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The Difference between Wealth and Money

21st August, 2005

First let us realise that wealth and money are more often than not, taken to be the same thing.

You would notice the difference when you came to sort out, what you had saved from the wreck, when you found yourself alone on a desert island.

You would find that money would be worthless and you would flourish and prosper in accordance with what you could use for your survival. You would assess your wealth by your survival potential.

A financial consultant would be a liability. As would be a lawyer or a fund manager. Even if you had a solar panel to power your computer, you would only use your computer for playing games.

The sort of consultant whom you might be glad to have along, in order to help you to survive, would not exists in The City of London.

The engine room that powers the British economy, would be unable to aid your survival in any way and would speed your demise with inexorable force.

Once you were grooved in as a really successful survivor, coping with hard reality, you would have a very different view of money as opposed to real wealth.

Landed back in your city office and looking at the reports from the National Statistics Office, you would feel distinctly uncomfortable to find that the global economy, currently has no survival potential.

Short term you would have nothing to worry about, provided you were totally indifferent to the survival of life on this planet. And that you knew for certain sure, that you would not be required to come back home and sort out the mess.

The human race has not yet discovered a science of economics and must try to get by with a variety of idealisms. Each derives from a different inspiration. Some inspirations are better than others, so that it is possible to have a game to play, in which no one can be sure of winning.

The result is that the human race itself always loses and cannot win. We all need games to play and possibly the real reason the global economy is in a mess, is because if we straightened out the mess, we might find ourselves with no game to play. Nothing to write about in the Press.

Of course the fact is, that there are much better games to play, which we do not recognise.

One very simple example of this phenomenon would be, that if we could be guaranteed peace, we might ruin the arms trade.

It could seem to be dangerous, to be free of danger.

We need to find some explanation for highly intelligent human beings, such as our statesmen, making such a hash of Economics.

Economics is a simple subject, rendered so complex, as to be beyond understanding.

Economics should be the science of creating and distributing the goods and services required by the human race for its survival.

Economics gets complicated, when it advances beyond a barter system and requires a means of exchange.

We find it all too easy to produce the goods and services for exchange and then find it impossible to distribute what is produced.

That is because we do not know and understand money, which we have chosen as our means of exchange.

We have tried using gold and ran into difficulty. We then abandoned money as a means of exchange and switched to credit and then claimed that credit is another word for money. But credit is also another word for debt. It is when we use debt as currency that economics becomes a mess.

It is impossible to decide the value of a currency, which has debt as a major component. Valuation sinks into pure guesswork.

We now have a two tier market. A money market and a market for goods and services.

This distinction is never made and the market is taken to mean the money market.

Gambling in this market becomes the activity on which The City of London pulls in 30 per cent of the nation's wealth.

Because there is no semblance of a science, of such a form of economics and its entirety is inspirational logic; the insider rules supreme. Wealth creation by the London markets, is second to none, allowing Britannia to rule the world with financial finesse. But that rule in shady and shaky. "So be it". We say and enjoy the fun of that game.

Doctor Edward C Hamlyn MBChB