Grafting and grifting

Grafting and grifting

Lucy wants to live fulfilled, joyously, graciously. She wants to work hard but not work hard for the entirety of her life. She wants to accumulate assets and use those assets to reduce the amount she works when she is older. Older but not too old to explore and make use of the free time. This dream can come to fruition if she makes a good plan and executes the plan well. This is Lucy’s dream. It rankles with those that favour socialist, community-based doctrines. To them it is a repugnant idea. They do not believe that one should be able to accumulate wealth by not earning it all through hard labour. The dependable grifter is the biggest sinner of them all, according to those with socialist principles. His line of work is not classed as work but gaining from unearned income. He is exploiting a system, taking advantage of those who do the day-to-day graft. Socialists want you to graft not grift. Grifting is working on the sidelines of the community, often honestly dependably and usefully. A magician may perform tricks to swindle the public. They draw you in to play money games that you can never win. Sleight of hand, cheating. That is a pure form of grifting. Dependable banking has a grifting undertone despite it greasing the wheels of the economy thereby making the economy-machine work better.

Lucy cares little for the socialists dream and feels she deserves to be free as the birds and bees. No one tells them what to do. Some animals work in unison, dolphins will corral fish, benefitting all concerned. All bar the fish of course. However, we apes are very good at working in unison for the benefit of many. A union works to stymie excess profiteering but will also stymie production and progress. Unison implies working for shared rewards.

Lucy asked people what they thought about her venture but quickly shifted from endless talk into endless action. She knows many around her that talked about starting a business but never started. They did talk a lot about what they were going to do but never got on with it. Sometimes you do not know what the problems will be until you are well underway. A few small mistakes, a big mistake here and there is fine. The biggest mistake one can make is endlessly procrastinating.

Lucy will be given twenty pieces of silver when the fence work is complete. She will pay ten for the wood. She will pay ten for the tools, but they can be used on other jobs afterwards. She decides to do something rather sensible. She enlists the help of Clare. It is rare of Clare to get her hands dirty as she is a member of the bourgeois set, but for this one-off job Clare will help. Clare will be given three pieces of silver. Lucy will ensure that Clare does at least half of the work. Ignoring the cost of the tools, Lucy is set to have six pieces of silver left over once the job is complete. The dependable grifter gets one, Lucy six, Clare three. Everyone is reasonably happy. Lucy will set aside two pieces of silver to pay down the cost of the tools and save to buy more later. Lucy is doing two very important things. She is calculating her costs. She is making a note of them. She is studying the profits. She is not afraid to view her accounts. Lucy sees it as just numbers. She doesn’t get overly emotional about it. One needs to feel emotions, that is what being human is all about, but too emotional about numbers that relate to something imaginary, money, is unhelpful. The more she faced it, the easier it was to deal with it. Lucy is also getting others to do a lot of the hard work. The more she does that, the better. Better for Lucy. Better for the wider community in the long run.

A socialist will not allow Lucy to profit from the labours of others. The reasons why they will not allow people to profit from the labour of others is a mystery. They do attempt to explain why in books they write. The books are fine to read as works of fiction. Anyone that enjoys excuses and obfuscation revel in them. Semi-truths merged within riddles. Each book contains a romantic happy ending, so they give people hope and belief. False hope and false promises. Socialists are known for talking a lot without ever answering a question.

Shirts are typically sold for 4 pieces of silver. However, Timothy Pierre Whitecoat adds a badge to his shirts, styles them a little differently by changing the cuts to the cloth and sells them for 15 pieces of silver. His shirts use roughly the same amount of cotton and takes roughly the same amount of time to manufacture as ones sold for 4 pieces of silver. The only tangible difference is fashion and prestige. Socialists will outlaw Timothy and his fancy shirt selling scheme. The socialists do not believe in frivolity. All shirts will be made to look the same. Function matters, form does not. Making something look better is unnecessary and capitalist in ideology. If it works, why fix it, why improve it. Charging more for something that has become more desirable is unearned income, no different to using assets to earn money. All shirt makers, shirt vendors and shirt distributors should earn the same amount. No ifs, no buts. Socialism is about empathetic community co-operation.

