We are all driven to maintain the cash flows that sustain us. Maintaining our cash flows is a more consuming part of our lives than we realize. While we may appear to be “above” such things, and may go to some trouble to convince ourselves that we are, outside of those who embrace their faith with a missionary zeal that involves voluntary vows of poverty, most of us are swimming in some sort of economic stream, working diligently to have cash flows diverted to our own selves or extensions thereof.
Most of us do not calculate how much time we spend trying to create and maintain favorable cash flows. If we did, we’d find a surprising number of our waking hours are devoted to maintaining and increasing the monies that we can direct to ourselves, our families, and the organizations of which we are a part.
Some cash flows are better than others. “Good” cash flows are based on providing goods and services valued enough to cause free people to freely choose to buy them. “Bad” cash flows involve taking money from neighbors at gunpoint. Plans and plots that do that are little less than thievery authorized by those who are, themselves, beholden to such cash flows.
One thing that all people involved in “bad” cash flows have in common is that they are able to convince themselves that what they’re doing is “good”. So, their waking hours are spent justifying lies, often with far greater gain than they would have been able to accumulate in the freer markets.
The danger is that souls who choose to mandate cash flows from their neighbors to themselves at gunpoint end up drowning in the stagnant pool of dirty money in which they have chosen to immerse themselves. When we point out this danger, for instance, to someone involved in some particularly silly, destructive government program, we first hear, “What we’re doing is good.” When we show why it isn’t, we often hear, “Well, it’s not as bad as what a lot of people do.”
When we find ourselves saying that, it’s time to start doing something else, even if it causes a reduction in cash flow.
