Public education is failing. People are struggling to find jobs even when there are plenty available. Even some with notable academic achievements are finding themselves unfulfilled, underpaid, and unsuccessful at their jobs. So many people in this country are financially hopeless without the help of government intervention.

Finance is the single most important discipline to understand in the modern world. Being literate is great, but being financially literate means you can be independently successful. No one in America in 2021 is going to pay someone to read something for them. Learning to read was a valuable skill when it was rare. Now it is more or less ubiquitous. Which is why no one will pay you to read to them. In order to make competitive incomes you have to do something that you can do for cheaper than others, do a better job at it, and be able to make people aware of what you have to offer. In order to achieve competitive levels of wealth, which is the true seed of freedom in this country, you have to understand finance. The art of ownership is the key to the golden gates of the American dream.

Finance circulates wealth (ownership) throughout the economy, spreading it to more people by forcing the use of the dollar in transactions and continuously devaluing the currency so that people will need to spend it rapidly or risk losing some of their wealth. In order to save their wealth they have to spend those dollars on something in the economy that will be worth more dollars in the future than it is worth right now. Even high incomes can be easily spent into dust and leave a high income person living as if they were poor. In other words they consume everything they spend their incomes on so their wealth stays exactly the same. They don’t have any ownership that they could liquidate into incomes (dollars) because everything they buy diminishes in value or is consumed and exposed of rapidly after it is purchased. The point is, people need to learn finance so they can understand ownership and stop just relying on incomes when they are clearly not the primary path to American prosperity in the modern era.

There needs to be a new public education mandate which requires high school students to take at least one year of monetary economics, one year of international economics and trade policy, and one year of introduction to open economy macroeconomics. If new adults can understand monetary economics they understand the psychology and social science aspects of the power of finance. If new adults can understand international economics and trade policy they can understand the real measurable effects of government intervention in modern economic affairs. If new adults understand open economy macroeconomics they can understand the mathematical and statistical significance of economic data patterns. All of these things would help our people make better financial decisions and contribute to an unprecedented growth in individual prosperity and systemic representation. Money is power and if you don’t have money you can not effectively represent yourself within a system that runs on money.

It is necessary to understand open economy macroeconomics because it is actually related to your rights as a citizen of the united states in terms of the ways labor laws and increased free trade between nations benefit and harm labor in the modern world. It is truly trickle down economics. Despite most economists laughing off the idea of trickle down economics it is essentially the system we have today. If you allow the rich to continue playing in the game and getting as wealthy as they want without limit then they will be so productive in the economy that others will see the price of goods and services reduced at the bottom levels of the economy thus increasing their overall standard of living. That is essentially the theory and that is essentially how our current economic system works.

The rich get richer but things stay cheap. This is largely to do with the effects of international free markets which subvert domestic labor laws. A lot of foreign laborers have few rights so they are cheap to hire making investment in these areas highly enticing. It helps developing countries grow their economies and take care of their people but it also allows for labor laws to go unenforced. You can’t legally pay joe next door lower than minimum wage and cut me out of my job at home for instance. Its illegal. But you can pay lower than minimum wage to people overseas and there is nothing illegal about it. It has its pros and cons so don’t jump on the hate train just yet. Remember that a lot of these countries don’t even have large enough food production capabilities to feed large portions of their population. If they can offer a good or service of some other kind and be able to competitively sell it to us they can increase imports of food and keep their citizens from dying of famine and malnourishment. This is why even though Americans do feel rightly ripped off by the offshoring of many American companies, there is a moral argument to be made in favor of it as well.

If you are worried about getting ripped off the best way to not get ripped off is to understand how you are getting ripped off. If kids entered adulthood with some awareness of the world of finance, they would be able to better represent themselves in the fight for a slice of this world’s economic pie.