The Path to a Future: Flat Sharing

For my entire working life the conventional wisdom seems to have been that only a mug would pay their full share of taxes, and that it was every citizen’s duty to reduce their responsibilities in this area to a minimum. Those who succeeded in paying the least amount of taxes have generally been lauded as heroes.

Continue reading “The Path to a Future: Flat Sharing”

LIFE SPAN – 2011.08.20 – Europe’s Future

Special edition of LIFESPAN : A LIFE Plan for Europe.

LIFE SPAN 2011.08.20 – Europe’s Future

Situational Policy Analysis & News from LIFE

Situation – Debts and Dangers

Like the rest of the industrial world, the only way forward for Europe is to “grow” its economy, otherwise it cannot sustain repayment of its debts. Those debts in the short past are national debts, that were inherited in the medium past from profligate banks and governments, and in the long past belong to everyone in Europe because in the aggregate everyone was supping at the same table and gave their permission to those that sat at the head of the table.

While the discussions now are centered around the €uro as a currency and how to prevent individual countries inside the €urozone from going bankrupt; the real, underlying, critically important issue is how to foster growth. By “growth” what is meant is an increase in the economic activity that creates wealth, because if the interest on what you owe is greater than your rate of wealth-growth (which it is in pretty much every European country) you can never get out of debt.

All of these currency and growth issues are exacerbated by the fact that today’s practice of the European social model in not yet fully mature (see Policy below for the mature model) and so the European countries are continuing to rack up more debt every year!

If your situation looks like this (which it does in pretty much every European country), you’re in serious trouble:

Debts are already > 80% of your annual output
Interest on your debts is > 2.5%
Growth is < 2%
Annual additional borrowing is > 5%

But what comes next is the REALLY dangerous stage for Europe. This is not a prediction of what will happen, but it is a picture of what could happen if we don’t work to change course soon:

In order to stave off the collapse of regional economies that would result from the failure of the Euro currency: the larger, more export-orientated countries will have to assume responsibility for the debts of all EU countries.
Ironically, because the EU was not built on firm democratic ground there will be political backlash across the continent against a political class making fundamental decisions about what Europe looks like and works like, without gaining the support of their citizens for such moves. The “leaders” making the decisions lack the legitimacy of pan-European democratic representation.
Despite the best attempts of Europe, America and China to maintain the financial world order, they will fail to achieve sufficient growth to make the system financially sustainable; never mind the fact that they aren’t even focussed on making it socially sustainable.
European politics will polarize and degenerate to reactionary stances with insular perspectives, all the while sucking on the teat of petro-energy and destroying each other and the planet.

The situation is serious and dangerous. Serious because without growth in demand, there cannot be growth in the economies; and without economic growth pretty much every nation’s debts are unserviceable and, therefore, so is the entire world financial system. Dangerous because the collapse of the world economic order will result in conflict, and distract everyone from the urgent task of reaching sustainable balance. If we don’t want the middle of the 21st C to look like the middle of the 20th C, bathed in the added stench of climate rot, we need to come to grips with the situation we are in, and devise a path out of here that serves our most civilized intentions. The European model MUST succeed, and show the rest of the world the path away from conflict, towards sustainable prosperity – this is Europe’s responsibility and opportunity.

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Policy – The LIFE Plan for Europe

The LIFE plan to get us from where we are now to where we want to be, consists of three major milestones:

Re-establish the proposal for “Europe”, with a clearly laid out structure and schedule that leads to voluntarily unified social, political, fiscal and monetary union(s).
Stabilize the short term, by defining the intermediate status of the currency, the nation states and all debts.
Initiate the rapid re-democratization of regions and nations on the continent with the goal of being able to have pan-continental elections of voluntarily associated states within 7 years.

This ambitious plan is substantially more achievable than you might at first imagine. The nation states that make up the vast bulk of the European content already have well established democratic systems that allow their populations to make informed choices, so they can all reasonably conduct their normal democratic schedules and elect representation that can express their desires for or against specific unifications with other nation states, and do so within the given timeframe.

The dire need to stabilize the current situation makes a clear annunciation of intention in everyone’s interests, including all of the bond holders. The proposal is not complicated, it is simply that: the communities, regions and states that comprise the continent of Europe will freely choose their association, and in so doing create one or more transterritorial, integrated socio-political-fiscal entities which will in turn assume the assets and debts ascribed to them under the constitution, Section 1.

In the meantime, all existing bonds will be guaranteed in full and attract interest at their current rate or 2.5%, whichever is lower. Any bonds falling due between now and 7 years will be automatically rolled over for 5 years from their date of maturity. This protects the interests of the bond holders while removing the Sword of Damocles from the existing sovereign states.

The proposal for “Europe” shall be the creation of one or more Transterritories, each comprised of no less than 3 States, each of which shall be comprised of no less than 3 Regions. A skeleton Constitution will be universally adopted at the outset to provide the framework for the formation of the new, freely-associated memberships. Upon the election of each transterritorial Assembly, that Assembly will be at liberty to amend their constitution according to the wishes of their citizens.

