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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 10/31/12

Work Does Not Work Anymore

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Carter stroud
Message Carter stroud

There may be better ways to organize distribution but all ways require the ethics and morals of people who resist white supremacy in all its class rendering forms. Greed kills everything.

Since we are what we adapt to, killing greed requires an environment where none can exploit anyone else or accumulate the property that all need to survive. Only the few who create (the Beethovens and the inventors) do not rely on resources contributed by government and other people. Taxes should level the opportunity field with free education, health care and retirement, all of which everyone needs.

Private property--your house and the things you can use exclusively--will be influenced by the market, as will the use of public resources. Markets that waste resources must be taxed accordingly.

Again, ethics are everything for success of the public good. An independent judiciary (under separation of powers) and a bill of rights are essential. Leaders must work within the rule of law. This is particularly important because extortion is profitable where morality and government do not overcome it. Price fixing, price gouging, inadequate wages, and Ponzi schemes create inequities that also fuel the war of all against all.

What I reference as skimming contributes to the income gap. Multiple layers of organization or management, like HMOs and similar organizations, only manage money. They contribute nothing to the delivery of services. They receive big rewards for designing schemes that deliver less for more.  

A sea change has already occurred and it drives the conflicts that stand in the way of long-term survival. Technology has made it possible to access resources once out of reach and it has destroyed a good deal of real wealth in the process. The means of feeding and housing people in numbers once unimaginable cost a great deal in critical resources. The short fall is reflected in budget deficits and poverty. The present means of production and distribution cannot be sustained.

The question now is who will suffer the consequences of our destruction of wealth. The answer for a would-be elite is the creation of the old feudal class system of lords and ladies owning everything worth owning and everyone else living at subsistence levels. Historically, that has happened to many cultures old enough to exhaust their resources through overpopulation even without technology. Their current embrace of technology will exhaust their more difficult to extract resources. After a short period of prosperity for some, overpopulation supported by technology will return the culture to poverty. Overpopulation is the source of most conflicts and greed insists on growth.

To insure survival of the species, natural selection tends to propagate excess births and then eliminates the excess in a remorseless competition. This once drove genetic evolution in the direction of improved adaptations. Thanks to technology's   ability to destroy species and traits without regard to long-term consequences, civilization has little chance without limiting population to sustainable levels while all share in any shortfall in resources.

The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. Roosevelt only partly succeeded. WWII created the employment needed to end the depression. Politicians fearful of losing their jobs to a new depression have kept us on a wartime budget ever since. The New Deal support systems were, and are, still needed. The economy has never really been sound. War budgets end up undermining an economy. It is a very inefficient form of socialism. Instead of spending billions on a fighter plane that performs poorly in terrorist conflicts and produces very few jobs, the money should be spent on efficient housing, transportation, education, and the nonpolluting fuels that make efficiency possible.

The source of our confusion about these obvious conclusions is our adaptation to the wrong thing, our technology instead of the environment that designed our genome. 

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I practiced law for 30 years as a city attorney. I taught elementary school before that. I became concerned with the many adaptations to our environment that I could not believe could be sustained. How could so many rational people adopt clearly (more...)
 
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