About time and money

Based on a series of posts about time and money ( one , two , three ).
After reading them all diagonally, I was very surprised not to see a single reference to the author of the famous “Time is money”, Benjamin Franklin.
And yet, the original quotation undoubtedly deserves attention no less than the texts published in Habré.
Here she is:

Remember that time is money; he who could earn ten shillings a day and still walks or idler at home for half a day, must - if he spends just six pence on himself - take into account not only this expense, but assume that he has spent or, rather, threw away Five more shillings.

Remember that credit is money. The one who leaves me some money for some time, after I had to return it to him, gives me interest or as much as I can help out with their help during this time. And this can be a significant amount if a person has a good and extensive loan and if he skillfully uses it.

Remember that money is by its nature fruitful and able to generate new money. Money can give birth to money, their offspring can generate more, and so on. The five shillings put into circulation give six, and if the latter are put into circulation again, there will be seven shillings three pence, and so on, until a hundred pounds come out. The more money you have, the more they generate in circulation, so that profits grow faster and faster. He who kills a pregnant pig destroys all its offspring to its thousandth member. The one who torments one coin at five shillings kills everything. what it could produce: whole columns of pounds .
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Be careful not to consider as your property everything that you have and live according to it. In this self-deception, many people have a loan. To avoid this, keep an accurate account of your expenses and income. If you give yourself the trouble to pay attention to all the little things, then it will have the following good result: you will establish how insignificant costs grow into huge sums, and find out what could be saved in the past and what can be saved in the future.

For 6 pounds of annual interest you can get 100 pounds for use, if only you are known as an intelligent and honest person. Whoever is wasting 4 pence per day, he is spending 6 pounds a year fruitlessly, and this is a payment for the right to use 100 pounds. Anyone who spends a portion of his time at a cost of 4 pence - even if it will be just a few minutes - loses the total amount of days the opportunity to use 100 pounds during the year.

Whoever wastes the time worth 5 shillings fruitlessly loses 5 shillings and could just as well throw them into the sea. The one who lost 5 shillings lost not only this amount, but also all the profit that could be gained if you invested this money in the business — that by the time the young man was old, it could have turned into a significant amount .

It is this phrase and it is this text that Max Weber presents in his book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” as a symbol of the spirit of capitalism . It is in these words that the driving force that turned the Middle Ages into a New Time is enclosed, it was they who ultimately created the industrial and post-industrial world in which we live.

Weber connects the emergence of such beliefs with the spread of Protestantism in Europe: Protestantism (especially Calvinism) proclaims the person to be nothing but God's instrument, and success in business is evidence of one’s own chosenness. Hence the logical necessity and the need to work tirelessly .

True, over time, religious motivation has weakened considerably, and in the 21st century, other mechanisms are already working, pushing for tireless work (see consumerism). The problem is that for the stability of the capitalist structure it is necessary for the Franklin principles to be accepted by the majority of the population. There is a famous economic paradox (I don’t remember who the author is), something like this: let a worker work 10 hours a day and collect 5 buckets of apples, getting 200 rubles for each; if you increase his payment to 250 rubles, then, instead of picking up even more apples, he will collect less: 4 buckets a day, get the same thousand, but for 8 hours of work, and spend free time with his family and relax ; I mean, raising wages in conditions of non-Franklin motivation is meaningless, and indeed many market mechanisms do not work.

Therefore, my dear friends, decide for yourself how you prefer - to believe in free competition, the market and the associated liberal values ​​and take every minute spent in idleness, a loss - or assume that money is not the main motivator and appreciate your little comforts and comfort is above them, thereby rejecting the basic principles of building a Western society and not resenting that everything is not like that of people.