a disease such as ALS. So would most good people.

There are other good reasons why good people want "lots" of money. For example, many older people today have children who are facing terrible economic insecurity: they may have huge student loan debts and can only get a low-paying job, and rents are sky-high. This is why older people want to be able to pass as much money as possible to their children after they die.

BUT, IN AN EGALITARIAN SOCIETY...

The point is this. In a society based on money, one needs money to good purposes as well as bad. But in an egalitarian society money is not necessary for those good purposes. Why not? This is why.

 

In an egalitarian society, everybody who has contributed reasonably according to ability, has the right to take for free from the economy what they need or reasonably desire or have an equal right to receive it when it is equitably rationed according to need. People won't need money to have a good nursing home--as good as anybody else's, including a Bill Gates or a Jeff Bezos--when they need it. Their children likewise will for sure be given an opportunity to contribute reasonably according to ability in a way that is mutually agreed upon by them and the Local Assembly of Egalitarians and in exchange they will be able to enjoy a good standard of living--as good as anybody else, including a Bill Gates or a Jeff Bezos.

Some rich people (even very rich!) are good people, as I write about here. We need to judge people on the basis of whether they want an egalitarian no-rich-and-no-poor society or not. Just because somebody has more money than others doesn't determine if they are a good person or not.

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