EPISODE 1 on Spreaker (click to launch Spreaker with iHeart Radio). Below is the transcript for your reading pleasure.

Welcome back to the Liberty Accelerator JET series where we unpack the truth on Jobs | Efforts | Taxes. In episode 1, we’re going to look at the idea of JOBs and introduce some concepts about JOBs that you likely haven’t considered before. I hadn’t until the previous year or so, having believed and bought into what the lamestream had fed me for the majority of my life.

In 2008 I left my first operational assignment, on a fast attack submarine stationed in Guam. I detached from that unit in Japan, and knew vaguely from the news that the economy wasn’t doing well (sidenote: my wife had returned to Houston ahead of me, and Hurricane IKE was plowing ashore in the region on the day I got off the submarine: curious how that acronym has become a central idea within this program).

To get back on track: I didn’t know why the economy was in trouble or anything at all about the “financial crisis” in the banking system and residential real estate markets, and was so exhausted and preoccupied with my work in the U.S. Navy that I didn’t give it much care. We didn’t have any exposure in the stock or bond markets at the time, but thought I knew that in a recession finding jobs outside of the military could be hard.

That was a very bad assumption, and one that I would realize a decade later had trapped me in the status quo and mediocrity at the time.

Not researching and understanding better then what was happening with the economy was a tremendous opportunity missed. That missed opportunity would reveal itself to me about 15 years later. There were tell-tale signs of it throughout the 2010’s…via our emergency savings account that began earning less and less interest as the years went on and accumulated to about $40K in 2019.

Why were interest rates dropping? I wondered but was so preoccupied with the busyiness in military assignments at the staff or operational job and focused on my Naval Officer Career that I didn’t take the time to study the issue…that, again, was a grave mistake. But hey, with a B.S. degree from Texas A&M, and an MBA from Naval Postgraduate School, I was educated, right? Sure.

It wasn’t until at National Defense University’s Dwight D. Eisenhower School (His nickname is IKE, by the way) that a very vague, general introduction to a financial services and banking idea known as fractional reserve banking did I have the curiosity to dive deeper, and come to a complete understanding on my own study via entrepreneurs in the real world, not government or academia, of what was going on with the savings in the Money Market Savings Account over the previous decade. And what I found horrified me. So how does this relate to a JOB, I’m sure you’re asking by now.

Well here it comes, so strap down tight and listen carefully, for the words I’m about to choose and use matter greatly.

In a JOB we give our time, imagination, knowledge, and effort in exchange for a paycheck. In government service, we can be confident that that paycheck will show up every two weeks without missing a beat. In the real world, as I understand it, a job is perceived by the employee to be fairly safe and a reasonable expectation of getting paid bi-weekly exists. As an entrepreneur or small business owner, the expectation can be a bit less firm, and I know from first hand experience because I’ve been trying to launch my business for a while now, and there’s no guarantee of income day-to-day or month-to-month with that effort; it’s sporadic with peaks and valley’s.

Why do I bring these three forms of effort up? Because that’s typically the silo’d nature of how post-military work is presented to us.

But there’s a big problem with choosing one option of the three: it limits your optionality to provide for yourself and your family. Additionally, in uniformed service, the majority, it seems, are completely dependent upon that one paycheck, and given the 2.7% pay raise we in uniformed service were extended for 2022, we’re all falling way behind if we don’t have additional sources of income closing the gap in the loss of purchasing power of our paycheck…because at 6.2% consumer price increases year over year, we’re falling way behind. Purchasing power is the number, quality, or value of goods and services that can be purchased with a unit of currency. I’ll state it again, please listen carefully: Purchasing power is the number, quality, or value of goods and services that can be purchased with a unit of currency.

Before we move on: Currency is a generally accepted medium of exchange for goods and services. Generally in society we incorrectly refer to currency as money. The main difference between money and currency is the stable store of value over a long period of time that is a trait of money, but not currency.

To drive the point home, and to connect it to your government paycheck, on January 14th, the first of the year that includes the 2.6% pay raise from Uncle Sam, who henceforth we’ll refer to as Uncle Scam, the U.S. Dollar we’re compensated for our time with is not a stable store of value. How can it be when it’s created out of thin air with no effort or energy put forth toward its creation. This idea is beyond the scope of today’s discussion, but we’ll dive further into that during Episode 2 on Efforts and our Energy.

