What's Money For?
I'm a terrible hoarder of money. For some reason, I have such an insecurity about not having enough of it to last me to the bitter end of my miserly life, that, no matter how little I make, I manage to sock away some of it to add to the little pile I've always had on hand.
Not that I would ever in a million years dip into it - but it's on hand. And if I'm ever living in a cardboard box in the middle of the road, it'll still be on hand.
So, I would not be someone you'd want in charge of the Treasury because, well, I'd just keep piling your taxed dollars onto the existing mountain of money and telling you to get out there and earn more money so we can keep that treasured Treasury treasuring.
You never know what's waiting around the corner - but the roads could get pretty crowded with cardboard boxes before it hits us.
Luckily (for me and Scrooge and Simon Legree) most people have a more "money's for the living" attitude towards spending it and since I'm a firm believer in a certain amount of everybody's income going into a big pot in order that we all do what we can to keep the country running in the manner to which we've all become accustomed - I have no problem at all parting with my share for that very purpose.
I also figure it gives me a say equal to the guy who makes a lot more money than I do simply by virtue of his birth. Because at the same time that we're a country where anybody can make it, we're also a country where, well, it's pretty hard NOT to make it if you're born into a certain class.
It's something I've always been very aware of, having gone to working class schools with kids from families where the same opportunities available to me were not available to them, if only because it was always expected of me and my brother and sisters that we would go to university - regardless of any economic obstacles that may arise - because my father had gone to university and then law school after he returned home from WWII.
That he died a decade or so after he started practicing, may have changed the actual economics of my family's situation, but it didn't change where we saw ourselves in the class pecking order. Having been born into a family where the breadearner was a lawyer made all the difference in our lives. I might even argue that we saw ourselves as a family as that much better than the families with actual living breathing lawyer breadearners, because, in spite of having had a great big economic setback - we all managed to get through university just the same.
But I won't argue that because it would reveal what an egregious snob I truly am. Yeah. Sure. The rich are different than the rest of us - they've got money - they don't need brains.
So imagine my surprise when I was actually at university to feel firsthand the sting of the very real class divide as seen by those whose fathers were living breathing lawyers who were themselves descended from... (and so on and so forth and more of the same...) back to whoever made the money that defined those kids down to this day as "rich".
Because it's real, that class divide, and you need only read the engagement pages of the Globe & Mail to know it's real. Rich kids, even today, do not date/marry outside their class. I was there to discover it for myself at university. Not intentionally, of course. It just happened. I came, I saw, I could have conquered but for the fact that I was a middle class girl from Sault Ste. Marie. And in spite of being friends with a couple of rich party girls who, for a while, took me everywhere with them, I never once got beyond, "Hey", with the boys - or any of the other girls for that matter.
They could sniff out the class divide, even if I couldn't. (Although, to be honest, I could, too, and in a way that is not at all flattering to their class. Stupid, shallow, with copious appetites for drugs - but not women - would best describe how they came across to me back then.)
Anyway, my point is that, in my experience, education goes a long way in closing a class divide because, while you may not ever be considered "one of them" (and to be "one of them" you've got to be born into the money) - you can be in the same professions as them - no matter where you started out in life - IF you can afford to get the education that'll put you there.
So... long post ended, I think I'd make my priority in spending the Treasury the freeing of education right on up the chain. No matter where you come from, if you can get the marks (and I'd give kids lots of tries - some people take longer than others to get the knack of academia) you can go to law school. I'd free up trade schools, too. You name it - you want to do it for a living? - here you go, get trained on the Treasury's dime and then go out there and start earning money to help top off the Treasury for the next generation.
The class system may or may not always be with us in one way or another, but having educational and training opportunities available to everybody, no matter whether or not they can afford it, would make us all the better for the Treasury money spent, I think.
