Common Sense Economics

A friend of mine recently said, “If you are born on this planet, you are an owner.”  It seems that a lot of the problems we have, especially today, revolve around who owns what.    It has always seemed ridiculous to me that a person born into our country does not have an unalienable right to stand in one place, much less claim the space to build a shelter and grow or forage for some food.  The more complex and systematized our society becomes the less part ethics, morals, and common sense seem to play.  Capitalism, the freedom to do business as one sees fit, and unbounded land and resources up for grabs combined to create a perfect storm of greed and inequity, Once the amount that any one individual could own and control became practically infinite, those of us who were more aggressive, assertive, and acquisitive naturally moved to the top of the heap.  Competition left the top spot for only the most ravenous and least principled.  Only today are we beginning to see how high, steep, and narrow that heap can actually be.   

We’ve created a system that rewards our worst traits.  Sharers are losers.  Trusting people are suckers that deserve to be taken.  To keep our economy healthy, we are encouraged to buy lots of things we don’t need, and to not fear spending more than we have.   The economics of scarcity require that we compete with each other for what we are told are dwindling supplies.  We ignore and waste our natural gifts and ambitions, instead scrambling for whatever means of income is available to us (Quit dreaming and get a job!).  To the extent that some of us can’t or refuse to take part in this scramble, we are considered lazy and shiftless.   We are all somewhere on this continuum: some more prone than others to put our elbows up when pushing toward a place at the trough.  I used to wonder why the poorest allowed their neighborhoods to get so messy.  Didn’t they have any self-respect?  I now see that they are struggling with much more fundamental concerns or they simply refuse to play a game that they clearly see is rigged against them.  Some set up their own games (those not allowed, that is, against the law) like selling drugs.  To make things worse, the wealthy set up charities to assuage their guilt by passing a few crumbs down to the less fortunate, thereby creating a culture of dependence and disempowerment amongst those whose ingenuity and industry are either not allowed to develop or are suppressed.

There is a way to turn all this around and at least one group, The next System Project (thenextsystem.org), is attracting the best minds to apply common sense and the laws of nature to put things on a better course.  Some of the principles they espouse:
1) The predominant characteristic of life interactions is cooperation, not competition.  Cooperation fosters equality and fairness instead of hierarchy and advantage, and allows natural individual talent and creativity to come forward and be utilized where it is needed.  Cooperation fosters love, and an awareness and regard for the well being of the entire system because we realize that we are utterly interdependent.

2) Workers must be stakeholders in the businesses they work for.  Stakeholders must be workers.  Let’s get rid of the adversarial relationship of owners vs. labor!  Right now, capitalism dictates that labor is a cost of doing business and must be minimized.  Labor wants a living wage and safe working conditions.  Both sides will sabotage the other in order to gain their advantage. Why not coalesce their interests by making them one and the same?  Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), worker owned businesses, and cooperatives having already proven themselves.  As stakeholders, workers profit from productivity gains, even when jobs are eliminated: No unnecessary make-work to keep workers on the job.  Workers are flexible about sharing labor demands by guaranteeing all an equal share of work hours required and often share both the more disagreeable tasks and the easy and more rewarding tasks.   Businesses have the benefit of the experience and creativity of every person working there.

3) We are all shareholders in the resources that are extracted from the Earth and should receive dividends based on the profits accruing from those resources.  The State of Alaska already pays about $1400/year to every Alaska resident as their share of oil extraction revenues. As stakeholders, we have a natural interest to nurture and guide the use of our common resources for us and the other creatures affected.

4)  Over-production and over-consumption are not required or encouraged.  Nature stops at enough; nothing is wasted. Common sense and overall well being provide the guidelines, not profit, growth, or the projection of power.

5) Local production and consumption are always the default choice, then regional, and finally global only when clearly shown to be necessary.

Changing such an all-encompassing system at once would be daunting, but we can do it incrementally, one business at a time, one consumer choice at a time.

Comments?  terry@vashonloop.com