Quote from tandh:
Being poor is not a problem. I like Peter Schiff's example of three men living on an island. It takes each of them one entire day each to catch a fish which they can then eat to survive. Next day, same thing.
One of the men decides to invent something he later calls a net. In order to do so, he has to under consume, by forgoing one day with out eating. He also takes on a lot of risk. If the net doesn't work, he'll be starving as he desperately tries to catch a fish the second day. He may fail to even catch a fish due to his fatigue.
So, in the story, the net works. This man is now rich compared to the other two. He can catch two day's worth of fish in only an hour or two. He now has plenty of time to do other things that he enjoys.
Even though he is now rich, and the other two would be poor, their poverty is not caused by his richness.
Nicely put Tandh.
The problem is universal and unending. The External balanced by the internal.
Excerpt from Martin Luther King "Street Sweeper" speech
___________________________________________________
What Iâm saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, âHere lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.â
If you canât be a pine on the top of a hill
Be a scrub in the valleyâbut be
The best little scrub on the side of the hill,
Be a bush if you canât be a tree.
If you canât be a highway just be a trail
If you canât be the sun be a star;
It isnât by size that you win or failâ
Be the best of whatever you are.
And when you do this, when you do this, youâve mastered the length of life. (Yes)
This onward push to the end of self-fulfillment is the end of a personâs life. Now donât stop here, though. You know, a lot of people get no further in life than the length. They develop their inner powers; they do their jobs well. But do you know, they try to live as if nobody else lives in the world but themselves? (Yes) And they use everybody as mere tools to get to where theyâre going. (Yes) They donât love anybody but themselves. And the only kind of love that they really have for other people is utilitarian love. You know, they just love people that they can use. (Well)
A lot of people never get beyond the first dimension of life. They use other people as mere steps by which they can climb to their goals and their ambitions. These people donât work out well in life. They may go for awhile, they may think theyâre making it all right, but there is a law. (Oh yeah) They call it the law of gravitation in the physical universe, and it works, itâs final, itâs inexorable: whatever goes up can come down. You shall reap what you sow. (Yeah) God has structured the universe that way. (Yeah) And he who goes through life not concerned about others will be a subject, victim of this law.
So I move on and say that it is necessary to add breadth to length. Now the breadth of life is the outward concern for the welfare of others, as I said. (Yeah) And a man has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his own individual concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
___________________________________________________
The numbers who could do this have always been few. But they were examples for the rest.
The problem is in the stream of life we are presently rowing FEWER even WANT to make the effort.