Crucially the new Europe will be based on a new citizen contract in which the social welfare model is transformed into a wellfair model that provides comprehensive and universal social services, instead of the cash grant system in place today. That every citizen is endowed with access to basic services that support life and opportunity is maintained, but that such support is a mutual gift provided to the extent that it is affordable for all. This maturation of the empathic social model resolves the fundamental unsustainability of the cash welfare system by absorbing the hygiene portion of labour costs into the society and liberating the commercial economy to deliver on its full potential.

The growth that will make the inherited debt burdens sustainable will come from the unleashing of the latent microeconomic potential that industrial capitalism stifles. This large engine of wealth is obscured by the immature practice of both economic and social policy that is the norm in current European societies. It will require effort and diligence for Europeans to meet their obligations, but it is most definitely an achievable task within the standard timeframe for sovereign debt (i.e. 20 to 30 years). And at the same time that Europe is proving that it understands responsibility, it will also be proving that sustainability is achievable.

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Analysis – A Light for the LIFE of the World

Change is not an option, it is a requirement. The truth is that the situation in Europe is not merely a circumstance that provides an opportunity for change, it is the eventual destination of all societies with immature social and economic systems. The confusion at the root of the industrial economic model and the arrogance of early democratic models means that they were fatally flawed from the outset. They were never capable of being permanent structures for a sustainable world, and yet we have persisted in their agenda beyond the end of their useful remit. Now we must face our responsibility to refine and develop our social and economic structures, to advance them beyond the visions of our ancestors, to fashion human civilization that honors, justifies and respects the influence over all life on Earth that the development of our species has imbued in us.

The achievement of a civilized and peaceful resolution of Europe’s problems, through the creation of freely-associated populations, working peacefully together for our mutual prosperity, while laying a sustainable foundation for our societies and our economies, will provide a shining beacon of light to the whole world that progression out of the darkness of conflict and the misery of crony industrial capitalism is not only dreamable, but is also practical. The whole world looks to Europe to show what they know is possible, and the people of Europe are ready to meet the challenge and shoulder the responsibility of demonstrating that sustainable peace and prosperity are the inalienable rights of all.

All of the great civilizations that proceeded Europe have enjoyed extended periods of peace and prosperity, some lasting for 100s of years. Europe has not competed a single century in the last 2,000 years that wasn’t defined by conflict and war. The modern world is a cake largely baked by Europeans, and now it is time to complete the process and ice the cake. Talk of Europe’s fading relevance and ossification are but excuses, it is plain to see that people in the rest of the world look to Europe to prove that the model they are adopting can be made to work.

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News – LIFE Party launching in the UK in 2012, and the rest of Europe in 201… ?

Starting next year the LIFE Party will launch in the UK to run for the 2015 General Election. We can start LIFE Parties in every European democracy during 2012 to bring responsive politics to every corner of the continent that is the cradle of democracy. To make that a reality and be part bringing sustainable prosperity to your part of the world, send an email to start@lifeparty.org and we will help you get started with tools, frameworks and campaigns.

This the third issue of the newsletter from LIFE: Situational Policy Analysis and News (SPAN). LIFE SPAN is published online and provides more in-depth coverage of situations at the forefront of public policy at the current time.

To keep information flowing we encourage you to sign up for direct delivery of LIFE SPAN to your mailbox, so that any disruptions in the availability of Facebook, the blog site or the web wiki site do not affect your ability to get the latest news and updates from LIFE. Just subscribe to this website, you can always unsubscribe at a later date if you want to. We will never share your email with any other organization.

A Brief History of TEA

Total Economic Awareness (TEA) is used in this article to describe a philosophical framework, adopted by many people today, in which every activity is perceived as being of monetary value. It is not entirely new, King Midas had a touch of it, but it has never been so broadly adopted as it is now that it has become a defining feature of industrial capitalism. It is worth understanding a little about the evolution and development of TEA so that we can perceive it more accurately, and determine where it has infected otherwise functional systems.

TEA is essentially a completely commercial view of the world, encompassing both living things and inanimate objects. It is the “business” view of life, a mindset that sees everything as tradable and therefore worth something that can be traded for something else. In theory there is nothing wrong with this, and it is used in the theoretical study of economics; in practice, most traditions and religions warn against its adoption as a singular focus, or its use as an exclusive lens for life.

In the pre-capitalist world there were always some who adopted a TEA mindset, and they became the bankers and traders of their time and place. But their actions were always a minority of total activity, and they existing inside a wider context of other frameworks that had greater standing in their society, like religion and culture. It has only been in the last 50 years or so that TEA became such a widely adopted world view, and that is has become the definition of culture in certain societies; so much so that people refer to themselves as living is a “capitalist society” in which economics has come to define the culture they live in. This increase has been spurred in recent decades by the adoption of fiat currencies, which have allowed so many more people to avail themselves of greater wealth. The early industrialists and oil men at the turn of the previous century adopted TEA as a brazenly deliberate approach to life, developing grand plans for their businesses in which people were simply units of resource, borrowing the dislocated condescension of the aristocracy that preceded them. They set an example of grand achievement by developing huge industrial empires and amassing great fortunes without regard to the toll extracted from the ‘resources’ they used. The damage caused by their activities was obscured by dramatic advances in production and technology, and by their industrial contributions to war efforts.

