Earning Money

Earning money, or capturing resources from an economy is a very simple concept to grasp — or at least it seems that way on the surface.

An economy is a system of trade in which idealism is used to imbue objects and symbols with authority that serves to facilitate and govern exchanges of labor, talent, resources, objects and artifacts, goods and services. Authority is the power to determine meanings, order and the outcome of events. In simple terms, an economy is what says how much things are worth, and how much people have to give in order to get.

Money is liquid authority. When you acquire money, you’re acquiring the power to determine meanings, order and the outcome of events — the power to “influence” the world around you. The more money you have is the more influence you have. At the lower end of influence you’re just surviving, and at the higher end of influence you get to impose your will and intentions onto people and things.

In an economy you’re either acquiring money from people, from corporations or from institutions.

If you make money directly from people then you’re operating as a company. Making money from people is both the riskiest and most direct way to earn money in society. What makes getting money directly from consumers a risky affair is that a) the amount of money you make depends on 1. popularity (how much the people like you, your product or your services) and 2. how much they have left to spend after covering their basic living costs and/or essential needs (which usually entails monies they’re expected pay to corporations and institutions), and b) it’s risky because the types of products and services available for you to offer to consumers can’t really cross into territories that corporations and institutions already have domain and monopolies in.

In other words, you can’t do what the big dogs are already doing because they won’t allow you to compete at their level. You have to stay small and benign because if you come within earshot of threatening their power-base then they’ll flat-out destroy you. They have buying power, political power, legal power, manpower, market visibility and risk and liability thresholds that make competing against them all but an exercise in futility. The only industries that seem to allow people to scavenge for direct-to-consumer product and service deals are those related to maintenance and repair, food and beverage, residential real estate, and low end retail. And while corporations do make some allowances for companies to scavenge for business opportunities, institutions simply won’t allow anyone to compete against them, period, i.e., you’re disallowed from competing against the legal justice system, the military, science, academia, the medical industry, etc.

The cool part about it though is that if you build a big enough revenue stream by capturing value directly from consumers, some corporation will likely come along and try to buy you out, because at that point you’ll represent an asset to them. But if you happen to find yourself on their radar, and they try to acquire you and you tell them ‘no’ then they’ll likely use their size and power to squeeze you out of the marketplace with tactics such as hostile takeovers or “clustering” (which is what you call it when businesses offer products and services similar if not identical to competitors, in close proximity to the competitors, which generally results in the ones with the most resources prospering when all is said and done).

It should also be noted that (at least within the frame of the breakdown I’m supplying here) companies function in the same capacity as corporations when owners pay employees for labor and talent. Also, companies can sell products and services to other businesses, however, payout systems and/or how value is transferred between parties effectively removes such transactions from consideration as it relates to capturing value from society and/or “getting paid”. This brings us to corporations…

If you make money from corporations, then how much you earn depends broadly on which tier of the organization you operate on.

So at the bottom (slave) level, you literally trade your life away, well below cost for resources to survive on.

At the lower-middle (management/overseer) level you make just enough to trade your life away below cost, however you’re allowed to wield authority over others as an extension of your compensation.

At the mid-mid level you get to manage lower middle managers and still trade your life away below cost for resources to survive on, but at least there’s a salient gap between your socioeconomic status and the slaves at the bottom.

At the upper middle bracket you manage mid-level managers, and you trade your life away at cost for a reasonably comfortable lifestyle.

At the upper (executive) management tier you make decisions on behalf of the corporation, and protect shareholder interests — which grants you a relatively nice lifestyle and wealth cushion, especially as compared to those beneath you.

At the shareholder level, you just benefit from slave labor distributed down to and throughout the corporate infrastructure, without actually providing any real value to the corporate entity itself.

Another way to make money from corporations is to sell products or services directly to corporations as a company. However, corporations usually do business with other corporations, or with companies that are large enough to shoulder liability. For someone to sell their product or service directly to a corporation is a (considerably) rare occurrence.

