As long as we all grow our own wheat and corn, and stitch our own clothes, and churn our own butter, and make our own shoes, we need nobody else. We are not even thinking of anyone else. We are only thinking of how to find enough time in the day to grow vegetables, feed the goats, shear the sheep, and shoe the horses. This is no way to live if you do not have to, and in the modern world, we do not have to.
By contrast, when Bob, Timmy, Jimmy, and friends all specialise, they are able to focus on how to better serve one another, and in doing so, they will gain more in return. The good Lord incentivises us to increase our dependency upon each other by offering the blessing of financial abundance for those of us who comply. In other words, we each win more of a living with less efforts when we specialise an trade. This process is called business.
Some defined business as any organisation or individual engaged in commercial, industrial, or professional activities. Others define a business as any organisation involved in the trade of goods or services to consumers. While these definitions are not wrong, they are overly precise. The truth is simply that a business is any person or group of people who have customers. If you are someone willing to pay you voluntarily for the work you do, product you produce, or service you provide, then you are in business.
Everyone who works for compensation can be considered in business. If the local government transport unit pays you for driving a bus, you're not an employee you are in business. Admittedly you are in business with only one customer the government transport system but nonetheless you are in business. If you knit scarfs for fun and agreed to make a few for your friends in exchange for a few dollars for your time, guess what, you are in the fashion and clothing business.
Difference between the bus driver and the person who knits scarves is in this example is that the bus driver makes more, in parts because they are have specialised. If the person who knits scarves quits her part time retail and food service jobs to focus on growing her business, she too might make more money by specialising. By specialising in a trade, rather than doing a little of everything, she can enjoy better efficiency and more disposable income, rather than spreading herself thin. If she goes into her own business, she will find that her customers become valuable human beings to her and she will desire to please them.
Are you beginning to see why specialisation an exchange are the foundation for the good Lords plan for human economic interaction. If you care about your customers as people and appreciate and desire to serve them you will be rewarded. However, if you prefer to spurn others in favour of making yourself utterly independent of all other other humans, your life will be considerably less pleasant. There's a reason almost no one still homesteads in the developed world. Being in solitude is nasty, poor, brutish, and short.
We all sometimes think that we just want to getaway from everyone else. We made a dream about some calamities sweeping away everyone in the world except ourselves. We think, finally, we will be able to get a parking space downtown. There will be no traffic on the freeway. At last you will be able to watch the television without fighting with your family for the controller.
She's daydreaming,. Imagine if this actually happened. What if everyone did disappear. Who would be operating the television station, that remote won't do much good if there is nothing to broadcast, no news anchors, no television actors. What good is that parking space downtown if there is nowhere to work. How can you fill up your car if there are no people operating gas stations or oil refineries. Parking will be the least of your problems. When it is time for dinner and you feel like a restaurant meal good luck. There are no cooks, no staff, no grocery stores, food is rotting on the shelves. Then you come home to your cold home where your heat and electricity have gone because there is no one running the utility company.
Thank you for taking the time to read my post on financial education. I hope this served you in some way.
