You dont have to Spend Money to Make Money
Now, similarly, another negative theory stands squarely in the path of advancement, and says: You have to spend money to make money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Again, let’s explore this argument and test its content for truth. You have to spend to make money. It, too, seems obvious. It has been repeated often. A deeper analysis is needed to discover the problem. This argument is meant to roughly resemble the truth. Ongoing businesses use up or expend resources. Certainly, even in its most rudimentary form, defining money as labor, this is true. For businesses to survive and expand, they need to use up or expend resources. Most fundamentally, they consume time.
In fact, the greatest expense in increasing your personal power is opportunity loss. Since you can’t work on everything, you must choose what you will work on, and consequently, what you will not. Many people are too busy making money to get rich. Whatever your course, you will “spend” your precious time. By spending time on anything, you forego other opportunities on which you could spend time. This is called “opportunity loss.” So it’s important to carefully choose what you spend time on.
Despite the ring of truth, part of this argument’s venom lies in the false justification of expending resources. It is too easy to be deluded into spending money (or time, meaning labor) on unnecessary frills, poorly conceived efforts, false starts, or other bad ideas, justifying the expenditure by saying, “you have to spend money to make money.” Spending, in and of itself, cannot lead to wealth.
The “One Wrong Idea” in this theory still waits to be uncovered. Returning to the same scenario of the rich king and the poor people in our isolated kingdom for illustration will help. To recap, the idea that the people have to spend money before they can make money is patently unsound. The people have no money. Therefore they cannot spend money they don’t have. Yet we have determined that they are the most likely to make money in that scenario. It was pointed out, however, that they do have something more basic in value than money itself, that being labor. In essence, it is true that they need to “spend” their labor to earn money. This is extremely rational thinking. However, this still does not justify the damage embedded deep in the argument.
The problem lies in the command nature of the theory, and a common error of logic. You HAVE TO spend … to make … The intended equivalence of the two words “spend” and “make” in the command implies they are synonymous. Consequently, spending money and making money have become horribly intertwined and confused in the common vernacular. Hence, you see TV commercials that suggest “investing” in a new automobile, clothes, or even something as temporal as a meal. These are not investments, but consumptions. Spending does not automatically create wealth. Similarly, the word “save” has been abused in the same manner. You hear commercials suggesting “saving” money by buying some product. Buying is not saving.
