And usually if you want to use the power of your money, you have to give it away. But sometimes, all you have to do is *have* the money, and you don't even have to spend it to wield it to get people to do your will.

The more money you have, the more this is true. I don't have much money, but I've used it to build a good credit score which gets me a ton of power I don't have to actually give up to use. In fact, many of the ways I can use that would give me *more* power than I have now. (Taking on credit forks power into two directions: I have more power in my bank account, but also the bank has more power over me to make me give it back to them. But still a credit score can be leveraged in ways that nets me more power than I owe.)

But if you're a billionaire, your money in holding translates into influence, which is another unit of power. Influence is abstracted above the money rather than exchanged like currency. Influence is about image.

#AbuseCulture #MoneyPower
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And that in order for a government taking power from a rich person to have any noticeable effect on them as a deterrent and as compensation for harm done, any form of fine-based justice needs to be somehow proportional to the amount of money power a person has at their disposal.

Again, all stuff we know, but thinking of money as power rather than wealth helps us realize what's really going on here. That these are all power games, NOT wealth games.

Money is about who gets the freedom to do what they want and who doesn't. NOT about who has the most toys.

The toys are a distraction. This is about being able to order people to do what you want. You're exercising this power when you get a burger (ordering a bunch of people to raise a cow, process the meat, cook it, and bring it to you). Or for the government to take some slice of your freedom rather than all of it for a time.

That's all for today probably. More later!

#AbuseCulture #MoneyPower
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We all know the saying, "If it's punished by fine it's legal for the rich," and this is another way of thinking about it.

Really it isn't the fine that's the problem, but the fact that a fixed fine has a disproportionate amount of power that it's taking away from you depending on your financial history.

A person with $1,000/mo income and no savings will be hugely disempowered by a $500 fine, which might take away power they otherwise would have exchanged to eat or have shelter.

A person with $1m/mo income and $1b in assets will not be incapacitated one bit by this fine. It's a tiny fraction of the power they have, not enough to impact them.

And from this, we can see a lot of aspects of power. In that human beings have a limit on how much power we can personally absorb or recognize. That point is one that needs further exploring but won't do that today.

#AbuseCulture #MoneyPower

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So yesterday I was thinking about government levied fines in terms of money as a unit of power. And it's elegant.

When a government fines you, that are taking away a piece of your power. This can be unpacked further to reveal some interesting aspects of our system.

For instance, a government has as much power as it does ultimately because of force. That is a raw form of power that is not directly represented by money, though there can be an exchange rate there. So the fact that the two major forms of punishment or justice a government can mete out is: 1. Force via imprisonment, a taking of all or nearly all of your power, or 2. A fine which takes away a portion of your power which can be represented by money.

So you don't need money to walk down the street, a kind of empowerment you don't have in prison, but it might disempower your ability to eat that day, or not have any effect at all. Next slide.

#AbuseCulture #MoneyPower

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I need a hashtag to help me track this idea. It's part of my bigger #AbuseCulture idea, because it's a method of exchange of power, but it deserves its own recognition. #MoneyPower maybe?

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