Category: Economics

Capitalism was made possible by the emergence of democratic societies. These societies shed economic elitism and allowed increasing portions of the population to access wealth.

The core engine of capitalism is one of the most common basic instincts…greed. Hard work, skill acquisition, and innovation can combine to elevate a child born in poverty to great wealth and prosperity. Under these circumstances, everyone had a chance to earn financial independence. And as a result, there was no need for the poor to resent the rich because they too have the opportunity to be rich one day.

What went wrong? Greed

As the descendants of poverty elevated to great wealth, their greed inspired them to use their resources to manipulate the free market to consolidate wealth to themselves at the expense of everyone else.

The propensity of free market capitalism to create severe wealth inequality is not new. Historically, these periods of severe financial imbalance were corrected by economic depressions, which re-leveled the opportunity to access wealth for the broader society.

By the 1970’s, the Powell Manifesto encouraged wealthy people to protect their interests by investing enormous resources to co-opt the government, university system, and mass media. The point of these investments was to prevent the economic correction that restores financial opportunities for the general population.

In the 1990’s, Alan Greenspan accomplished the first “soft” landing in US history by reversing a business cycle slow down without an economic recession. And by 2009, the Congress and the Federal Reserve prevented the new Great Depression by giving the wealthiest holders of capital trillions of dollars in public funds to cover private losses. The net effect is to metastasize severe economic inequality as the new norm of the free market economy.

Free market manipulation, and economic globalism, combined with accelerated automation has effectively subjugated the broad working class to involuntary servitude.

While the wealthy have been successful preventing the restoration of economic opportunity for the general population, they have also earned the contempt of people who now understand they will never have financial security.

Here we are, working harder and hopefully smarter toward the common goal of financial independence. To reach a point where we can choose to spend our limited time as we see fit. Yet, no matter how close we are to achieving our goal, we all live one mishap away from carrying a work for food sign at the side of the road.

How? Reliance on money.

If you have it, your possibilities appear endless. And if you don’t, you may starve to death while living in the wealthiest country in recorded history.

Consider one startling fact: Almost all of us have lost loved ones to curable, preventable diseases because they did not possess enough money to gain the knowledge of healthy nutrition, or to purchase food that supports wellness, or to access timely and adequate medical treatment.

Have you noticed that the highest quality goods and services are reserved only for people who have the money to pay the most? For the rest of us, we are immersed in an ocean of sub-optimal products and services that are designed to rapidly degrade so we will have little choice but to purchase the products again and again. And the worse part is many of us suffer injuries and even death resulting from the less than optimal quality of the goods and services we rely on.

This is the unspoken reality of our lives.

Up until this moment, we have been told price discrimination in the quality of goods and services is necessary because there is simply not enough resource to provide the best for everyone. The accumulation of human knowledge, coupled with relentless technological developments, have rendered scarcity of the highest quality goods and services obsolete. Stated bluntly, we now have the capability to provide the best quality for all of us.

I hear your doubt but consider a few easily verifiable facts…

• Knowledge once gained can benefit everyone. The only reason knowledge is withheld is to give contributors exclusive rights that are sold to make money.
• Most of the garbage gorging our global landfills are from affordable (cheap) goods that were produced to fail long before the best quality goods.
• Most of the drain on global resources is for the production of less than optimal quality goods that are sold at prices that support our consumption-based economy. As every Economist insists, the more we consume, the better the economy. Better for whom?
• Since the best quality is reserved only for people who can afford to pay the most, the large majority of global millionaires make their fortunes selling sub-optimal products and services to the rest of us.
• Our current mass production of sub-optimal goods and services threatens to exhaust global resources as billions of new customers join the consumption pool, especially in India and China.

And what are the implications? If we fail to improve the efficiency of global resource utilization, future resource availability will support materially smaller global populations.

What can be done?

Educate yourself on the issue of scarcity. If we have the technology and resources to provide the highest quality goods and services to everyone, price discrimination is no longer necessary.

Despite what we have been told about our Us versus Them world, there really is no them…There is only Us.

Free market Economics is considered the most efficient (fair) way to distribute scarce goods and services. But what if human innovation, technological development, and available natural resources have rendered scarcity unnecessary?

What if it is not necessary to compete to eat…to learn…to have shelter…to receive the care we need…to reach our full potential…to be contributing members of a global community? Would you still prefer to pursue your own happiness even at the expense of others?

Doubtful.

Technological developments are rapidly eliminating the jobs many people rely on to support themselves and their families. Sadly, many people view this fact as the tragic cost of modernity. But what if automation and AI are paving the way for humanity to free ourselves from the need to have a job to support our well-being?

We would be free to cultivate and apply the boundless, creative capabilities of human ingenuity to the areas of science, mathematics, the arts, philosophy, and so much more. Free to invest in every person so each of us can reach our full potential in the areas of our vocational passion, unconstrained by financial discrimination.

