Money and choice

When you don't have the money for either, there's no question of whether the cooking knife or the axe should be replaced first. I'm not thinking of the feckless poor here, but those who have so little that they can't make choices about what to do. Their only choices are how they choose to think about necessity.

If you do have the money for painting the house, you can choose whether you want to spend the next couple of decades looking at green or blue. Choices are possible, and they shape your life because you can't undo them easily. You've saved up, and finally this year you can take a big family vacation. Just the one, though. Do you want the kids to have memories of the West, or of the East, or maybe New Orleans?

If you're rich, the only choices you have to make have to do with your time. You can have somebody repaint, have one of every kind of kitchen knife just in case, visit a dozen countries in a whirlwind tour. It almost doesn't matter what choices you make, because you have the resources to undo it and make others.

Except, of course, that your time is a finite resource. Turns out money doesn't buy more time.
But it buys a lot of "looking the other way" about any vices you may indulge in.(*) "The rich man's wealth is his fortress, The ruin of the poor is their poverty."

Perhaps that's part of why Jesus wanted the rich young ruler to divest himself of his fortune. It can shield you from a lot of consequences. "The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes." The disaster comes when you believe that sort of thing yourself.

We all have to decide about time, and about our attitudes. But I suspect we are able to make a clearer choices about the rest of our life from the middle ground--not so poor as to have no choice and not so rich that choices don't matter.

"Give me neither poverty nor riches"

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(*) The rich can afford their vices, for a time anyway; the poor have no such margin for comfort. They are, in fact, endangered by the vices of the rich. I don’t simply mean that the rich man can extort his will from the poor, or wield the law as a club to keep the poor man in his place. He can do worse: He can infect the poor man with his vice, and that may be the quicker way to destroy him."