In the middle of the 20th Century, as fiat currencies replaced gold standards, the example set by the early industrialists was adopted more and more broadly by the populations of the industrialized countries, encouraged by the innate desire for competitive advantage and the apparent absence of consequences. The early TEA adopters never had to acknowledge the real support provided by their societies, which constrained their excesses and caught the fallout that they ignored. So long as the purely commercial world remained a minority of all activity and was constrained to its own sphere, the TEA mindset of a minority could not destabilize the society.
But the untrammeled pursuit of advantage through wealth has a limit, and that limit is defined by the size of the consequences that it ignores (i.e. the extent to which it is exploitative). If 20% of the consequences are unaccounted for, then 80% is the maximum TEA penetration that a society can tolerate; if 50% of the consequences are ignored, then 50% is the maximum. But the theoretical maximum TEA penetration into a society has to be modified by the amount of social support that is present by default, without any commercial activity, and that is, at a minimum, 20%, rising to 50% as the prosperity of a society increases.

The formula for determining the maximum penetration that a society can tolerate is:
Population – Default Social Need – (TEA Penetration x Exploitation Factor)
Assuming that TEA activity has a 20% exploitation factor, then the maximum penetration is 65% is an underdeveloped society with a 20% default social need
100 – 20 – (TEA Penetration x 20%) = 80-20% = 65
and 40% in a developed society with a 50% default social need
100 – 50 – (TEA Penetration x 20%) = 50-20% = 40

The absence of fiat currency in pre-industrial economies meant that TEA penetration never reached much above 10% or 20% and could easily be tolerated, even if the exploitation factor was greater than 100%. If exploitation factors reached up into the 300%-1000% range (slavery) then those activities had to be exported to remote lands (colonies) so as not to destabilize the domestic society. The domestically sanitized presentation of the wealth acquired from TEA exploitation abroad gave it a legitimacy, and allowed the domestic audience to focus more on the benefits of the greater prosperity than on the costs of the fallout from the exploitation.
The introduction of fiat currencies effectively removed most of the barriers to broad adoption of TEA and so the only limit on its growth became the tolerance capacity of the society. The concurrence of increased access to wealth resulting from fiat capitalism and the growing dependent demography, caused by increased life expectancy and greater education requirements, created a collision course between the penetration of TEA and the maximum tolerable penetration rate for TEA. It became a race for individuals to adopt TEA (commonly known as the “growth of the middle class”) before the social tolerance level was reached, meaning the point at which there would be no more room on board that bus.

Constraining the exploitation factor allows TEA to penetrate society at closer to its maximum percentage, and in the beginning of broad TEA penetration this was an almost universally adopted convention – manifested in “a growing middle class with strong labour unions and safer workplaces”. But, as the maximum potential TEA penetration approached, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that even if exploitation was reduced to zero there still wasn’t room on the bus for much more than 50% of the total population of a modern society. So some people adopted the ultimate TEA rationale, which was to increase the exploitation factor by exploiting those running to get on the bus. If there wasn’t going to be enough wealth to give everyone comparative advantage, then you’d may as well stop playing by even the most basic social rules and adopt TEA as a total philosophy, in which those who didn’t grasp the finite nature of TEA should rightly be the victims of it themselves. This final and terminal stage of TEA is where we are today, in which a small minority of TEA adherents have callously figured out that their own advantage is best acquired through the maximization of exploitation. This maximization is achieved through the deliberate obscuring of the exploitation’s effects at the same time as the cynical promotion of TEA. Examples of this terminal TEA include denying climate science while promoting consumer credit to boost wasteful product consumption, and complete destruction of Appalachian communities to produce climate destroying coal.

An alternative to TEA is here.

The Path to A Future: The Great Gamble

We, as a species, are engaged in the greatest gamble of our brief existence. The outcome will affect all of us, but not everyone has a place at the table nor is everyone playing with the same hand.

The gamble we are taking is embodied in two questions. Questions we have to answer if we are to consider ourselves masters of our own destiny.

Do we need to change the fundamental structures of our societies and our economies to avoid catastrophe?
If we do, when do we need to start making those changes?

The easiest answer to both questions is that we do not have to make any fundamental changes, that peace and prosperity will be ours without changing anything very much. This answer demands the least from us and would seem to have the least impact on us, assuming the answer is the correct one.

For the majority of this world’s inhabitants, that answer would be inconceivable. Most people can see their environment changing, their water being polluted or disappearing, their crops yielding less, their opportunities diminishing and their freedom out of reach. They do not live in peace and prosperity today, and they know that something’s got to change fundamentally if they or their children are going to have any chance of either peace or prosperity.