This is not Utopian mythology.

This is reality once we each accept that scarcity of the goods and services that support our well-being is no longer necessary.

If there really is enough for all of us, we no longer need to take as much for ourselves as possible.

The fact is free market Economic principles of advancing our own self-interest encourages us to take all we can, which creates the scarcity causing global human suffering.

Be the change. Life can be a global feast. Have some and pass it on.

Beyond the root of all evil, money is…

A lifeline to the resources that sustain us.

Often the difference between life and death.

The overseer on the modern plantation.

The sufficient condition for social interaction.

The great unequalizer.

The Midas touch of human relationships.

Our addictive undoing.

The culmination of the old paradigm.

The limit of our humanity.

The lowest denominator of infinity.

The zero sum of our abundance.

The price of our dignity.

The excuse for our disillusionment.

Our unfixable fix.

A stairway to nowhere…

The crass reduction of purpose into objectification.

The value of scarcity.

The $ign of the times.

The incentive for our extinction.

And yet the reality of our condition is we must seek money to survive another day.

By acknowledging the gilded shackles that bind us, we illuminate the path to our fulfillment.

Here we are immersed in the white noise of 24/7 news chatter…real news commingled with fake news. Who has time to suspend the grind of our own lives to tell the difference? So we turn to alternative sources…the internet blogs, more Truth Sayers immersed in relentless rants designed to undermine the last shred of faith we have in any mainstream news source, politician, or public institution. Is there no end to the noise? When did we forget how to talk about our challenges and concerns without yelling past each other?

Time for each of us to take a deep breath and pause for a moment. Repeat the deep breathing until the noise fades away. Now that you have created a moment of calm, allow one question to enter your consciousness:

How do we as a humanity evolve beyond our current dilemma?

I won’t waste time providing the historical detail of the dilemma because this problem is exactly what all the ranting is about…this is why life is now so unfulfilling, even for the fortunate.

The fundamental question is how do we get from here to a more humane place?

I acknowledge the enormity of the problem is paralyzing. The fact that any necessary change will take many years, and likely last beyond our lifetimes, only makes the problem intractable. But for the sake of our progeny and our sanity, we must do something.

Where do we begin? Root causes. The root cause of any problem strips the litany of false leads & convenient scapegoats and reveals how we find ourselves here.

Our problem is pervasive scarcity. Today, countless people are starving while we throw away millions of pounds of food. Millions suffer and die from treatable diseases while thousands of available hospital beds lay empty. Billions of people live a century behind modern knowledge and technology, denying most of them the opportunity to discover their full potential. Virtually every person spends most of their lives toiling away at jobs they would never do but for the need for money.

In a world of resource abundance, how did access to resources become so limited? A system of social organization and economics where access to resources is tied to how much money you have. Since only money guarantees access, each of us is encouraged to accumulate as much money as possible. The result is a world where most of the global wealth is consolidated in very few hands, and half the world’s population is resource deprived.

If scarcity is our problem, the solution is to maximize human productivity by guaranteeing access to all the resources each of us can use to reach and maintain our full potential. The keys here include limiting consumption to what we can use, reducing waste by maximizing the quality of all goods and services, allowing all people full access to the accumulation of human knowledge, and leveraging the use of automation to eliminate the need for mundane, repetitive tasks for human labor.

Is this solution possible? Yes, but only if we reconcile our defining values to the wisdom of our experience. Each of us rely on many people to produce the conditions that sustain us. As a result, our individual well-being is a function of the well-being of every person who contributes to our living conditions.

The farmer who grows our food and the truck driver who delivers it to market…the electrician who wires our home and the mechanic who installs our brake pads…the pilot who flies our plane and the engineers who designed it…the teacher who exposed us to our life’s chosen vocation and the every person who believed in us…Each and every one of these people and many more we may never know, contribute to the conditions that make our lives worth living. And when they are distracted, undernourished, ailing and denied access to the resources they need, we suffer with faulty goods and services that often alter the trajectory of our lives.

Once each of us acknowledge our interdependence on humanity, we realize we all must matter if we want to live in a sustainable, mutually fulfilling society.

How then do we get from here to there?

Helping each person we know to understand we can best advance our self-interest by supporting the well-being of all of us. Changing the dialogue of our public policy discussions from “how does policy affects me?” to “how does policy help us?” Supporting candidates and causes that favor global unity over nationalism and sectarianism. Doing the relentlessly hard work of building an emerging critical mass of values that elevate all of humanity.

This is the task at hand, which offers purpose amidst a cacophony of inhumanity.

Is it in you?

