<...At a recent conference at which we were honored to speak in Houston, Texas, we
cooked up a little game as an opener. In front of each guest were two envelopes, one
yellow and one red. The host welcomed his audience and then invited them to open
the red envelope, in which was to be found a play $1 million bill.
"Do you feel any richer?" he asked, to chuckles and the shaking of heads from the
floor. "Then, ladies and gentlemen," he went on, "could you please open the yellow
envelope." Inside was a genuine $1 bill. "Now let me repeat my question," said our
host. "Do you feel—however marginally—any richer?" Naturally, the audience all agreed
that they did.
He went on: "Friends, if we had the time and resources—not to mention bigger
envelopes—we could have put a million such bills in these. I take it that, if we had,
you’d have been much more enthusiastic about feeling richer." Again, the audience
assented.
"So," he continued, "if we had had the time and resources—bigger envelopes—and Alan
Greenspan’s help, we could have given everybody in the country a million of these
bills. Would you have felt richer then?"
Instantly, the mood changed. The people assembled instinctively knew something was
wrong, and a perplexed murmur went up.
"I see you disagree," said the emcee, reaching the climax. "So what we have taught
you today is that mere 'money' is not to be confused with wealth, and what we have
also shown is that, at root, the contents of the second envelope were just as
much counterfeit as those of the first."...>
Alex, just got the same on the von Mises Daily mailing:
mises.org |