If you live in peace and prosperity today, you probably live in the “developed” world or are a member of the ruling elite of any nation. If this describes you, then you are sitting at the table and you are taking the gamble; you are a card player. As the lucky recipient of peace and prosperity today, you have the greatest stake in and influence over everyone’s peace and prosperity. Your fate, your peace and your prosperity are the bets on the table, and you are doing the gambling.

If your answer is that nothing substantial needs to change, then doing nothing is a bet that will pay off. But if fundamental change is necessary to protect your peace and prosperity, and if the necessary changes are going to take a few decades to effect, then doing nothing today is a very poor strategy. The risks of being wrong go up every day, as the odds of being able to make the changes in time go down.

“Doing nothing” encompasses a range of different positions and actions, all of which are the equivalent of doing nothing, because they waste time not making changes.

Doing nothing includes trying to prop up or resurrect the status quo; it may feel like action and it may look like action, but it isn’t making the necessary changes; so it’s the same as doing nothing.

Fatalistic abstinence is doing nothing. Deciding that nothing can be changed is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a failure to be here now, to live in the place that you exist in. You’ll never know if action could have changed things if you don’t act. Predicting dire futures that are rescued by the indeterminate resurrection of some amorphous possibility may be a satisfying justification for inaction, but it is still doing nothing.

Doing nothing includes going about your day doing lots of things, being busy and accomplishing the goals you have set yourself. But if you don’t change anything, if you don’t see a need for change or aren’t supporting change, then you are doing nothing too.

In the face of mounting evidence that something needs to change, doing nothing, in all its guises, is supported by two arguments: we can do something later, and doing something now will be just as deleterious as doing nothing. These arguments are only relevant if you’re on top of the heap today, a card player sitting at the table.

The risk of leaving change for tomorrow is that you need to have an accurate notion of how long it will take for changes to take effect, and of how much time is available. If it takes longer to make the changes, or if the time available is shorter than you expect, it will be too late. So if your bet is that change can be forestalled, then you better have a really good grasp of how long it will take to implement the changes required, and how long you’ve got to complete them in. Your risks are compounded by the fact that neither of these variables are really knowable with any degree of certainty. Fundamental changes to the world’s societies could take decades to complete, and there’s a big difference between two decades and five decades. The impact and timing of climate change are also unknowable; we can have a good guess, but the planet is a massively complex system with a myriad of feedback loops. So a strategy of wait and see is extremely risky, because there’s no way of knowing whether waiting even one more year will be too long. You just can’t tell, and the downside of being wrong is that it is a game loser. Betting on this option is the equivalent of putting all your money on one number, for a single spin of a 1,000,000 slot roulette wheel.

The other reason to do nothing is that you are doing so well right now, that virtually any change is bound to reduce your prosperity, your security or your advantage. You may be tempted by the advantage you have today, to feel that under almost any circumstances you’re better off without fundamental change. The political leadership class of virtually every society in the world falls into this group, and that represents a serious obstacle to change. These are the high rollers at the table, the players with the most to lose and the most cards in their hands.

These high-stakes players are crucial determinants of how the game will play out. There are two factors that can influence how they act: control, and mutual results.

In a democracy, these high rollers are there by the choice of the people they represent; if the electorate develops a different view of how important fundamental change is, they can replace the players with other representatives who will act for change. The same replacement process can happen in societies that don’t have democracy; it just tends to be bloodier and messier.

The probability of mutual results could also influence those high rollers that retain their political control. Mutual results is the reality that however the game plays out, we are all affected in the same way, in the end. The high stakes players and the lowest stakes players will all experience the consequences of getting it wrong. If fundamental changes are needed and not enacted in time, the resulting chaos and destruction will affect everyone everywhere on the planet; no matter how rich, how clever or how remote they are.

Mutual results may influence the big players, but it may not. It may seem to them that the odds of a negative outcome are not as bad as they appear to be for the vast majority of other people. In this situation, wresting control away from them will be key to our mutual survival.

A big part of this gamble is the assessment of risk. To stand a reasonable chance of a life lived with peace and prosperity, we are going to need to make accurate and clearheaded calculations about the odds of success for any course of action we take. There are risks inherent in the decision to make fundamental changes to our societies, but the odds lean towards a favorable outcome for the vast majority of us. If we start making the right changes now and we’re too late, we won’t have lost anything. Probably the biggest risk we run is that we make the wrong changes and exacerbate our problems. But if we focus on improving our decision-making processes while reducing the environmental impact of our economies, the chances are good that we’re doing the right things anyway. Nevertheless, what to change and how to change them are very important things to get right; and that’s what this book addresses.

So we have a high-stakes game in which our chances of living in peace and prosperity, maybe even our survival, is at play. The game is mostly being played by a few of the people in the room, and even amongst the players there are those with significantly more cards in their hand. Everyone in the room wins or loses together. The cards represent changes we can make. We can keep them close to our chest, only putting out the minimum number we need to keep the game going; or we can play big, put down a royal flush and go for it. Because everyone wins together, the royal flush strategy has very little downside, but it does mean that the pot will have to be divided amongst all those present in the room. The alternative of a cautious game, favors the players who are at the table, because they don’t have to share their stakes while they have them on the table and the game is still going on.

