The shirt says "I'm smarter than your boyfriend." And I probably am, too. But I may not be making as much money as your boyfriend.
If I had a Steem Dollar for every time people have called me smart, or intelligent, or bright, or stuff like that, I could buy enough SP to be the biggest whale of the community.
It's something I've struggled with and pondered about for a long time, years even, that I should be doing a whole lot better, if I was as smart as people say I am. I'm not doing bad, per se, I've been somewhat succesful at work in sales and whatnot, but I have always been a bit skeptical of the idea that what you need in order to succeed is a high IQ.
I recently - last night, in fact - watched Tim Urban's TED talk about the "instant gratification monkey". Basicalally,w hat he was talking about was procrastination, and the fact that it's hard for him to, well,get shit done. He was given a year to finish an important school assignment, and he didn't start doing it until the very last day.
I've never been able to relate with anything as much as I did that TED talk. I was like "Yup, that's me!"
I know I can handle even complicated concepts, and "draw" things in my mind, being able to predict how they'll work out. I work in sales, and I'm good at estimating and predicting how different types of peole react to certain things. I have also "mapped out" the seven or so different types of people that I usually interact with during an average day. I also fluently speak two languages, Finnish being the other one, since I'm from there. I spoke fluent English a year before we started learning English at school, I'm still not quite sure why and how, I just did.
My point being, I'm no dummy, and I know that. But is being smart the most important thing when it comes to being succesful?
I almost get frustrated nowadays when people put me over as a super smart guy, because it always makes me feel like I've failed somehow, since I should be higher on the food chain, if the claims about my smarts were accurate. It's funny, too, since I actually really enjoy writing. It can be serious, funny, politics, economics.. from pokémon to pro wrestling, I just really like writing stuff. That said, it's the most difficult and challenging thing for me to actually sit down and START writing stuff. After I get started? A breeze. But before I get TO start, I have to make a cup of coffee, I have to have at least one cigarette, I need to check out YouTube, I need to check out Facebook, I get stuck doing something else.. It's not uncommon that in between me deciding to get something done and actually doing it, there's a good four-five hours of me not accomplishing a damn thing.
So, what is the value of intelligence? Clearly, it has value, but it's only valuable when coupled with being able to work hard, to take initiative, take action. In other words, the ability to turn that intelligence into money, something concrete. Without the ability to work hard, intelligence is like money that you own, but it's locked up in a bank account that you don't have the password to. You probably forgot, since you never wrote it down because you're a lazy piece of shit.
What's funny, though (and this is another thing I want to get into) is the fact that I find a lot of people like me on the left wing side of things. And it makes sense, too: they're lazy, so they are unable to garner satisfying amounts of currency, which easily drives them into supporting wealth redistribution, since, from their perspective, the game is rigged and they can't win. What I'd like to point out to these people is the fact that the more there is government regulation, the more the government taxes, the more "projects" the government has that are inteded to help out these "lazy and poor people", the harder it actually gets to satisfyingly "downshift".
I'll explain why.
The more the government interferes with the market, the less jobs there will be available. And the less jobs available, the more power the big companies have over the work force, since the work force has few, sometimes no, alternative opportunities available. You either play by the rules of the big players, or you don't play at all.
The more the government taxes, the less power you have over your wealth, the less able you are to save, invest, try to earn a passive income.. In Finland, where I live, we use a progressive tax system. In short, it means that the more money you make, the more taxes you pay. I work in sales, and basically live off of the commision that I make from the succesful sales I have. Let's say a normal month's worth of work makes me around 2,500€ which is around $2800. If I work extremely hard, I can earn and extra 1,000€, buffing my pay to 3,500€, or $3,900.
By making 2,500€, I get somewhere around 2,000€ after tax deductions and other mandatory pays. So, that's a net worth of about 2,000€ that I have in my disposal of the full 2,500€ that I made.
Okay, so let's say I want to buy something nice, I want to be able to shop around some more. I have a sales job, which pays me by commission, so great! Let's say, and this is a real life example I'm using here, from a few years ago, I work extremely hard and make an extra 1,000€. Now my pay for the month is a gross value of 3,500€. I can control my own pay, which worker wouldn't love that? Except it's not that simple. You see, by working longer hours and doing more work in general, I'm also going to be paying more taxes, like I said, My tax% goes way up by working more, which results in me getting a net worth of 2,500€. So, from the added value of 1,000€, I actually 500€ - which actually might be closer to 400€, if I'm being honest.
Why bring this up?
I bring this up because economic freedom is often considered to be something that involves the rich, something that enables the rich to buy two golden helicopters a month, instead of two, because now they are paying less taxes. It's not brought up often enough that economic freedom actually empowers the regular folk.
When the government taxes you, it taxes away your power to make decisions regarding your own life. In the example I gave, no matter how hard I work at my job, my actual purchasing power, per month, stays almost the same. Sure, I do make more money if I work harder, I do get more money out of it. But what needs to be understood is the fact that I work a thousand bucks worth more, and the extra money I make is probably even less than that. So, I am not getting the full value out of it.
This, at least in my case, has lead to burnouts now and again, since the amount of work I put and the amount of rewards I gwt out of it are not in balance. I work with a lot of salespeople, and I've noticed that a lot of the high earning people are extremely frustrated about their lives and stressed out. And I blame taxes for this. If no matter how hard you work, you only merely survive the month, it can make us depressed and feeling powerless.
To tie this post to what I was originally writing about, I'd like to see people who able to relate to being lazy - we can call it procrastination, but let's face it: we're lazy motherfuckers - start to see how the government and socialism in general are making it worse, taking away their power and ability to earn and save currency the way they choose. Like I said earlier, a lot of people who have not accomplished much are very supportive of the idea of socialism and the concept of a government giving them handouts, and a lot of the libertarian and anarchist literacy is just overly philosophical mumbo jumbo that offers value to us already "into" the ideology of liberty, but offers extremely little to those just looking to pay the bills this month.
What I always say to a person making little money per month, and therefore supporting the concept of a welfare state, is that what could possibly empower you more than being able to keep a larger % of your earnings every month.