Who wants to be a millionaire

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“Here’s how to become a millionaire on a low salary,” the internet ad says below a smiling face of a happy, happy blue-collar man. By now, we should all know what that’s about: you send in X dollars and a computerized algorithm running 24/7 will buy or sell investment pieces with your X dollars. You may buy a tiny interest in Greyhound, say, at 2:30 am for $11.25 and sell it at 2:35 for 11:30 for a profit of $.05. And if the computer makes, say, 1,000 similar transactions while you’re asleep or at work, your portfolio will have grown by $50.00 in a day, let's say, and $1,500 in a month.

That seems like a deal of which everyone should take advantage, except if everyone did and Rosthern, became home to 500 millionaire families, prices for houses, food, services would rise enormously on the principle of whatever the market will bear. Unearned money, dollars achieved through speculation on the currency itself or on the price of land, goods or services, is in the end, blood money. Money itself ceases to be a regulated medium of fair exchange and takes on the aura of a casino.

This makes of any get rich outside of normal exchange of work for dollars, a pyramid scheme that must eventually collapse under its own weight. And as prices inevitably rise to keep the GDP and the money supply in a reasonable balance, the super rich become billionaires and trillionaires, the middle classes are again hard put to make ends meet and the poor are scrounging and begging to merely survive. Sound familiar?

I’m a skeptic when it comes to matching Old Testament prophecy to current affairs, but one stands out for me as a principle unfolding right now. “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil,” appears in Paul’s Letter to Timothy. Or we can go back to Ecclesiastes to hear that even while currency was coin and there were no banks, “He who loves money is never satisfied by money, and he who loves wealth is never satisfied by income. This too is futile.”

I don’t know if Muslim, Hindu, B’hai or Buddhist faiths have similar precautions about the folly of placing confidence in money. But clearly all must see that there are resources and space enough on earth that no one would needs to suffer want. Capitalism makes impossible the kind of benevolent culture necessary for an equitable, peaceful world to exist; whatever you can get mentality replaces a moral code that’s as old as… well, at least as Ecclesiastes.

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