The risk is that the game will end without anyone playing their winning hand, and everyone in the room loses.

So if the game clock says that there are about five more minutes left to play, what would prevent the players at the table from putting down the strongest straight in their hand? This is where we are. This is the risk we are running.

We, the players, have to look hard at the clock, and ask ourselves if we really think it’s too early to play our strongest hand.

Apparently, we haven’t decided to play our hand yet. Apparently, we still think there’s time and that it serves us to keep our cards for now. I say this because we have not collectively summoned the will to align our actions with a different outcome. We are still on basically the same path and the same trajectory that we have been for the last 100 years: industrial growth that will ‘float all boats’. That’s the equivalent of keeping all our cards in our hand and if we’re wrong: we’re screwed, along with everybody else. Just in case that is the wrong strategy, let’s look at the facts of our situation and review the state of our game today.

Are we relying on our instincts to make the right choices for survival? Are we making choices today that will deliver the results we want tomorrow? These are important questions if we are betting our lives on them. Never mind doing the right thing, have we fundamentally miscalculated the odds? Have we even calculated the odds at all? If not, we could be making a dooming mistake on an evolutionary scale.

In our daily lives we routinely select making better choices tomorrow, in favor of easier choices today. We select personal safety, over the rights of others. We select not looking, over knowing. We select the safety of established opinions, over the dangers of an open mind. We select how it was, over how it could be. We select low price, without recognizing the unincorporated violence embedded in that price. We select personal enrichment today, over the consequences for others tomorrow. In most cases we don’t really think about the choices we are making, our gut tells us that these are the right choices. But are they?

We have a hard time choosing between peace and money. You probably don’t think of it that way, but many of our conundrums can, and should be, expressed as peace versus money. We equate money with security, and that is the phraseology we consciously use to justify and rationalize our choices. We say to ourselves that we are choosing security, not money.

We accord money with the equivalence of security because of a gut level instinct that money should bring us personal security from hunger, hardship and deprivation. This is quite likely true for many of us in the short run, but we would do well to note that our real desire is for security with peace, not the money itself. The money is the means that we believe will enable us to create the security which will allow us to live in peace. We actually desire peace, it’s just that we believe money will give us peace.

We are attracted by the notion that we can own money, that we can possess and protect our money. Whereas peace is not a tangible asset. We understand that peace exists only in the moment of time, dependent on our mutual intention that it should.

When we choose money over peace we do so because it seems more likely to reach us personally than the notion of peace, which we are dependent on others to attain. We choose money over peace when we support oppressive regimes for access to minerals. We choose money over peace when we buy products made from those minerals. We choose money over peace when we make drugs illegal, and buy them anyway. We choose money over peace when we begrudge paying taxes to help others. We choose money over peace when we build more prisons. In every case we argue that our aim is our security. What we mean is our personal security, a very close and narrow view of our personal security, right here and now. The security of our supplies, the security of our morality, the security of our low prices and the security of our lifestyles.

But we are not choosing peace.

We really do desire peace, but we do not actually choose it. We know that helping to oppress the freedom of others is not a choice for peace. We know that poverty does not foster peace in our communities. We know that locking people up does not lift them up. We know all of this, and yet we still choose money over peace. And guess what? Our choices beget our rationale. The oppression, the poverty and the violence that we create, and now see all around us, are further fodder for justifying our decisions to choose money over peace. What d’ya know? Whodathunkit? Our inward facing, narrow, personal logic (aka instinct) has led us to create exactly what we feared all along.

But we still want peace. That hasn’t changed. All the money in the world is no good to us if it does not bring us the security of peace. We know that too. On some level we know that we are taking the great gamble. We are gambling that the personal security we purchase, will last the longer than it will take for the un-peaceful consequences of our choices to catch up with us.

We know that the unfree will seek freedom, that the impoverished will seek their own security and that the put down will rise up. We know all this because we know that that is what we would do if we were there. So we can even see the circular counter-logic of our own arguments, but we still choose money over peace. We are engaged in the risk-reward gamble that has defined our evolution, and which is a fundamental, natural part of our most basic makeup; what we call our “gut instinct”. A set of animal reflexes designed to ensure survival from one moment to the next.

So let’s work with this a little. We choose money over peace because our basic instinct tells us that money is a safer bet than peace. The reward of security bought with money now, feels like a safer bet than the risk that peace will become unattainable where we live, within our lifetimes. We are betting that the wars will happen somewhere else. The poor will not steal from our kitchen to feed their children, and that if they try that we will be able to lock them up and put them away. We are betting that the wars and the poor can be kept at bay, at home and abroad.

If we have got this wrong, the consequences of our choices will destroy our peace before we can experience our purchased security. That would be a mistake that money would be unable to redeem for us. A cool-headed evaluation of the odds is necessary here, before we simply accept our assumptions.

