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WE BUY NOTHING BUT LABOR

Consider an automobile, for example. You may think of the metal, rubber, cloth and glass which enters into its manufacture: you reason that all of these cost money. The fact is, however, that all of the raw materials contained in an automobile were given without cost by nature. The metal used to make the body, the motor, and many other parts were first embedded in Mother Earth. Nature did not put a price on the metal-bearing ore. A cost came into the picture to compensate the miners who ex­tracted the ore, and to provide a profit for the mining company. This same condition holds true with all of the other elements entering into the manufacture of a car: the glass, upholstery materials, rubber, etc.

In thinking of the food we buy, we can agree that what we pay for corn and potatoes, etc., is not paid for the products them­selves, but for the labor involved in growing and cultivating the foodstuffs.

The price you paid for the house in which you live covered nothing but labor: labor for felling trees and reducing them to lumber; labor for making concrete from materials removed from the earth; labor for building the house.

We now reach the conclusion that the only thing we can buy with money is labor and that the value of labor is not stable. When I was a child a laboring man was paid as little as $1 per day. Now, the average rate of pay is $2.80 per hour. Fifty years ago, if you had $1,000 saved up, you could make the down payment on a substantial home and have money enough left with which to make an initial payment on the furnishings. To­day, it is risky to attempt to buy a home unless you have at least $5,000 on hand, and even with this amount you would have to be exceedingly careful in the way you handled it.

Do not become discouraged with the facts I am now giving you, which appear to be devaluating the dollar. This information is being given for a purpose as you will understand when you read further. In fact, what you are now learning will help to make it much easier for you to gain what you want in life.

In the United States, money consists of silver coins, nickel and copper coins of small denominations, and notes secured under legal provisions. The need of a medium of exchange was felt by the earliest peoples and money took many and curious forms. In ancient Syracuse and Britain, tin was the first money. Sparta used iron. Rome and Germany made cattle their media in trade. Carthage used leather prepared in a certain way. Russia used platinum. Nails were currency in Scotland. Colonial Virginia used tobacco and Massachusetts, bullets and wampum. Soap passed in ancient Mexico and shells on the coast of Africa.

As civilization advanced in all countries gold and silver coins and paper money based upon them became the media current in domestic and foreign trade transactions. Metallic bases for money have been in some degree abandoned since the world business crisis of 1929, in favor of managed currency.

Related terms include typist and money making jobs.