At the founding of America, the forefathers declared independence from British rule because King George III practiced tyranny over the American colonies. In organizing the new nation, the fundamental rights of free people were acknowledged in the Bill of Rights, which defined our individual autonomy with the principle of ordered liberty. In practice, the concept of ordered liberty, which empowers government to limit our freedom where it impermissibly limits the freedom of others, has translated to freedom to advance our self interest.  Each of these events occurred within the context of economic modernization.

As societies progressed from hunter-gatherers, to agrarian, to industrial, to post industrial, to information based models, we improved productivity and accelerated innovation through specialization. The sum effect of modernity is rapid improvement in life expectancy and many other quality of life measures in exchange for a growing, yet hardly acknowledged, interdependence on humanity.

Interdependence involves mutual dependence for mutual benefit. Each of us exchange the excess productivity of our specialized skills for the remainder of the goods and services that sustain us. Interdependence is distinguished from codependency, a condition involving the dependence of one party often for the benefit of an enabling party.

In our modern society, we use money as a medium of exchange for our specialized skills. As such, money is the necessary condition for accessing all goods and services including the development of specialized skills. By limiting access to skill development based on how much money we have, modern societies create a global caste of under skilled people who are codependent on wealthy benefactors. This condition is not sustainable because the benefits are not mutual.

The first step toward a sustainable, mutually fulfilling, interdependent society is acknowledging the benefit each of us receives is tied to the ability of all of us to contribute.

The quality of the food we eat is tied to the well being of the people who produce it.

The quality of the shelter we enjoy is tied to the well being of the people who built it.

The quality of love we receive is tied to the well being of the people who provide it.

My well being is tied to the well being of every person who contributes to the conditions that sustain me.

Therefore, I gladly declare my interdependence on humanity, and I commit to support policies that advance the well being of all of us.

How about you?

What separates you and me from the Walton family, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and every extremely wealthy person on the planet? Cash…specifically, the huge accumulation of cash. And with their huge accumulation of cash comes influence and control over an extraordinary portion of our finite resources.

Now imagine an economy where money no longer exists. We no longer compete to accumulate cash in order to access the resources we need to sustain ourselves and our families. If we all have the same claim on our finite resources, we all have an interest to make sure our access provides for a high quality, mutually fulfilling, and sustainable living condition. Individual accumulation of resources is no longer necessary because everyone will have all the resources we can use to reach our full potential.

From our birth, we will have full access to the complete body of human knowledge. We will be free to pursue our educational passions and select our vocations based solely on our highest aspirations. Human innovation is unleashed to the maximum potential because it is informed by the accumulation of human knowledge and unhindered by limited access to our finite resources. Since our quality of life will be a function of our total contributions, all of us will be motivated to add new contributions to improve our living conditions. Imagine how productive we each could be if we all worked in the field of our highest, well informed aspirations? But what about the wide range of mundane vocations necessary for modern living? This is the appropriate application for automated technology. By maximizing the use of automated technology to fulfill the myriad of mundane functions, each of us are free to turn our focus on the areas of our maximum contribution.

The latest innovations are no longer exclusive to those few who can afford to pay for it. All goods and services are provided to the highest level of quality and efficiency in order to maximize our contribution to our mutual well-being and minimize waste.

A successful life will no longer be measured by who accumulates more resources to themselves, but by who contributes most to the quality of life of the global community.

Talk to the best and brightest people and ask “what are the keys to their success?” Invariably they say something most of us already know…hard work…diligent study…thinking outside the box…buying low and selling high…

blah…Blah…BLAH!

We walk away assuming they are being coy with their treasured secrets to success. The thing is…they actually are telling the truth. But you say “if that’s all it takes to be successful, I would be very successful. I already know all those keys to success.” And now for our Yoda moment: It’s not what you know, instead it IS what you do that determines your success.

Consider investing. The first rule of investing is “buy low and sell high.” Yet, when scandal hits a company…the stock usually plummets. Why? Because an increasing number of investors are choosing to sell low. And when a company posts record profits…the stock price skyrockets. Why? Because an increasing number of investors are buying high. Now take Warren Buffett, America’s greatest investor. On Black Monday, October 19th, 1987, the stock market posted the deepest crash since the Stock Market crash of 1929. On this day, on paper, Warren Buffett lost over a billion dollars. And while the broad market was selling everything at increasingly lower prices, Warren Buffett bought the holdings that would drive his return on investment for the next decade and beyond. Everyone trading stock that day knew to buy low and sell high, but only a few actually did it. The key to Warren Buffett’s investment success is he lives the maxim, even when the rest of the market is running in the other direction.

The simple lesson here is to make sure the best we know is reflected in the most we do.

Now ask yourself…Do I do unto others as I would have them do to me? Do I live the values I hope to receive from others? Do I give first what I want to receive? Am I the change that I expect in others? Do I listen with the same desire as I want to be heard?

Now imagine what life would be like if we did.