Here we are, working harder and hopefully smarter toward the common goal of financial independence. To reach a point where we can choose to spend our limited time as we see fit. Yet, no matter how close we are to achieving our goal, we all live one mishap away from carrying a work for food sign at the side of the road.
How? Reliance on money.
If you have it, your possibilities appear endless. And if you don’t, you may starve to death while living in the wealthiest country in recorded history.
Consider one startling fact: Almost all of us have lost loved ones to curable, preventable diseases because they did not possess enough money to gain the knowledge of healthy nutrition, or to purchase food that supports wellness, or to access timely and adequate medical treatment.
Have you noticed that the highest quality goods and services are reserved only for people who have the money to pay the most? For the rest of us, we are immersed in an ocean of sub-optimal products and services that are designed to rapidly degrade so we will have little choice but to purchase the products again and again. And the worse part is many of us suffer injuries and even death resulting from the less than optimal quality of the goods and services we rely on.
This is the unspoken reality of our lives.
Up until this moment, we have been told price discrimination in the quality of goods and services is necessary because there is simply not enough resource to provide the best for everyone. The accumulation of human knowledge, coupled with relentless technological developments, have rendered scarcity of the highest quality goods and services obsolete. Stated bluntly, we now have the capability to provide the best quality for all of us.
I hear your doubt but consider a few easily verifiable facts…
- Knowledge once gained can benefit everyone. The only reason knowledge is withheld is to give contributors exclusive rights that are sold to make money.
- Most of the garbage gorging our global landfills are from affordable (cheap) goods that were produced to fail long before the best quality goods.
- Most of the drain on global resources is for the production of less than optimal quality goods that are sold at prices that support our consumption-based economy. As every Economist insists, the more we consume, the better the economy. Better for whom?
- Since the best quality is reserved only for people who can afford to pay the most, the large majority of global millionaires make their fortunes selling sub-optimal products and services to the rest of us.
- Our current mass production of sub-optimal goods and services threatens to exhaust global resources as billions of new customers join the consumption pool, especially in India and China.
And what are the implications? If we fail to improve the efficiency of global resource utilization, future resource availability will support materially smaller global populations.
What can be done?
Educate yourself on the issue of scarcity. If we have the technology and resources to provide the highest quality goods and services to everyone, price discrimination is no longer necessary.
Despite what we have been told about our Us versus Them world, there really is no them…There is only Us.