Lucy has done the deed, built the fence and received the bag of silver. She is no fool. She has paid everyone she owes. She has six silver coins deposited with the dependable banker. She will not buy new carpets for her house. Nor will she replace her sink in the kitchen despite it being very old. She will not swallow a gallon of beer nor smoke dried leaves. She will not have an adventurous trip abroad. Not this year. Maybe in a few years’ time. Instead, she will pay some of the loan off and keep the rest for the next job. Lucy is rare in this neck of the woods. Most spend what they earn soon after being paid. They dare not save for personal financial progress. To become wealthy, one must earn more than they spend. They must study their accounts meticulously and get others to do the bulk of the hard work.

Lucy asked Clare to lay the fence posts out. She wants each one put near where they will stand. Clare ignores this request and begins digging the first hole. Clare prefers to fetch one post at a time after each hole is dug. Lucy prefers to have all the fence posts set out first. Does it matter? Not really. Our ways differ. Those ways can sometimes achieve better results. Those ways may save a little money. Those ways may simply be the way we prefer things to be done. Some ways are safer. Lucy understands that some ways are near enough as good as her ways. If your way of doing a job takes a few minutes longer, it doesn’t matter. Not here in the fence erecting business. Lucy accepts that people she employs might do things a little differently but will get the job done nevertheless. Lucy will still earn quite a lot from other people’s hard work. They will not work as keenly as her. They will not strive to make the business as fantastic as she, but they will, in general, be reliable and courteous towards the customers. Across the meadow, along the lane, behind the mountain works François. Alone. No one will work with him. He controls people, micro-manages them. He insists that every job is carried out in a very particular way. Lucy becomes rich, François not at all.

Some people are quicker at doing certain tasks than others. Some are brighter than others. Some are more creative. Some are in a world of their own. Controlling every move a fence post erector makes, may be counter productive, but in other businesses, managers can change a small thing and the change in output can be astonishing. I have increased production by a factor of three. From seven an hour to over twenty by simply re-organising who does what. Managers will change what their staff are doing. Staff watch the clock whilst managers watch what happens as the clock hands roll around. Small changes could be made. Changes that are obvious. The problems are clear to see. You might assume the staff would see what could be changed and make the changes. However, they rarely do. Managers are grifters in the eyes of the socialists, but they can make incredible changes to organisations. They are paid their weight in gold, because they are often worth more than their weight in gold.

A job is a job, is it not. It is when it is profitable. It is not so much a job but a labour of love when not financially profitable. I had a realisation during my business journey. I was buying broken clocks. I repaired them. I sold them. Each clock was sold for one piece of silver more than I paid for them. I realised that this was not a good thing to carry on doing. Instead of repairing small clocks I decided that I shall repair radio equipment instead. I can fix a radio in the same amount of time as I can repair a clock. I can earn seven pieces of silver for each radio that I repaired and sold. I can earn seven times the amount of money in the same space of time. I repeat what I said earlier. Study your accounts and you will notice things like this in your business. I would only repair clocks if it was a means to an end. Maybe to draw customers into my shop perhaps, so that I can sell them other things too.

One of the reasons Lucy was keen to go into the fence erecting business was because she enjoys working outdoors, enjoys physical graft. As she employs more people, she will spend less time outdoors and more time dealing with fraud, tax returns, advertising, dealing with miss-deliveries, personnel matters and getting technology to work as desired. I semi-retired quite early so there was a payoff for all those years of commitment. The stress of running a business takes a toll though. Stress makes you ill. Believe me it can make you unwell in peculiar ways. In the long run it is worth it, and money gives you choices and freedoms like nothing else. Happiness though will evade you if you believe that money is everything. It is not.

The dependable grifter will invariably put his interests ahead of those he is lending to. That is not simply being selfish. He is after all lending money that is not all his. He is lending money that other people have stored with him. If his business fails, lots will lose lots of their hard-earned pieces of silver. He needs to maintain confidence in who he lends to. Confidence is money. If he suspects a business is not making enough profits to cover costs, including the cost of money borrowed, then he may act before the situation gets worse. He may ask the business to stop trading and salvage what he can. Some businesses seem to be profitable when they are not. Some businesses seem to be loss making when they are simply at the bottom of a business cycle. Each person who analyses the accounts will come to a different conclusion. Different but roughly the same conclusion in some cases. Different but markedly different conclusion in other cases. Some believe that there will be an uptick in tool sales next year. Others feel differently. What you believe will happen in the future will dictate what sales you expect the tool maker to make. The more optimistic, the more confidence you will have in the tool maker. The more confidence you have, the happier you are to invest in his business. Confidence all round.