So let’s turn our attention back to the JOB. DoD’s TAP is laser focused on JOBs for transitioning and/or retiring service-members, and the broader community of non-profit Veteran and Spouses Service Organizations are focused on military spouse employment.

Can I ask you to imagine something with me at this point?

Similar to our time in service, in a JOB we’ve got Just One Boss, and that’s what JOB typically means if viewed as an acronym: JOB: Just One Boss. And with a job alone, unless we’re receiving a pension which is only a sliver of the population, we’re just one boss away from being without a paycheck. The purchasing power of our pensions will be discussed and dissected as a spin off of Episode 2 covering Effort and Energy, so hang that idea on your hat rack. We’ll grab hold of it at a later date, too.

So to bring it all full circle, equate this to our JET analogy for this series. Your seat on the “military” JET of military service life is the equivalent of your job, that by the way isn’t yours…it’s the plane’s seat, right? And with that seat on the JET comes rules. Just imagine a trip on an airline today and all the rules that come with it, both written and unwritten, by law and by society. What I mean is, you can go to jail for breaking the law by not wearing a face diaper or smoking in the lavatory. Socially, you’d be criticized by taking someone else’s seat mid-flight to visit the lavatory…we just don’t behave that way, right!?!

Well the same goes for your job, you don’t own it, either, and you don’t have a God-given right to it, in government service for Uncle Scam, in Corporate America, in small business, or as an entrepreneur. The employer owns that job, whether that’s Uncle Scam, corporate America, a small-or-medium sized private business, or as an entrepreneur. In the case of the entrepreneur, your potential customer owns the decision to pay you for whatever product/service you’ve got that solves their problem, not you. And to get them to give you part of their hard-earned paycheck, they’ll probably want to know you, like you, and trust you not to screw them over. The last thing anybody wants is to regret a purchase decision, because it’s proof of a mistake made, and nobody likes feeling fooled or admitting a mistake. It’s just not in our nature.

So like on an airplane trip, you pick your own seat or have it assigned to you and you’re in that seat for the duration of the flight.

Can I ask you something again? How comfortable are you being just one boss away from a paycheck? Also, how comfortable are you knowing that, in government service anyway, the purchasing power of your paycheck is being eroded away by something generally referred to as inflation? Quick sidenote: inflation is the expansion of the currency and credit supply. Inflation is the cause of your paycheck purchasing less and less goods and services month to month and year to year, and it’s not price increases as measured by the Changing Propaganda Index, commonly referred to as the Consumer Price Index which is an average estimated price increase of a basket of goods and services which is calculated by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and widely distributed throughout the lamestream media (remember, those talking heads and bureaucrats who produce those numbers are in jobs, too, dependent upon a single source of income most likely and therefore forced to do what their boss tells them as opposed to reporting the truth).

Price increases are a symptom of inflation, not the cause of it. This is a really important concept to understand, so I encourage you to do some additional study on it from reputable sources, and I don’t include government or academia in that category, use entrepreneurs who understand economics, because their livelihoods are on the line via their reputations, whereas the talking heads on lamestream news and the government bureaucrats are incentivized to report what their boss tells them to report, less they lose their job for not doing so because there’s hundreds or thousands of people who’d replace them in a heartbeat. So study Inflation and Consumer Price Index from entrepreneurs, not academics and bureaucrats.

To sum up, explicitly stated: your efforts are being stealthily and heavily taxed in JOBs alone, and that’s putting you and your family further and further behind if you’re dependent on a job (or two if married) to maintain or increase your standard of living, to save for retirement, and to service consumer debt obligations.

Because of this, it’s vital to create multiple streams of income that work for you while you sleep and while you’re working in a job, because in a job alone today, which isn’t yours as we’ve already discussed, we can never maintain the standard of living we’ve become accustomed to. It revolves around the idea of purchasing power, and the effort we put forth to trade our time, imagination, knowledge, experience, and efforts for a paycheck.

That’s a lot to unpack, so we’ll leave episode 1 of the Liberty Accelerator JET series on that note, and we’ll be back for episode 2 to discuss Efforts and our limited Energy that we expend into the world. Thanks so much for joining me on this flight, and be sure to like and subscribe and share with someone else, your friend and family member FIDO maybe? FIDO: that’s someone like me over the past fifteen years, Friend/Family Is Doing Only (FIDO) what others are doing.

To Your Liberty,

#HeckYeah

https://www.jarrodhsmith.com

https://www.patreon.com/ToYourLiberty

JET Episode 1: It's Your Job (NOT!)

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