It is very possible in the United States to have an extremely high income and be essentially bankrupt or at best, insolvent.
This is easily achieved in two ways. First, if you hold zero land, labor, or capital while continuing to consume disproportionate to your own utility. Second, if you hold huge liabilities in excess to your assets (collateralized debt). Few people navigating their way through the Great Economic Experiment realize that income does not necessarily equal wealth, but what you do with your income is the sticky part of wealth.
The good news is that you do not need to earn a large income to control the larger portion of your most precious resource — time. The bad news is that just because you’re earning $175K per year, that does not mean you are wealthy or will ever be wealthy.
Wealthy people do not buy things that have no purpose and do not waste their time (well, those that want to remain wealthy or are the creators of wealth). Money is not evil, however wholesale wastage of resources to self serve definitely is. The two are not directly linked until a human brain links them through action.
This does not have to happen.
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I think it’s important to define the types of money and value. Money can be an exchange tool for real goods locally (local currency) or long-distance (centralized or national currency). Value can be monetary (price based on supply/demand/brainwashing) or based on implied future usefulness (I trade some cow manure to a hardware store for a new pitchfork and we both get something we find useful in the future.)
“Love of Money” is evil because it results in detaching utilitarian money from the lives of people that are perceiving some future usefulness. Instead of thinking about the future usefulness of the pitchfork, I might be thinking about the future use of the money, without regard to the resources or people who might be able to make the pitchfork in the future. If no pitchforks are available because of a war, then the money is rendered useless (unless I choose to buy a gun and fight in the war on the perception of the world being more useful in the future). The war issue really escalates when the decision to go to war is made by people according to how much money they can accumulate by selling weapons or stealing oil, regardless of whether there will be a world left to spend it in or that the stolen oil gets burned up fighting the war.
Summary? Money is a useful tool. Value is usefulness itself. Money is only useful as long as it is moving. Accumulation of money is the act of keeping usefulness to one’s self. Living things are actively useful to their future. Debt is the promise to accumulate money for someone else (with interest), under the guise of making money move.
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