I meet with a group of men at the IHOP here in Newhall, at least I think it is Newhall, every Thursday morning during the winter. We used to read My Utmost For His Highest which is a collection of daily devotionals written by Oswald Chambers. Jim is our reader but we all have books to follow along.
Today, we changed to reading a collection of John Wesley’s writings, also broken up into daily devotional format. Somehow, this morning, we got onto the topic of folding a dollar bill so that you could see the twin trade towers burning and Greg, the pastor, did the folding to show us all. Then of course the jokes started to flow but we got to talking about the first use of the American dollar. I volunteered to look it up and found, as we had guessed, that it was indeed in use before the declaration of independence. In fact, if you follow this link

Eaxmple Of The First American Dollar
you can read a bit more about the early minting.
Well, this kind of thing always starts my brain off on a tangent so I thought I would ask the men what value the dollar really represented to them. After a few complaints about it being too early in the morning for such a deep discussion I just told them what it means to me.
To me, for the dollar to have an underlying value of any kind, it must be based on something. To me, it isn’t good enough to say “well, it’s based on the gold standard”, or at least it was, because the question then just becomes, on what is the value of gold predicated ?
In the end, the only thing that has an unchanging, meaningful value to us humans is time. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts the only real thing we have to ’spend’ is the time we are alive. So, naturally, the dollar’s ultimate value to me rests on how I value my time.
So where am I going with this ? Well, the value of my time never really changes. I can only spend it once and it is the ultimate arbiter against which I value everything else. The value of a TV set, or watching a program on said TV, is how many of my days on earth ? A car, a holiday, the time spent climbing to the top of a mountain to seek out a view, or the value of a conversation on a Thursday morning at IHOP. They all have a time cost.
I’ve considered this issue before, but what makes me think about it more these days is the economy. I’ve heard accountants and economists talk about the current economy and recommend borrowing as much one possibly can because, in some twisted fashion, the money one borrows today is going to be cheaper to repay in the future due to something called inflation and devaluation. I don’t think that is really true. Ultimately, I’m not borrowing dollars today, I’m borrowing against my tomorrow time. As I’ve said, in my view, the value of that time doesn’t change. We can have philosophical arguments about how, as you get older, your time becomes more valuable because there is less of it left to spend, but I think that’s a matter of changing priorities, not a measure of the changing value of time.
So, where does that leave me, if not you ? It leaves me with the thought that borrowing money is probably the worst thing I can do, ever. While it may give me $500 to spend today, it actually discounts my time tomorrow by the accumulated interest and I can tell you, I have no desire whatsoever in paying my time against an interest rate. None. I just don’t believe that can ever be a good expenditure and makes me a terrible steward of my days.
It also leaves me with a great deal of concern about the amount of money the U.S. treasury is about to print. Not just the U.S. treasury, but many nations. What the governments are proposing to do is apply a levy against the time you have available to you tomorrow. Not just you, your children too. It is my opinion, as tough as it may make it for some people today, perhaps even me, none of us has the right to encumber our children’s future to support our unsustainable lifestyles today. It is one thing to encumber your own time, it is unconscionable to encumber that of our children and grandchildren. Now that’s just plain selfish and down right immoral.