Is money an important factor in our life?

I still to meet a person that doesn't think so! Money is important not for its value per se, but for what it can do. Everybody works really hard to make a good living for oneself and his/her family, and everybody aspires to have a comfortable life.  The question should be turned around to say how do we get our money?

I was explaining this to my daughters last night, that people do not actually love money, they love what it can do for them. But some people may have a love to the money itself, and when that happens they take all the routes to get it and accumulate it.

If you think about it, there are four ways in which people get the money.  People like you and I will work hard, and excel at what we do to earn a good living, some of the money that we earn will also go towards helping others and of course to re invest in whatever it is we do; we will travel and have fun, but will never be extravagant and spend on stuff that are useless just because we have the money. We are the type that is easily explainable.

Other people want to be rich fast, so they use inferior ways to get rich soon, by stealing, cheating, selling illegal stuff like ivory or drugs, or trade in white slaves.  Most of these things generate lots of cash but this cash will easily evaporate! why? because the saying goes: easy comes, easy goes! not an economic theory but its as true as can be.

The third type are those that inherit money from their parents or families, some of them will be reasonable enough to continue with the family trade and grow it, but some will spend all the money or waste it, regardless on what, nevertheless its all wasted, and they can go back to living a very ordinary life. These are the lucky people, of course other people maybe lucky by winning the lottery, and we all know what happened to those that won the lottery, nothing. I have yet to hear about a person who won the lottery and had actually went into a business and generated more money out of his or her new fortune.

The fourth type is the scary one! its those that are in governments. Apart from the little clerks and social workers, those that work in governments are there because they know that there is money to be earned.  Some hear about a project so they start a company and bid for the project, some skim the cream out of government projects, some get bribes because they will refuse to do jobs for the public unless they are paid and some want to over throw the government so they can become the new government in order to get the money. I am certain that you have all heard of the term "selling the building contract", the contractor that will eventually build the government project would be number 20 in the line, and he will only receive 10% of the money that the main contractor had received for winning the bid. Other projects that we know about have all been won in similar ways. Just answer one question, how come the same road is dug and rebuilt every year? I am not going to answer this question, I will leave it to your imagination.

Please ignore my comments, it didn't come from any scientific research, it came from my attention to details and understanding of human behavior  I can be wrong, and maybe scientific research will also prove me wrong, but because I told this to my kids, I thought of sharing it with you so we may debate it.