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Tax Pollution

Fred-Rick
2 min readAug 16, 2022

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Money is a man-made instrument, not something divine. Let’s use it properly.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

When I immigrated into the United States, one of the surprises I encountered were the people worshipping money over freedom. I was flabbergasted and had no clue how anyone could ever be that way.

Over the years, I learned that people have weeks, months, sometimes years of vacation time on the books, never using it so they can have more money in the end. I also learned that a good number of them ended up with about two years of retirement before dying.

The idea that money is not an abstraction of value, but something that is inherently good, still makes me scratch my head because money is a mechanism. Money is not a something; it’s a way we organize and deal with values in our societies.

What happened to these people that believe that money is divine? How were they not indoctrinated to think that something not real is somehow the highest we can achieve? I have a degree in economics, so don’t get me wrong. But to worship money to the point it becomes the ultimate decision maker is not a healthy state of mind.

Naturally, money has value. That is the whole idea. We were able to create an abstract system in which we captured all values that we desire to translate into that easy mechanism of exchange.

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Fred-Rick
Fred-Rick

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