By Bob Whitaker

If you want hours of advice on how to make and spend money, let me tell you the easiest way to get it.

Go to a bar and find a guy who needs for somebody to buy him a drink. Buy him LOTS of drinks and ask him about money. He will tell you about how to make money and how to invest money until he passes out.

It’s a little harder to find the ideal person to tell you all about power. You would have to drink with a multimillionaire. He knows all about making money, he says, so he can tell you all about how, if he wanted to take the time, he would run the country.

The average person would like to have a lot more money and a lot more power. So they think power is all about money.

One of the many conspiracies people talked about is how Dick Cheney, who had huge holdings in Halliburton, tried to make money off the Iraq War. I think that’s funny. But I know it’s funny not because I think Cheney is a moral paragon, but because I know a lot about human motivations.

Cheney doesn’t NEED money. He’s got more money than he can ever find any use for.

Let me tell you something else about money if you are one of the “It’s all about money” crowd. Bill Gates is tens of billions of dollars richer than Cheney, but he would give all those extra billions if he could be in Cheney’s shoes, even though he has tens of billions and Cheney has to survive with only a billion or so.

People are always talking about the Moslem Paradise and the beautiful houris each man there will have. But they don’t talk about another aspect of that Paradise. It has clean, pure, cold water running everywhere.

Mohammed lived in Saudi Arabia, where water was precious. If you are thirsty, you forget sex, money, power and everything else.

If you have water and no food, food is everything.

If you have no money, money is everything.

But when you have all those, you want power.

If money bought power Rockefeller and Steve Forbes would have been presidents.

Unlike money, power is a very complicated thing. A Rockefeller bought himself the governorship of Arkansas. But he found he really didn’t have any power there. Senator Rockefeller of West Virginia is in the same position. He bought a senate seat.

But the way the Rockefellers bought their positions was to hire professional campaign managers. Their managers told them what position on each issue they had to take to win.

But here is something people forget: a person with power is the one who MAKES positions on issues, not one who TAKES the right positions on issues. If Rockefeller weren’t taking those positions as a senator, somebody else would.

So Rockefeller bought a senate seat, but he did not buy POWER.

You can buy an office. You can buy fame. But you have to spend your money following the rules set down by your campaign managers or your press agents, and neither professional campaign managers nor press agents are interested in POWER. They are interested in winning you an office or in making you famous.

A man must provide food and water and shelter for his family. He likes to be famous or to hold office. But the ultimate goal of any man is power, the ability to change the world.

Everything else is necessity.

The guy in the bar won’t tell you that.