Un-Civilizing America

Chapter 7Win‐Lose Money

You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measures of length or weight or quantity. You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin [a unit of dry measure].

—Leviticus 19:35–36¹

What's so important about a “just” measure? In this chapter, we try to figure it out.

And continuing our Bible reading, we find this in Genesis 3:19:

¹⁹By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat.²

If you want money, in other words, you have to earn it. And earning it means satisfying a customer or a boss. It means giving something to get something.

If you want to get ahead financially, if we were to put it in terms of rules, we could list them as follows:

1. Work hard.
2. Learn as much as you can.
3. Save your money.
4. Invest wisely in things you know.

Or hold up a liquor store.

There are always dishonest ways to get what you want, too. Less violent than robbing a liquor store is printing up counterfeit money. And laying on the ground in front of us like an unexploded bomb in a playground is another Bible quote, this time from Proverbs 21:6:

⁶Wealth created by a lying tongue is a vanishing mist and a deadly trap.³

As long‐term readers of our daily blog, Bill Bonner's Diary, now at Bonner Private Research on Substack, know, we are connoisseurs of financial disaster. Give us a 1922 Deutschmark—an excellent vintage! If you had bought a house in Berlin in 1921, you could have paid off your mortgage in 1923 for the price of a cup of coffee. Or how about ...