There is one and only one true global currency. Any local currency is based on it and it is the foundation for every econony on Earth, from trading beads and pookah shells all the way up to the US Dollar and the Euro. You've heard about this international currency before; I'm sure of it. But now I'm here to tell you that it's going to be our new currency for the global economy from this day forward. It's called (drum roll, please) Give-A-Shit.

You've heard it referred to over and over. "I don't Give-A-Shit." "I'm all out of Give-A-Shit" "If they don't Give-A-Shit then why should I?" "I enjoy my job because I Give-A-Shit and my employer Gives-A-Shit about me." Do any of those statements sound familliar?

Stop and give it a think; you'll see that this is true. When you buy a cheap plastic thing at Wal-Mart, how much Give-A-Shit was put into it? Not very much. That's why a week later you've either broken it, returned it, thrown it away (please recycle) or you're sorry you bought it. When you buy something you're going to use often and you really need it to work reliably day after day, you're willing to spend a little more. Your computer, for example... if it's fast, reliable, never crashes, has plenty of memory, processing power and disk space, it's obvious that the maker of that computer put a lot of Give-A-Shit into it. You paid for that high level of Give-A-Shit, and yet you're glad you did because you have a good computer.

If you didn't spend very much and wanted a cheap computer to get you by (rather, you don't Give-A-Shit) then you ended up with a computer with less Give-A-Shit in it. This could be because it was originally made with very little Give-A-Shit or else it's an old, used computer you got from someone; it used to have plenty of Give-A-Shit in it but now it's worn and out of date and doesn't have much Give-A-Shit left for you to use.

Either way, a simple purchase is a great way to illustrate the economic equation: You traded a quantity of your Give-A-Shit for money by working, then you traded a quantity your money for Give-A-Shit in the form of a computer. The amount of money you paid should be in balance with the amount of Give-A-Shit your computer has.

Now let's back up to see where your money came from. You probably have a job, yeah? You wake up every day with just so much Give-A-Shit available to you. If you wake up feeling really sick or have a splitting headache, you have almost no Give-A-Shit so you call in sick. Maybe your job has already used up most of your Give-A-Shit and you don't have any left, so you call in sick and watch TV all day. But on a good day you're up and at 'em and ready to go. You drink some coffee, which makes you feel like you have even more Give-A-Shit to put into your daily tasks. You pack up your Give-A-Shit and head off to your place of business.

You and your employer (even if you're self-employed) have a contract whether it's written or unwritten. You will exchange your intangible, yet very real Give-A-Shit for the physical paper and coin of your local currency. Now, let's look at a few example scenarios to see how your day might go:

You take the bus to your burger palace and begin flipping burgers for the lunch rush. Your employer has offered to purchase $6 worth of Give-A-Shit from you each hour. That's NOT very much Give-A-Shit, is it? So, how much Give-A-Shit do you put into your work? Not very much. If you sneeze on the burgers, get a hair on one of them, drop one on the floor, who gives a shit? Not you. The manager who's watching you cares, though. Because he or she is being paid three times as much as you are. Not only has the burger palace chosen to purchase $18 worth of Give-A-Shit from that manager but also, that manager realizes what a sweet deal he or she has; they don't really have to work that hard, they don't flip the burgers themselves, and they get weekends off. It's worthy of putting in a bit of Give-A-Shit to do a good job. It's entirely possible that you're flipping burgers because you don't have much Give-A-Shit. Maybe you're channeling too much Give-A-Shit into other activities and don't have very much Give-A-Shit left for your job. Either way, you'll be flipping burgers until your available Give-A-Shit increases.

Maybe you HAVE plenty of Give-A-Shit but your employer is only interested in trading the minimal amount of Give-A-Shit for a minimal amount of pay. It's completely fair that you only give them as much Give-A-Shit as they have chosen to buy. This leaves you with a nice reserve of Give-A-Shit to use elsewhere: writing a book, playing in a band, making art, going to school or whacking off. How you spend your Give-A-Shit is up to you. There's always the possibility that you're already giving ALL your Give-A-Shit to flipping burgers and that's the only job you can find. That's perfectly fine too and you deserve as much respect as anyone else. At least you're working.

