Making Money

Yesterday, while I was washing dishes with the television tuned to TLC, my nine year old said, "Mom, we should build a machine so that we can make money."

"Really? What type of machine should we build?" I love it when children come up with creative ideas. Children are natural entrepreneurs.

"A machine that makes money."

He didn't want to build a machine that could do something useful and that we could sell, he wanted to create a machine so that we could print counterfeit currency. I assumed that he came up with the idea after the program about the man who had won five million dollars in the lottery. I guess, in his little mind, it would be easier to just print money than to win the lottery. The two are probably just as ethical, in his mind. Who knows?

I asked him what he thought would happen if we did print money. His said, "We would get rich."

I told him it was illegal. He said, "We wouldn't get caught."

"So, as long as we don't get caught you would be happy with printing money, even though it's against the law?"

"Yes."

I didn't judge. Mainly, because a part of me was busy spending...

A few hours later, I asked him again if he wanted to make money. He said, "We can't." I was relieved that he had come to that moral conclusion on his own without my help. Children are natural learners, after all. I was proud of myself for avoiding didactics.

I asked, "Why can't we make money?"

"We could if we lived out in the country."

The truth is, he has "made" money before. He turned our dining room into a restaurant and created menus for his customers and even "made" money so that they could purchase food. Does a restaurant like that exist? "Here's fifty Chili's Bucks, have a nice meal."

Now, isn't that the kind of person you would want "making" money; The kind of person who would give it to you?

Guess what this is: