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Many people believe they never have enough of either time or money. So central are these two essentials to our everyday existences that an old saying seeks to equate them by claiming that, "Time is money."
In a capitalist society such as ours, most Americans understand the ideas encapsulated in those three words. We must be efficient when performing our jobs. This adage tells us we should not waste time in unproductive activities. Whether chatting in the break room or making personal calls during office hours or playing games on our computers when we should be focused upon our spreadsheets, when we squander time we will either be costing our business potential sales or adding unnecessary costs that eventually reduce profits. And, of course, without profits, no company can long remain viable. If the business fails, we will lose our jobs and face the consequences of our self-indulgent dawdling.
As important as this expression is in emphasizing our responsibilities at work, there is another, even more fundamental and profound relationship between these concepts. Perhaps if people truly understood and accepted this alternate phrase, they would be far less willing to tolerate (however grudgingly) the taxes and professional limitations that plague us all.
"Money is time." At first blush, this simple reversal of words may sound odd. After all, is it not money that people work to procure? If the proper use of our time results in us obtaining more cash, then this new saying seems to suggest that being wise in the expenditure of our money will enable us to "purchase" more time. An absurdity on the face of it.
"Money" is many things. It is a medium for economic exchange, helping us move beyond a simple barter system. It is a measure of delayed consumption, for example, when we open a savings account or invest in stocks. It can mean security or power, status or reward, justice or leisure.
Ultimately, however, the true nature, the core meaning of money is that it is a measure of our lives.
When we are born, we have a fixed amount of time ahead of us. Whether we live a few years or a century or more, our life spans are limited. The problem -- or perhaps the blessing -- is that none of us knows precisely how much time we will have on this planet.
The salience of this incontrovertible fact is that the amount of time we devote to various goals is a gauge of how much we value those respective ends. In other words, each purpose we set ourselves requires the expenditure of ("costs" us) a portion of our irreplaceable time -- an irretrievable segment of our lives -- to achieve.
We obviously "spend" time on very worthwhile and non-monetary pursuits such as friends and family. But it is equally clear that significant parts of our days are committed to earning incomes to provide for the physical (and, to a certain extent, emotional) requirements of existence. Food, shelter, clothing, transportation, education, entertainment: these and innumerable other goods are "purchased" with those hours and days and years we spend working at a job or conducting a business.
When we experience "buyer's remorse" due to a foolish purchase, we have not only voluntarily misspent our money, we have frittered away a fragment of our lifespan. As bad as that situation feels, when external factors forcibly interfere with our choices of how to "spend" the minutes of our lives -- when money we might otherwise earn is denied us -- a fraction of that finite time we each possess has effectively been stolen from us.
When we are denied the ability or the right to work at a particular profession because of a requirement for a license or a permit, we are victims of "life theft."
When the cost of engaging in some business is artificially raised via regulations and rules that have nothing to do with preserving individual rights, we are experiencing "life burglary."
When we are prohibited for whatever reason from pursuing a specific career because such work is deemed "illegal" despite the presence of willing buyers, we are facing "life looting."
Even when we struggle with the chains designed to limit our options and do succeed to whatever extent our abilities and the hampered market permit, insult is added to injury in the form of the myriad of taxes that snatch away nearly half of our working lives in a robbery that masquerades as the "price" we pay for "civilization."
Those individuals who work in our society need urgently to recognize that it is not really their money that flows into the coffers of the State: it is their lives.
If people fully embraced the reality of that trespass, that plundering, they might resist more vigorously the felonious assaults they suffer every day from those "honorable" criminals who pretend that pilferage and wrongdoing are the essence of morality. When each and every one of us accepts the truth that it really is our responsibility, our decisions, our money -- and, yes, our lives -- that we must defend from the predators of the world, then and only then will this legal larceny -- this not-so-hidden purloining of the money, the time that is our lives-- be ended.
