Bob's Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon Vol. 3
Copyright© 2022 by aroslav
Chapter 58: Wealth
Fantasy Sex Story: Chapter 58: Wealth - "Hi! I'm Bob and I'll be your demon tonight." But Bob is not your ordinary textbook demon. He was not imbued with any traits of evil. He's just your everyday, slightly horny, happy-go-lucky (mostly lucky) demon with 4,000 years of history as his teacher. This is the way Bob remembers it happening and he was there! (Tell that to your history prof!) It's a romp through the annals of time from a unique perspective. A little bit spooky. A little bit sexy. A lot funny. Vol 3: Current Era (Mostly)
Caution: This Fantasy Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa Consensual Heterosexual Fiction Paranormal Demons Polygamy/Polyamory
I’M RICH in the wealth of this world. By anyone’s standard. Peninnah has told me that in terms of equivalents, I’m richer than Mansa Musa, purportedly the richest man who ever lived. In today’s dollars, his wealth would have been well over $400 billion. I’m up around there, too.
There’s a big difference in the way wealth is measured, though. Mansa Musa’s wealth was in gold. I don’t know that anyone ever calculated the value of his city, his land holdings, his slaves, his wives, his palace, etc. He had $400 billion worth of gold!
My wealth is in various stock holdings which I’ve traded over the ages. When Peninnah began divesting our shares of oil, which I’d invested in just a few years AC, she turned them into real estate, technology, space exploration, manufacturing, and various mining and resource operations. We even have a number of farms and plantations, like those where our chocolate is grown. The value of any of those ventures can rise and fall on a daily basis.
But gold? A bar of gold is roughly 8.5”x2.5”x1”. That’s 400 Troy ounces, or approximately 438 fine ounces. That means, each brick of gold (like the ones you see pictured at Fort Knox) weighs a little over twenty-seven pounds. If we computed the number of pure gold bars represented by $400 billion, we would get around 300,000 bars of gold!
If you just stacked them one on top of the other, we’re talking about a tower five miles high!
When Mansa Musa began liberally distributing his gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca, he destroyed the local economies for more than a decade.
My wealth? Ha! I have a stack of paper, maybe a foot high, that records the shares I own of various enterprises, the property I own, and the bank accounts I have. Each piece of paper has been assigned a value, totaling around $450 billion, but that value varies day by day, depending on the market. I try to always carry some local currency with me when I travel, because you can’t buy groceries with stock certificates.
I try to do good with my wealth. Peninnah bought us several dozen homes, many of which I’ve never traveled to. Some are as small as a little ranch in Kansas or a condominium in San Francisco. Others are as large as an entire South Sea Island. Each property employs a dozen to a couple hundred people to maintain it. I like this arrangement because I don’t expect income from those properties, so the money I pay in salaries (and property taxes) goes directly into the local economy.
There are businesses that are ‘for profit.’ These include our cocoa plantations, for example, which employ people who grow our crops. The people are paid a good standard of living, but even after wages, crop development, taxes, and equipment, we turn a healthy profit on the produce. And, yes, we pay taxes on that. In fact, we also own a share of the chocolatier who buys the beans from our plantations. They process the chocolate into a hundred different products that are sold to various exchanges around the world that distribute to food outlets, and other manufacturers. We make a nice profit on each of those sales. Yes, I pay taxes on that profit, too.
Ultimately, every business I am involved in pays taxes on as many as a dozen different levels for the money it makes. I receive my share of the profit, and I personally pay taxes on it. And I still get wealthier every day.
What about charity? And research? And education? Yes. We fund hospitals, medical research facilities, educational institutions, scholarships, and hundreds of other worthy causes. The only thing we do not fund is religious organizations. Of any sort. I’ve built a number of temples in my life and have insisted on paying and caring for the people who served to create that temple. But I’ve never paid a priest. I’ve never refused to pay taxes on any income that establishment receives. And if churches, mosques, and temples around the world were truly not for profit, they would be required to use every penny they take in for good works. Religion should be a net-zero operation, in my opinion. I do not include evangelism in the category of good works.
Why go on about wealth? I’m not a fan. I consider wealth to be a form of slavery, not just for those who possess it, but for everyone they possess. I mean employ. In reality, I believe the women I actually possess are freer than most employees.
Sometime around seventy-five or eighty years ago, I became friends with a fellow I knew only as Bucky. He was quite a thinker. He built all kinds of futuristic structures, and I even recreated a few of them in Areola. Eventually, I included his structural philosophy in the design of my space ship.
He studied the universe and came up with some startling things.
“You’ve been around a while, Bob. You’ve seen the world change. We’re constantly doing more and more with less and less. Now look at the radio, for instance. Just a decade ago, radios were cumbersome things that were a huge piece of furniture in a person’s home. Wonderful things. They brought people news of the world. You might say, they made the world smaller.”
Well, I certainly understood that. In the 1770s, I rode a horse for nearly two months to get from California to Pennsylvania, then another two months back. Now people flew from one to the other in hours! It was amazing.
“But look at this radio,” Bucky continued, holding out a device that fit in the palm of his hand. “This little thing connects me just as well to the radio stations around the country as that big monstrosity sitting in my living room! What’s the difference? We—people in general, not you and me specifically—learned how to make a transistor that’s an inch long that would do the work of a dozen big vacuum tubes! And with a battery to operate it, I can carry my transistor radio with me wherever I go. I have much more contained in much less!”
“I see, Bucky. But people still need the same amount of food,” I said, trying to come up with something to contradict his argument. “We don’t do more with less food. If anything, we have to produce more and more as the population increases.”
“But even in food production, our barns and silos are overflowing. Where it once took a hundred acres to feed a family, now we can feed the world on what is produced on our farms. And with farm machinery, it takes fewer people to produce that food. People aren’t leaving the farms for the city because the work is too hard. They leave because there isn’t enough work there to keep them busy.”
“Why do we have so many poor and malnourished and sick?” I asked. “In this country of all places! How can I even begin to take care of people?”
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