But with corporations, even at the slave level, in terms of consistency of transaction, earning money is an exponentially more steady and stable affair than acquiring money directly from consumers (being a company).

Easy way to say that is, working for somebody is usually way safer than working for yourself (kinda like in society, aligning yourself with established belief systems is usually safer than independent reasoning and investigation) — but then, lower risk can also result in lower payout.

Earning from institutions is perhaps the most stable way to make money in society. Traditional institutions such as government, criminal justice systems, the military industrial complex, intelligence agencies, institutional science, medicine, (and to some degree) academia and religion produce the most stable jobs and/or revenue streams of the three primary workforce models. Because they’re more stable though, they tend not to pay as much as jobs in the mid-to-upper tiers of corporations do, and they lack the flexibility that business ownership can afford to people. They also tend to be fraternal, tribal and/or tenured in nature. But whereas corporations (even corporate giants) can come and go, institutions tend to remain, as they’re the pillars of society — which is why there’s greater job security in most institutions than there is in the other two workforce models.

Corporate-institutional hybrids like mainstream media and social media create a variety of ways to capture value from society, but they just kinda flounder everywhere, and arbitrarily dispense payouts based on the popularity and visibility of the entities and agents manning them. And unless you’re “grandfathered in” through various forms of nepotism, longevity in corporate-institutional hybrids is rare. Media is within itself an institution, however, the vehicles it takes shape in and uses to reach and impact upon the masses tend to mutate and diversify at a rapid pace, especially as compared to the other institutions. In terms of making money from hybrids though, they function primarily as corporations (even though again, media is an institution).

The biggest problem with the workforce model in society is that the corporations and institutions are taking money from the people in the exact same way that companies do — and not just in the forms of commerce, but in the forms of labor, talent and taxation too. Consider this…If they collect and benefit from taxes paid by you, but don’t pay taxes to the same scale themselves, then they’re necessarily profiting from your taxation, correct? To understand it better, think of it like this…

Imaging you’re trying to catch and sell fish by the seashore, but that you’re going head to head against both Swanson and Yale University, who not only have bigger boats, more men and larger nets to catch fish with than you do, but who also have plants to quickly process fish in to sell to grocers and restaurants, and who ALSO set up stands by the seashore to sell fish out of at a lower rate than you’re able to sell for. Now imagine that they’re not just subsidized by monies that the government collected from you in the form of taxation, but that they also used lobbyists to hand select politicians to give them tax breaks, thereby making it so the entire system was being propped up by what was squeezed from your pockets. Now imagine that you were just renting the boat you caught your fish on from them, and that they made you pay taxes on that too, and that you were required to pay tax directly to them — taxes that they didn’t even have to report directly, and could just pocket under the guise of sales tax.

It’s an all-around rigged game. It’s practically impossible to win rigged games, and the longer and harder you play is the more you stand to lose when all is said and done. In society you’re not actually up against yourself or your abilities to produce and persevere, what you’re really up against is a system that’s working to effectively squeeze life force (potential) out of you in the forms of labor and talent, and then squeeze you out of it (the system), after benefitting at your expense. It’s not you vs other people in a race to acquire money, it’s you vs the mode of parasitism itself for survival. And it’s well ahead of you…

And if you’re solely focused on competing against and/or dominating and getting ahead of other humans then you’re necessarily a liability. If your only goal is capturing the most resources from society, and you don’t actually understand what you’re up against, or the mechanism of the game at large, then the best you can hope for is to achieve brief windows of prosperity before ultimately getting eaten alive by the system.

You’ve got all these folks are out here screaming “Money, money, money! Get money, get money!”, completely ignorant to the fact that the entire infrastructure is on the verge collapse — or more accurately, on the verge of controlled demolition. And if you don’t actually understand how making money works in society, then you’ll believe that simply “making more” is the answer to everything. And the harder you play is the more you lock yourself into the trap of the rigged game.

Of course we have to try to survive in society, but everyone needs to abandon the competitor-mind state long enough to properly assess the situation and make critical adjustments, otherwise we’ll just compete our way to self-termination.