Free Money: Changing the World for Better or Worse by Noah

Free Money: Changing the World for Better or Worse by Noah - April 2023 Scholarship Essay

Everybody has at one point thought of how they could make a positive impact on those around them. While in hiding, Anne Frank wrote "how wonderful is it that no one has to wait but we can start right now to gradually change the world." Many, however, feel limited by their resources in their quest to change the world. For the hypothetical of how one would change the world in a positive way, I believe that it is crucial to draw upon one resource that is thankfully quite abundant in developed nations: education. Without education, one is ignorant to the issues facing the world, let alone possible solutions. In institutions of learning, I have been taught about the horrid living conditions in underdeveloped countries. Children there are often uncertain when or if their next meal will come, and health care is practically nonexistent. In this world of limited resources, issues like world hunger, war, and poverty will be perennial issues plaguing humanity for the foreseeable future. Complete egalitarianism will never be achieved as long as the skills that one adds to society are viewed as unequally valued. In a world with unlimited wealth, however, a decent standard of living could be assured. The reason that this could never happen is not because of a lack of resources per se, but that our society relies on some form of scarcity to function. Man must always yearn for and want more than he has so that he will continue to work and contribute to society. If everybody were able to afford every desire without labor, nobody would labor. Nothing would ever be produced to be consumed in the first place. While automation could do some of the work, humanity has yet to invent itself out of manual labor and likely never will.

It is for this reason that whoever is bestowed the endless monetary supply described in the prompt faces not an amazing opportunity to benefit the world but an unconscionable dilemma: either give resources to every single person in the world that needs it, thus collapsing the value of that money and society as we know it, or knowingly withhold the money from some, prolonging their suffering to continue the scarcity of goods and the need for labor. This does not even address the individual decisions on who to give the money to and what circumstances are to be regarded as graver than others. When everyone gets a free lunch, often no lunch is made at all.