Perhaps one of the first and easiest rationales that comes into our heads, is that we are simply doing what anyone else would do. But even if we can argue that everyone else would make the same choice, that isn’t really relevant, because it is only those of us that have the opportunity to make the choices that are actually defining the consequences. It may be true that others would do the same, but we are the ones making the choices and taking the gamble. It is our choices that are actually determining the outcome. Besides which, mutual poverty of rectitude is not an assessment of risk; it’s just an excuse for inaction.

So let’s evaluate the three primary mechanisms that we believe tilt the odds in favor of money being the right choice for us. Those are:

any consequence of war or conflict will not visit us personally,
the poverty of others will not directly affect our lives
we can erect a system of legal protection, that will insulate us from any risks that escape from the first two assumptions

Wars will Stay Over There

That wars will stay over there, is the first part of our gamble. Certainly this used to be true, but increasingly we can glimpse the chinks in this armor. We call it “terrorism”, and it is abhorrent to target civilians, but we would be well served to recognize that to others it is the globalization of freedom fighting. The same technologies and facilities that smooth the flow of modern commerce are being used by the disenfranchised and the oppressed to spread war outside the pretty confines we would prefer them to stay within. Terrorism is the last resort of the ignorant freedom fighter, but maybe we should figure out that when we see terrorism, it means that some people may have reached their last resort. It would seem pretty obvious to conclude that suicide bombing is the very last resort of anyone, and if we dismiss it as merely the act of a lunatic, then we are not making a cool-headed assessment of the situation. The reality is that war is now mobile, it will not stay over there.

Your own intuition, and every security professional in the world, will tell you that you cannot prevent the manifestation of terrorism, you have to act on its root causes. On the whole we can keep the affects of remote conflicts out of our everyday lives with ever more secure border controls. But the risk that they will spill into our lives through any one of countless opportunities for disruption, from hijacking our transport to poisoning our food supply, is very real. Even if we can keep the actual wars away, can we keep the violence out of our lives?

The Poor can be Kept at Bay

This is the second factor in our calculations of the odds for our gamble. Implicit to this is the acknowledgment that there are poor people (intentionally); so it is not the existence of poverty that is our risk metric, it’s our ability to mitigate the impact of their poverty on our lives. Fundamental to this calculation is the ability to “manage” poverty. That is to say: to control the depth of the poverty, and the location of the poor. If the poor aren’t actually starving, if they have at least something left to lose, then they are less likely to be a threat to our security. Also if they aren’t close to us, the less of a risk they pose to our security, however deep their poverty is. So keeping the really destitute as far away as possible, and the poor that are closest to us out of total despair, would seem to be the tricks to maintaining the odds in our favor. Or, to put it the other way around, the risks are: that the really poor will come over here, and we will not sustain sufficient hope in our local poor.

Of course this gets a little difficult, because the more we help our local poor, the more attractive it becomes for the remote poor to move closer. Even this is manageable, if we can stop the poor from moving around. The trouble with that is that really poor people, denied the ability to improve their situation where they live, tend towards migration and revolt. Those feed into the aforementioned terrorism and war problem; which is another relationship we will have to factor in, when making our final calculations.

So “managing” poverty is a little more complicated than it might appear to be at first. There is no doubt that the local poor represent the most immediate threat to our security, so we have to make sure that we use some of our money to keep them at bay. We can improve our odds if we can keep them from starvation, hold out an advertisement of opportunity and, at the same time, keep their life expectancy low. Just enough support to keep bellies full of cheap food, just enough glitz and glamour to provide the illusion of opportunity, mixed with low levels of education and healthcare to keep their actual ability for progression to a minimum. This formula to create a “happy poor” has worked pretty well for the last hundred years, but it is not actually new. The Romans, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Ottomans, the English and the French have all given this strategy a jolly good go in the past. The trouble with it, as a stand-alone risk mitigation strategy, is that it doesn’t deal with population growth; poor people have a tendency to have lots of children, as a means of increasing their personal security. Unless you can reduce the average life expectancy of the happy poor below the age of reproduction, you can’t stop their numbers growing. The more of them there are, the more of your money you have to spend on keeping them happy. Sooner or later the balance is going to tip, so you won’t have enough left to buy your own security because you’re spending too much keeping the poor happy. Past attempts at fixing this conundrum have included sending the poor off to die in wars before they can reproduce, or sending them off to reproduce abroad in colonies. The former has reduced potential nowadays on account of prohibitions against using children in the military, something that wasn’t a problem anywhere only a hundred years ago. The latter is problematic today due to the lack of places left to colonize. So the risks posed by local poor are more difficult to mitigate these days and, to make matters worse, we have to face the fact that any version of “happy poor” has its limitations; because even modest levels of education and healthcare are going to result in larger populations and higher demands.

