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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