When you accept free money, the entity giving it to you knows who you are, where you are and can use it in many ways to their advantage. You might think you're the one in control but, if they hold the purse strings, it could take some serious resolve and negotiation skills to keep the upper hand. The saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Whether that statement is true or not, if you think you have an equal footing or even the upper hand, people and entities can lack integrity. They can change the rules as they please. (Check legal agreements meticulously for loopholes!)

Without getting into the “How to catch wild pigs” analogy, so-called philanthropocapitalism and lobbying whereby the likes of high profile billionaires and corporations skew results, events, laws and elections to their liking (and benefit) through "charitable donations”, orchestrate tax dodges and all manner things (the rabbit holes go too deep there!) I will give just a brief yet significant (from a family sovereignty perspective) example from my own life.

When I was home educating my kids, many of us homeschoolers would never accept money from the authorities (no matter how temping or how much we needed some extra $$) because we knew it would come with many strings attached. If not straight away, we knew it would eventually lead to our demise. We knew it would be used to screw us over, control us and take away our freedoms.

There were those who said receiving financial support from the state would be good for homeschooling. "We will get the support and recognition we need" they said "It will shine a light on homeschooling and others will know about its existence and join us" they said "They should pay me to educate my children, I pay taxes, I save the government a fortune!" (entitlement) amongst other justifications. But some of us knew that we all just needed to stand in our own sovereignty, keep control of our own lives and the right to raise and educate our children how we see fit, without state interference. We knew that our children's education and upbringing was our responsibility and none of the state's business, and we were willing to take full ownership of that. We let the others collect the free money, put their names and addresses onto registers, KYC their children and have them monitored and we found other ways to raise funds that aligned more with our integrity and did not compromise our freedom. I was not without warning to others but it’s hard to sway someone once they have decided and all they can see is $$$.

Taking responsibility for our children’s education, for us, was about freedom from the state, so accepting financial support from the very entity we wanted to be free from was defeating the whole point of doing it in the first place.

There are many other instances such as UBI (Universal Basic Income), unemployment, sickness benefits and other benefits doled out by the state that are worthy of consideration and I could go much deeper into this subject than this short post but, for now, I will just say I think we should all be wary of FREE MONEY and treat it as a huge red flag.

This is from my substack. You can follow me here if you wish: https://open.substack.com/pub/sovereignhearts/p/is-free-money-is-a-control-mechanism?r=399tfu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true