The Law will Protect Us

This brings us to the third risk mitigation factor in our calculation: legal restraint. If we can’t get the poor to voluntarily restrain themselves from rudely interrupting our purchased security, we can always try using a legal system to control their unsociable activities. We can increase the odds of our successful use of money to buy personal peace, if we use some of our money to keep the most troublesome poor out of circulation. When we can’t keep them away or happy, then we can lock them up. On paper this looks like a reasonable strategy, but it has some real problems that limit its effectiveness. First and foremost amongst these is that it requires that we pervert the natural course of justice; the consequences of this have an insidious inclination to detrimentally affect the quality of our own peace and security over time. If we are to use the legal system to keep the poor down or out, we have to develop a legal structure that specifically discriminates against the poor. It has to target crimes that the poor are more likely to commit, and attach penalties to those crimes that are sufficiently punitive to keep the guilty effectively repressed. To support those two objectives, it will have to include a legal process that ensures high rates of conviction by suppressing the poor’s ability to use the system to defend themselves.

Now, while those are all well and good on their own, and we have shown that they are perfectly possible to enact, they include a fundamentally unbalancing consequence that bodes ill for our overall odds: they don’t make the poor happy. While we are trying to suppress the top tier of troublemakers, we are actually increasing the dissatisfaction of the great majority of the rest of the poor. Again, this is only a risk factor and it can be managed by upping the quantities of cheap food and distracting illusions of opportunity. But it does have its limits, and sooner or later you reach the point where you just can’t afford to keep putting poor people away, and down, at the same time. It all costs money, especially putting people away – it’s far cheaper to kill them, but that avenue is increasingly closed as a realistic option, especially in large quantities.

So how do the odds look now? What are the chances that our choices to buy personal security with money will outrun the consequences of selecting against peace? I’d say that the odds look a little short, and they look to be getting shorter every day. Obviously it has worked in spurts over time, but we live in a different world today where the opportunity to mitigate the risks is very different than it used to be, and even those opportunities that do still exist have very definite time constraints. Populations are growing, weapons are proliferating and people are starting to evaluate the quality of law against the justice that it delivers.

It really comes down to time. There’s obviously a fuse on this stick, and the gamble comes down to how long you think it’s going to take to burn down. Is that enough time to make choosing money over peace now the right choice for you? And even if it’s the right choice for you today, how long will that remain the case? Do you perceive that at some point in the future the scales will tip, and it simply will not be possible to buy personal security while ignoring the consequences for peace around you? If you do think that that time will come, when will that be? Next year? What about a decade from now, or when your children are grown? And then how will the transition happen, when the odds flip the other way? What will be the consequences of your choices today, when the time comes that those are no longer the right choices? Will the consequences of today’s decisions magically evaporate as soon as you start making different choices? I think not. Right? I mean, you are still the same person and you did make those prior choices, and you could reasonably be held personally responsible for having previously chosen money over peace. Even if you aren’t held personally responsible, French Revolution style, you will still experience the consequences, unless you’re dead.

So how long is that fuse? This is the heart of the gamble. For how much longer is it going to be the right choice to have selected money as the option that delivers you the rewards, and when will it become the choice that only compounds the risks and blows oxygen on the sizzling fuse? I would argue that that time has already passed, but I am obviously in a minority, albeit an increasingly large one, on this matter. I think that every day we continue choosing money over peace we exacerbate the situation. We sponsor more wars, we create more poverty and increase the violence of our societies through oppression, subjugation and deprivation.

Now let’s throw in a relatively new factor: global climate change. Again, this is possibly subject to a discussion about timing, but its reality is no longer the subject of debate. What climate change does, is throw all of this into stark contrast. Not only are many of the historical avenues for mitigation already closed, now the pressures on our global society are going to increase from every angle. Climate change directly and negatively impacts all the significant factors used in calculating the odds of money being the right choice over peace. Climate change puts pressure on resources, increases the likelihood of mass migration, and these in turn increase the likelihood of war, poverty and erosion of the rule of law.

Given that climate change, by itself, threatens peace everywhere; what does that do to the odds for making decisions that further reduce peace in the world right now? It makes matters worser, faster. I think climate change changes everything. The time scale for the impacts of climate change are short; maybe a decade, maybe five, but anyway you look at it, they fall into the bucket of now. Now, because we all know that having chosen money over peace for centuries, it is not going to be reversed in a few months, or even a few years. The consequences of our past choices are going to take decades to be mitigated, let alone stopped. Reversal could take many decades. We know this, it doesn’t take a brainiac to figure out that getting to peace, from where we are today, is going to be a lot of work and take quite a lot of time. The harder we work at it now, the less time it will take; but it’s still going to take some time. This is relevant, because if it’s going to take, let’s say, 30 years to move our societies onto a peaceful footing (the equivalent of extinguishing the fuse) then we, personally, have to start choosing peace over money 30 years before the flame reaches the stick.

Here’s the choice we face today: will we extinguish the fuse before it reaches the dynamite? Will we figure out that the odds have changed and that choosing money over peace today is the wrong choice? Can we see that we are almost at the point where it is no longer a question of risk that we are making the wrong choice? We are entering a time when it is a certainty that peace over money is the only survival choice we have. If we can’t lift our heads up for long enough to look out over the landscape of our consequences and discern the changed nature of our times, in time, then we will let the fuse burn down and the stick will ignite. Our wildest fantasies of greatest dread will pale in comparison to the reality of the times after that event.