There are mainly two ways this could chage. Either you use your untapped Give-A-Shit to become manager of the Burger Palace or you flip burgers for 60 years and retire. That can happen. I once knew a guy who'd been delivering pizza for 30 years, but I can't remember his name just now. The other option is to gather up your Give-A-Shit and take it elsewhere. Find another occupation where your Give-A-Shit is appreciated more. Find a way to HAVE more Give-A-Shit like getting an education or developing a skill. The amount of Give-A-Shit we have each day is highly variable. Find ways to increase it.

In scenario two, you're a famous and higly skilled artist or craftsman. You might pour your mighty cache of Give-A-Shit into making an object that will be highly desireable to others. It could be a piece of art, a high-end luxury car, a custom built computer, or a replacement leg for an amputee. It doesn't matter what the object is, what matters is that after you spend hour upon hour working on it, (your blood, sweat and tears; so to speak) what you have there in your finished product is an extremely high concentration of Give-A-Shit. People are amazed at how much Give-A-Shit is in it. People who have enough money and have a need or desire for your high quality doodad are quite willing and happy to buy it from you for cash. That is to say, they are willing to exchange your Give-A-Shit for money - and lots of it.

The third example shows how things should go in a perfect world. You apply for a job with a well-run company. Your interview goes well and you're given an entry-level position for around $9 an hour. At first, you're happy and you put a lot of Give-A-Shit into your work. There are now three options. 1: You feel that you're giving more than you're getting and you cut back on your Give-A-Shit and only give as much Give-A-Shit as your employer is buying. 2: You get bored with your job, you're tired of it, and you start giving a lot LESS Give-A-Shit than the company is buying from you (this will usually end up getting you fired or promoted to management). 3: Your company recognizes that you have a lot of untapped Give-A-Shit and they wish to purchase more Give-A-Shit from you in the form of a raise.

Our final example is a medical student. He put years of hard work and study into becoming a doctor. His brain now contains a lot of Give-A-Shit. This Give-A-Shit was borrowed from the economy in the form of student loans, tuition payments, and textbooks. He graduates and becomes a resident at a hospital where even more hard work and experience further increase his Give-A-Shit. He's not paid very much, but his hard work is still converted into Give-A-Shit, which is stored as knowledge and experience. Eventually he becomes a highly skilled physician. People's lives are at stake every minute of every day. It's imperative that he gives a shit about his job. That's when his earning power kicks in and the stored potential of Give-A-Shit is converted into money. Dr. Give-A-Shit has a lot of Give-A-Shit which his patients are willing to buy in the form of quality care.

We all convert our daily alotment of Give-A-Shit into our work, and that work is converted into money, which we then spend on things that we give a shit about. Those things enrich our lives and the nice things, the good books, the healthy food all feed back into us, increasing our own personal Give-A-Shit, which we put back into our chosen professions. It operates on the same principles as an ecosystem. Keep the Give-A-Shit moving and life goes smoothly.

Sometimes the system breaks down when there are gross inequities in the Give-A-Shit for cash conversion process. An example would be... oh, let me think about recent economic developments... You're a CEO of a big, big company with publicly traded stocks. In your own little building you're in CHARGE. You're God with a Napoleon complex. You have a board of directors to play golf with and all you have to do is make a few decisions now and then. You only come into the office twice a week. One of the decisions you make is how much to pay yourself. Wouldn't it be nice if our friend at the burger palace got to decide how much to pay himself? You're lucky to have that kind of power over your own income. How does Five Million a Year sound? Right, I thought you'd like that. Well, since you're in charge, why not make it Six. Yeah, now you're the Six Million Dollar Man. Get 'em tiger.

What happens next? Your company is exchanging SIX MILLION DOLLARS for your annual supply of Give-A-Shit. You're giving back about $10,000 a year in Give-A-Shit (based on the actual value of your job performance). You're doing a shitty job. You're only there to keep your golf buddies rich and to make sure that the people at the bottom of your company (the ones actually making your products) get paid as little as possible. This is good for your company because it can afford to pay your outrageous salary and what doesn't go into your pocket will make your stock prices go up. You'll get more money from your investors so next year you can get more poorly paid workers to make more poorly made products and maybe you can give yourself a raise. Nice.

