Packages of Time

A friend of mine was heard to remark that he wished there were packages of time that could be bought from the supermarket shelf, because he never had enough time.

And I told him that there really are packages of time on the supermarket shelves, because he was saving a tremendous amount of time by shoping at the store. If all of use were required to hunt and gather and plant in order to eat, then we really wouldn't have time!

But thats not the way the world works, the people do labor constantly. Money in a sense is the power to command another person's labors. All manufactured goods are valued almost entirely upon the time required to create those goods, and very little is the value of the actual materials. But even the most basic building materials must be wrought from the Earth and refined in order to be formed into something useful. And all that effort is the value of the thing. If I gave you the very same materials unformed, you would not pay a fraction of the price. A pile of bricks and wood is not the same thing as a house. And we all do require some kind of house to live in, but very few have the skill to actually build that house. And getting the skill is also a matter of time, and of course we do not all focus our attention on obtaining the skills to build a house. Its very easy to put a value on physical labor that gives form to the things in our world. Its easy to put a value on the labor requried to provide a service to other people. But in our world some people even manage to earn a comfortable livelyhood just on the basis of having an opinion!

Of course in the matter of such opinions, they can often be said to be educated or expert. But in many of these professions there is very little physical labor involved that can't be delegated to another, there is little more than the process of making a decision in some cases. And yet the whole process does require another person's time and attention, and that time may easily equate to money.

Now of course it is right and good that a person's labor, should it prove beneficial to the community, would entitle that person to services from the community. And we use a medium of exchange to make things work this way, the power of money. But of course we must needs determine what level of rewards are appropriate to the work that has been done. But every person in the world recieves their allotment of time by the same measure, should we really say that the measure of one person's time is more or less valuable? And here we go exercising that judgement again to decided what things are more or less important. Completeing the more important works should be more rewarding of course. If work is less important then it should provide less rewards from the community.

To a large degree we decided which jobs are most important by the demand for that kind of work to be done, and of course the supply of workers that can do the job may be taken into account as well. Clearly not all people enjoy equal means to get work done, even if we don't take qualifying skills into account. A simple skill may be obtainable by any person given enough time. For some people, some skills may very well be unobtainable even given unlimited time to learn. A lot of labor intensive processes depend upon having access to the appropriate tools. And if a person does not have access to the appropriate tools then perhaps they can get access to the knowledge of how those tools are made. Of course the working person may save a great deal of time by having the appropriate tools ready made. But its feasable that the tools would have to be made in order to compelete a particular job.

I want to produce goods, and I have a plan from which they may be produced. But having a plan or schematic or patent is useless without obtaining materials. Now it just so happens that in our world, every parcel of land should be considered to be private property. Some people there are who hold a deed to everything under the land, and there will always be some person who has title to make use of the land. You may not simply go out and cut trees wherever you please in order to satisfy a demand for wood, without there being someone who claims prior rights. Therefore most of the world's material assets are inaccessable. But now please consider who should have greater rights to claim a portion of the Earth's substance than any other? And what body of governing individuals should have the authority to grant such rights exclusively? Without having the means to produce something for lack of materials, potentially useful labor never bears fruit in the world and thus can not be rewarded.
So it is very hard for a person to make their way in the world from scratch. Even the most remote corners of the world are regulated by civilization, there are no more frontiers.

And the people who have all the rights to resources from the land are those who have paid for those rights. And they were empowered to pay those fees by the process of having performed some useful labor. Now those people who are most senior and established hold all the assets. And having control of the assets gives one the right to determine how those assets should be used. Now every human being is a person of many desires, someone else may decide what will be produced and some there are who may provide the labor to fulfill those desires. Therefore someone else may choose how my time should be spent, and what should be produced. My self-interest may be served in some way because I will surely be paid some form of compensation for contributing my part to the greater whole. And therefore humanity creates heiarchys in order to organize a group effort, and one person stands at the top of the pyramid directing everybody else's efforts. And for giving the world such excellent direction, those people at the very top will get the lion's share of the rewards. But please consider, is that person at the top really more important than the person who is cleaning the bathrooms? You can't run a business place without having clean and sanitary bathrooms. Yes we create heiarchys but we easily forget just how synthetic they are and how no one person can be more or less important than any other.

And all the processes of labor and product creation in our world has a tendency to pool the wealth into certain pockets. And of course that wealth represents the power to command other people's labor, but it also represents the power to possess capital assets such as tools and buildings and land, and the various material resources associated with land ownership. Of course i would like to do everything to increase my own personal share in the world's labor, but I have no right to claim another person's time and attention having no money to spend. If I can not increase my share of the money rapidly enough, then perhaps I can increase my share of the material assets. And in fact the actual substance of the Earth is of very little value, perhaps it may be purchased without labor or money being involved. But I'd like to stake my claim to the whole thing in such a way that it clearly overturns any prior agreements made between persons when I was not a party to the agreement. I could perhaps perform the minimal amount of labor that would be required to produce a printed document. Yes I will embelish that piece of paper with all the appropriate legal terminology and it should serve as a deed to all the land, and of course all that lies beneath the land should be claimed as well! Well obviously there is no recognized authority in the human world that could grant such a document, by what authority could such a thing be sealed?

A simple argument could be made for equal ownership of the world's resources, no person should be entitled to a claim upon it that preceeds someone elses. But I'm not really interested in seeing the world divided up into six and one-half billion parcels, I want to claim it myself whole and complete. And in order to accomplish my goal, i would be interested in finding out if there is some person in existence with prior claim to the property. One person with a claim to preceed all the claims of humanity, and then of course to pay the appropriate price to that person. But now what if that person has no need for a man's labor? And certainly one may not take a portion of the material world in order to pay the price of the whole world. But the supreme person has been found and the price has been paid in full, and it did amount to little more than a promise.

Personally I have not many material goods that were not given to me by someone else. I have been employed occassionally in the USA, but the whole time that I did labor for someone else's interests, I also did labor for myself. And I have performed much of the kind of labor which is mostly consisted of making decisions, I have not even produced much documentation of the work that has been done to date. But for all the work that I have done, I have fasioned a thing of value; and that thing is a mature personality. Of course I have not yet recieved compensation for this work, but I still have hope that I might. Often times selling a good product in the world requires the manufacturer to produce the market as well. The people must be made aware that the product is good and beneficial to them personally, so that they will be willing to reward the work that has already been done. I have lived and worked in this world for niegh on 45 years now, I have had many good and some not so good experiences. I have a kind of expertise that is very hard to come by, it can not be had by education alone but in many ways it does depend on some education. As soon as I made my promise to the supreme person so long ago, I have been put on a path to become intimately familure with insanity. A really good fantasy can be a powerful thing to believe in, especially if it makes us seem more important. But whether or not I am more or less important than anybody else, I do know one thing that most people don't. There is a God in Heaven and he's paying attention to events here on Earth, and perhaps he is even concerned enough to act in some cases. Its interesting to imagine what things might become possible if we could have Heaven for an ally, its entertaining even when it produces no results.. LOL.