Hooraay! Competitions. Winning is so much fun. I won second place in a baby competition. All thanks to my adorable ignorance. See Brian if I gave those judges the sceptical look I give everyone with a clipboard nowadays we would have not even seen a podium position.
Alas not all competitions are as innocent and jolly and deciding which mini person has the cuter set of dimples. The competitive landscape of global economics is a good example. A little girl gleefully said to her daddy, “I wish I had infinite dollars,” then he replied, “That would wreck the economy.” Well he is absolutely right but who wants to tell a little girl about the harsh realities of our wonky economic structures that can be toppled like a Jenga tower every time a president gets found guilty of embezzling state funds. The Rand Dollar ration was close to 17:1 that day.
Since the petrol price went up everyone is trying to stay competitive with increased prices across the board. Some supermarkets are having “inflation buster sales” which becomes a competition in itself to see who can buster inflation the hardest not by lowering food prices but by which supermarket chain can put the biggest, boldest most inflation busting fonts on their banner ads.
Yeah it’s bad but just imagine if we took that idea to the extreme. The government starts printing money on everything short of papyrus. The little girls of South Africa will frolic through slopes of money as a sanitation worker rakes the R200 bills up like leaves in autumn for minimum wage. On the upside everyone is earning minimum wage and at least the corruption problem will be solved. On the downside well everything else will not. It would be chaos in the streets, a lawless eMalahleni where toilet paper is literally worth more money than actual money.
The true worth of something comes shining through. Gold and diamonds will be paperweights. Probably to keep all the worthless money from blowing away in the wind like a sad metaphor.
Skills are the currency of the day. A good mechanic or technician, someone with a trade like carpentry or sewing will become tradable and probably worth more than a politician’s weight in fresh vegetables.
On the other hand people that might come up with the short straw are the aforementioned political figures; journalists probably will not make the cut either. Sorry Brian but if you every managed to retain any useful skill from all those hours of playing video games then now is the time.
My point is (I try my very best to make one each time or at least allude to one), my point is that as cheap things become expensive and expensive things become unaffordable do not forget the true value of things. Buy one ply toilet paper before cancelling your medical aid. Postpone that holiday before postponing your car repairs.
