Rule 9 Contribution and Compensation

Rule 9 Keep the River Clean and You’ll Always Have Water

The Power of Contribution and Compensation.

The power of contribution, says for every contribution you make to the river, you will receive an equal or greater compensation. I've seen many people give with the expectation they will receive great compensation. But, that kind of giving is manipulation.

True giving is a gift of love. It is giving to help with no expectation of return.

My grandmother always taught me to leave the beach a little cleaner than I found it. Now, I can clean up the litter along the bank, but I can't keep a paper mill from dumping its poisons in the river. The only way I can do that is to work with others to pass clean water legislation and make sure the legislation is enforced.

The "drilled baby drill" people don't care about the consequences of drilling. As long as they have cheap gas in their tank, they either don't look to the future, or they don't care what kind of mess they leave to our kids. The irony of this is we can't drill our way out of the problem. By drilling, we may be able to give ourselves enough time to develop alternate kinds of fuel. But oil is finite and we have gotten all the easy oil.

The free, unregulated market only works when the buyer and the seller bargain on an equal footing. If we buy cheap products from China, our local businesses can't compete without exporting our jobs overseas. This whole financial meltdown is a result of banks being able to sell their mortgages so they can take the risks of those mortgages off their books. When they're not responsible for the quality of their mortgage, their motivation is to sell mortgages. They don't have to worry about whether or not the buyer can afford the mortgage. When interest rates began adjusting upward, people started default.

The law of contribution and compensation hit them with a vengeance. They planned on living in the house for a year and a day, selling the house for a half million dollar profit and paying a 15% capital gains on the money they made. When the housing bubble burst, a lot of people got caught in a financial squeeze. They defaulted on their mortgage. When people saw their financial companies reporting, billion-dollar losses. The value of those companies plummeted, and investors converted their stock to cash.

Credit dried up, the stock market crashed, and we haven't seen the bottom yet. The problem was created by low interest rates, by skyrocketing housing costs, and by lack of federal oversight of the financial institutions. CEOs of these companies are still being compensated with millions of dollars a year. They haven't been fired and the federal government is using $750 billion of our money to try to keep these stock market manipulators from going bankrupt.

The law of contribution and compensation doesn't work when the only contribution is selling fraudulent stocks to unsuspecting investors and the compensation for doing that is a multimillion dollar reward. White-collar criminals shouldn't be rewarded; they should be jailed.

The bottom line on contribution and compensation is we give what we get, and we get what we give. Give hate and get hate back. Give love and love will come back to you.

"Turn the other cheek" does not mean you want to accept a beating. It does mean that you control your own boat and choose your own course. Recognize the difference between manipulation and true giving. Give yourself to make sure the river is clean, and you'll always be able to drink.

From “A River Worth Riding”, by Lynn Marie Sager, www.navigatinglife.org