But what's happening downstairs?? You have workers making plastic things. You're choosing to purchase $8 worth of Give-A-Shit from each of your workers every hour but you're demanding that they make 100 plastic things every hour in order to keep their jobs. You have plastic things with 8¢ worth of Give-A-Shit in them that you're going to sell to Wal-Mart for $8 each. That's a pretty high mark-up and you're relying on stupid people to buy them. If everyone started to recognize how much Give-A-Shit is actually in these things, your sales would plummet.

After a few years of this, your company is in debt, people have stopped buying your junk and your stock prices have fallen dramatically. This is happening to a lot of other companies too so the whole stock market crashes. Everyone is in trouble. You're going to lose your $6 Million Dollar job. Your workers are going to lose their $8 jobs. People (who work for other companies that are in trouble) no longer have money to spend on your plastic things so your sales drop even lower.

Congress has been collecting Give-A-Shit from everyone in the country all year in the form of taxes and to save everyone from massive unemployment, they give your company bail-out money so your workers can keep their jobs. You use that money to give yourself a raise and you find workers in China who will make your plastic things for $3 instead of $8.

This can't go on forever. Eventually all the Give-A-Shit will be in China and there won't be any left in America.

You're looking at the WSJ and you're reading an article about a company that seems to be immune to the crisis. They're paying their workers $15-25 an hour to make good quality products here at home and there are plenty of people who wish to buy them. You have one of their products yourself, which cost you a lot but it was worth every penny because you're happy with it. They're having record sales and they give all their workers a percentage of the profits as a year-end bonus for a job well done. Their workers are very happy and they are all eager to use their Give-A-Shit to make even more well made products next year in anticipation of even more sales and a better bonus. All the workers you laid off when you sent your manufacturing to China are now working for this other company. They're earning $15-25 to make high quality items. Damn, if only you'd known your workers were capable of this kind of Give-A-Shit, you might have started making high quality products yourself!

The CEO of that company comes to work every day, knows each of her workers by name, contributes company profits to their health plan and retirement funds, and she does all this for a paltry $2 Million a year. She doesn't play golf because it's boring and she's way too busy running her company.

You've been making $6 Million a year but now your company is bankrupt and has gone out of business. Which CEO comes out on top? She does, because she gives a shit and her company grows and stays in business. She retires rich at the age of 50 and spends her golden years traveling Europe.

Now that you have a clear understanding of Give-A-Shit principles we can apply those principles to taxes. Just like a computer, a house or a car; the quality of your purchase can be quantified as the amount of Give-A-Shit in it, which should balance pretty closely what you paid for it. People who want a really nice house don't squawk about paying for it because it was their own choice, right? Yet we want to live in a really nice country where everything is safe, secure, the roads are smooth, the water is clean and the fruit is ripe on the trees that flank every street... then we bitch and moan about having to PAY for such a Utopia. What the hell? Look, all of us Americans are roommates in a very big apartment. We can do our own thing a lot of the time but there are SOME things we have to do together. When the electric bill comes we have to pay our share of it. If you want to live here you're expected to kick in your share of the bills. That's what taxes are. You're paying bills to live in a nice place, that's all.

The way that taxes are different is this: there's always that one roommate who takes the money, pays the bills and tells all the other roommates how much their share is going to be this month. It requires some trust and responsibility and all the other roommates usually vote on who it's going to be. It can't be the stoner who will lose it playing poker. It has to be the one who will pay the bills with it. In November we're going to elect a new bill-paying roommate. George had his turn but we're renewing our lease this year and he's moving out. He didn't do a very good job anyway; he spent our money on stupid crap that we didn't need AND he was charging us more so he and his buddies would have to pay less themselves. When George is gone we'll pick someone else to handle the bills for a while. It has to be someone who understands Give-A-Shit. It has to be someone we can trust to divide the bills more fairly and handle the money more carefully or else our lights will be disconnected.

What goes around comes around. When Give-A-Shit is exchanged fairly everyone benefits. When its not, everyone suffers.

Do you Give-A-Shit?

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