By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 8, 2012
As grad school lumbers closer to my immediate future, more often than not I find myself considering a problem everybody has: money. Specifically, a lack of it. These days, everything is expensive. The tuition piper is always waiting to be paid.
My problem is I turned 20 and I feel I should become more adult about money. But how do I go about doing that? There are so many self-help guides that it’s more than easy to give up before even starting. There’s too much on my mind already without putting time into finding the perfect system to make me rich and successful (as so many books, DVDs and seminars promise they can).
Just being on the subject opens a brand new can of worms: what are the moral connotations of cold hard cash? I don’t even want to think about that. People are starving in Africa and I’m complaining that grad school is too expensive. Should I give away my meagre part-time earnings to those who are less fortunate?
It’s a downward spiral. The whole mess makes me want to move to Tibet and eke out an existence herding goats, trading milk and writing haikus in return for bread and salt.
However, despite never really delving into the world of finance theory, I’ve always been an avid reader. Because so much of our culture revolves around money (how to get it, how to lose it, who has it, who doesn’t, and why), it was unavoidable that I form some home-grown ideas about how, exactly, the concept of money works.
There are two concepts in particular that have stuck with me. The first stems from Ayn Rand; when I was in high school, I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time. Over the next couple of years I slowly devoured the rest of her work. The worlds of her books are intense to say the least, sometimes viciously so. Her entire philosophy is built on the assumption that whatever a person earns, they deserve. If a man can’t fend for himself, he is a parasite and doesn’t deserve pity or, say, social services.
If you can’t fend for yourself, Rand reasons, there must be a reason no one will pay you to do anything. If you aren’t producing anything of value then you don’t deserve to be paid.
This is a pretty harsh take on how society should work, but it’s stuck with me. I can’t expect to be paid for work that nobody wants. I shouldn’t expect to be supported if I’m not willing to support myself.
On the other hand, I recently read something else that (in some ironic, unlikely way) stuck with me pretty hard as well: comedian Louis CK. Some of you may be familiar with his work, which (somewhat like Ayn Rand) makes no bones about what it is: crass, blunt, and occasionally offensive. He released a wildly popular special, Live at the Beacon Theatre, just this past December. What makes this story interesting is that rather than take the conventional route of going through a manufacturer to produce and distribute DVDs, he decided to release the digital version himself, through his website, at $5 a pop.
He made a million dollars in the first 12 days.
“That’s a lot of money,” he wrote. “Really too much money.”
A lot of people—and I’m not really pointing fingers, Wall Street one per cent—would hoard that kind of coin away and save it for when things get rough. Let’s be serious; we all know some bad times are coming, probably worse than what we’re experiencing now. Why not salt some serious dough away for a rainy day? Especially if one million dollars just landed in your lap.
Nope. Not Louis CK. He split the wad into four roughly equal quarters; part of it went to pay for the special and the website used to distribute the special, part of it to charities, and part to his staff as bonuses. He kept the smallest piece for himself: a relatively quiet 220K.
“I never viewed money as being ‘my money’,” CK wrote, “I always saw it as ‘The money.’ It’s a resource. If it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.”
Ayn Rand believes that producing something of value will return to you as profit: Louis CK appears to prove this rule. On the other hand, Rand also believes that you should never give your hard-earned money away willy-nilly, which is what CK is kind of doing when he talks about flushing it back into the system – so now I’m torn between two ideas that both make a lot of sense to me.
Although I only read CK’s press release two weeks ago, it really hit home. Aren’t we in the #occupy trouble we’re in because people have been hoarding money they would never be able to spend? I can’t even count to a million, let alone a billion. There’s no way anyone should have that much money. I can agree that if you earn money, it’s yours to do what you want with – but if you have more money than you could ever possibly spend is it not your duty to flush out into the larger world?
Maybe that’s just the grad school talking. If you need to get rid of some cash in a hurry, give me a shout. Meanwhile, these are purely theoretical questions. My bank account, as always, is fairly barren. The question of what to do with hemorrhaging funds is one I’m fairly certain I will never have to deal with.
