You are a billionaire: You wouldn’t think of flying first class, nothing so rushed and inconvenient as that. You don’t stay in fancy hotels when you travel. You take your private jet when you want to visit grandma for Christmas, you have your yacht if the destination is on the coast, and you have homes in various places that you might want to travel to, all fully staffed. You can drop in on Senators without an appointment and they drop everything to see you. Your influence is felt in boardrooms all over the world.
Sounds nice doesn’t it?
So do you have any problems? Well, maybe one or two.
Does anyone else want your money? You bet they do. What are they willing to do to get your money? Anything they can think of: They will lie, cheat, steal, murder, and worse (if you can think of worse). You can’t really (safely) trust any of your many employees, because they are all exposed to temptation. So you can’t ever really rest easy because your vast wealth is not safe.
Is your fortune safe? Perhaps not. If your wealth is in money, the value of that money can change, inflation is a contributing factor. So you need to have parts of your wealth in a variety of currencies around the world, but even then banks can fail and inflation that strikes in one nation’s economy tends to affect other nations’ economies as well. If your money is invested in corporations, their value may drop as we have recently seen on Wall Street. Even some of the most well-respected firms have gone bankrupt in the last few years, so you could lose money in the market. If you are in a nation with an unstable government, the government might simply confiscate your assets as was the case in Russia and China and even America in the 20th century.
But you will always have your family, right? Maybe. For one thing, your fortune is a great temptation to kidnappers. No matter whom you may hire to guard your loved ones, the guards may be bribed or may go into kidnapping for themselves. Your family is always at risk because you have such great wealth.
Your family will want your money as well. Just because you have made them wealthy in their own right doesn’t mean that they have all they want: They just might want it all, they just might want your position. And of course your wife married you because she loved you. Her affections were not affected at all by your wealth. Or were they? How can you tell? Do you have friends? Are they really your friends or only people who are attracted by your wealth and power? Do they really tell you the truth about yourself or do they say just what they think you want to hear?
What about your reputation? What do people really think of you? Do they think you earned and deserve your wealth and power? Do people speculate that you must have been doing illegal and immoral things to get so much money?
The Bible has several stories about wealthy men. One gets the impression that not many rich people are going to get into heaven. If you are very rich, how can that sit with your conscience? How can you hoard all that money while there are so many poor people suffering and dying, people that you could save but have chosen not to?
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Now, how would things be different for you if you were just as rich, but the society and economy of which you were a part was a Copiosis-based one? Let’s start with whether other people want your money. Since money cannot be transferred from one person to another, there is no way they could get your money. They may envy your wealth or even be jealous of your wealth but they can’t get your money so they won’t even try. That means you don’t have to worry that any of the people you work with has designs on your money. Your family cannot inherit your money so they want you to live a long time and continue to buy them gifts. Your fellow man in a Copiosis economy will have no temptation to do you harm because that would cost them future income.
Is your fortune safe in a Copiosis economy? It is as safe as the continued existence of the society. Short of some disaster which destroys the productive capacity of the nation (a meteorite or a super-volcano, perhaps) your money will have a constant buying power. It will never suffer from inflation and there will always be lots of luxuries for you to buy. You can’t lose any of it to the courts since not even judges can have the numbers in your account decreased. Your money can only buy luxuries so the failure of the enterprises in which you participate cannot reduce your money.
Is your family safe? While there is always the possibility of accident or illness, no one would have a financial incentive to kidnap them, since you can’t pay a ransom. There is no way their kidnapping could benefit others. Also, preventing their kidnapping would earn those who prevented it quite a bit of money. Should you hire body guards for them anyway, there would be no way to bribe them when money can’t be transferred.
Since you can still give people expensive gifts, it is true that there is no guarantee people would be honest with you about how they really felt, so in that regard things would still be the same. That is just a price you pay for having so much wealth, it comes with the territory.
Your reputation would rise with your account balance. Anyone in a Copiosis economy who is rich has done things which greatly benefitted many other people. Your wealth is silent testimony that you have been a great benefactor. Others will respect your goodness as well as your capacity to do good. They will be eager to cooperate with you in whatever enterprise you choose to pursue. They will believe in you and will “obey” you in the sense that if you tell them to do something they will likely do it in the expectation that it will make a lot of money for them. Your power would be unrestrained. There would be no laws restricting that power. There would be no person opposing that power. All would support and encourage the exercise of that power. Your power would be safe.
The conscience of a wealthy man could rest easy about having a lot of money. Rather than being a sign of having ignored the needs of others, such wealth would indicate that he had done great works for others.
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