Most Americans are raised get an education, get a job, make money, and then make more money. There’s nothing like starting your work life in your early twenties with a huge student loan debt that will take you years to pay off. Money seems to be the driving force in this country and the pursuit of it is all consuming. In reality, it’s the same almost everywhere else as well. I think a lot of that make-money mindset was passed down through the Great Depression generation like my parents who were concerned with little else. It’s not a bad thing to chase money but how you go about is even more important. Make as much money as you can but try just as hard not to harm or destroy others in the process.
Today’s post involves a short history of money.
- At the age of 12, Andrew Carnegie worked as a millhand for $1.20 a week. A half-century later, he sold his steel company for nearly $500 million.
- Not a single bank existed anywhere in the 13 colonies before the American Revolution. Anyone needing money had to borrow from an individual.
- Although he is famous for inventing the cotton gin, in 1793, Eli Whitney made no money from his invention because he did not have a valid patent on it.
- Henry Ford shocked his fellow capitalists by more than doubling the daily wage of most of his workers in 1914, 11 years after he had established his first automobile factory. He knew what he was doing. The buying power of his workers was increased, and their raised consumption stimulated buying elsewhere. Ford called it the “wage motive.”
- Paul Revere, the American silversmith and patriot, designed paper money for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which issued the money in defiance of English law even before independence was declared. The notes were handsome but soon depreciated. Some of them subsequently were used as wallpaper in barbershops.
- When Jacob A. Riis published his classic book How the Other Half Lives, in 1890, the fortunes of about 1% of the US population totaled more than the possessions of the remaining 99%. The pattern hasn’t changed all that much. Today, the fortunes of about 8% of the US population total more than the possessions of the remaining 92%.
- We hear all of the economy experts constantly raising fears about rising inflation. Here is why! At the height of inflation in Germany in the early 1920s, one American dollar was the equal of 4.2 trillion German marks.
everyuselessthing.com 