I, for one, am for extinguishing the fuse, turning the corner, recognizing the reality of the odds, and choosing peace over money now. There are those, I know, who would say it’s too late, that we have already passed the moment when the fuse was extinguishable; and now there is naught that we can do, save prepare for the explosion. I am not one of those. I can see a different future. I want to gamble now that choosing peace today is the right choice, the survival strategy, the best chance I have. That is the gamble I want to take. I choose peace over money, and I choose to do that now.

If you’re serious about choosing peace, then the next question has to be: how do we get there from here? What do we need to change and what are we aiming for? Those are the questions addressed in this book. A path that leads from where we are now, to where we want to be. It’s not for the faint hearted and it requires that you have decided to choose peace; but if you have, it provides a map for changing the world.

You take your first step, and we can go the rest of the way together.

Part 16 in the serialization of the The Path to A Future – originally published in 2009.
A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
To get a free PDF of the book go to www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

The Path to A Future: Two Words about the Destination

Sustainable prosperity.

It’s a simple description that will not get embellished much in the course of this book, hopefully because it is self explanatory. But it is worth taking a moment to clarify what is not included in that description.

It is not utopian.
It does not suggest equality of outcome.
It does not speak to the veracity or ascendancy of any particular worldview beyond the simple context inherent in the word “sustainable”.
It does not include any necessary configuration of peoples or places, nor does it to accord credence to a situation based on the history that led to the way it is now.
It is not a guaranteed or self-fulfilling prophecy; it will require choices and work all the way there, on arrival, and thereafter.
‘Prosperity’ is intentionally modified by the adjective ‘Sustainable’.

What the destination is, is wedded to practical outcomes in the natural world and it is, above all, realistically achievable.

Part 16 in the serialization of the The Path to A Future.
A new section will be posted every 2 weeks during 2011. Enjoy!
To get a free PDF of the book go to www.standardsoflife.org/thepathtoafuture.

Sustainable Economics paper published!

We have just completed our paper showing a practical path to reaching a sustainable state. This paper brings together various aspects of the Standards of LIFE to focus specifically on why and how universal services are the key to saving our environment. This is an important document – please read it.

Armed with the knowledge in this paper you will be able to explain to others how we can get to a steady state economy and why it will be fantastic once we get there. Truly the next stage in the development of empathic civilization, there’s on need to return to the “dark ages” to save ourselves.

You can read the paper at http://www.standardsoflife.org/Sustainable_Economics as well as download both an ePub version for iPad/iBook/kindle and a PDF version.

The wiki pages are open for adding comments and you can always give feedback via our Facebook page and email to feedback@standardsoflife.org.

Enjoy and educate!

LIFE SPAN – 2011.05.01

LIFE SPAN 2011.05.01 – First Edition of the new LIFE newsletter – subscribe now!
Situation – Nu-clear Power. Policy – No Alternative to Voting. Analysis – The inflation tiger is out of it’s cage and walking around the world economy with a gaggle of central bankers holding onto it’s tail.

LIFE SPAN 2011.05.01

Situational Policy Analysis & News from LIFE

Subscribe at lifespan@standardsoflife.org

Situation – Nu-Clear

Even before you factor in the pollution, proliferation and profligation of nuclear power, the most important thing to understand is the distraction that nuclear power represents.

The situation at Fukushima in Japan has brought the world’s attention to one aspect of the dangers of nuclear power generation, without even touching on the dangerous pollution resulting from mining and producing the nuclear materials in the first place, or dealing with the storage, recycling and disposal of nuclear waste at the other end of the cycle. But these dangers are not even the most dangerous thing about nuclear power, the most dangerous thing about nuclear power is that it distracts us from investing in the development of really sustainable renewable power generation.

Every single dollar invested in nuclear power could be used more productively invested in renewable power or improving efficiency. Every single physicist researching nuclear power could be more productively researching sustainability, deep chemistry or efficiency. The time for stop-gap measures has passed, we must aim straight for the finish line now.

Last month the world also committed to spending $1Bn on putting another protective cap over the leaking Chernobyl nuclear reactor. That has to be done, but it is just another example of time, money and effort that cannot now be spent on developing the sustainable energy infrastructure we need. Will we need to the same thing to Fukushima in 25 years from now?

A new clarity is developing in which we can see that any power source that is not re-newable is going to have insurmountable waste problems providing the energy we need to run a planet with 6, 7 or 8 billion prosperous people on it.

Now we can see Nu-Clear – we don’t want nuclear!

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Policy – No Alternative to Voting

This week the UK will hold its second national referendum ever to decide whether to change the vote counting process used in national elections from decrepit to deprecated. It’s a miserable choice that incorporates almost nothing learned from the last 100 years of democratic practice. If the “no” camp wins it will probably be the end of the Liberal-Democrat Party in the UK, but, other than that, either result will make almost no discernible difference to the quality of democracy in the UK. Minority political parties will still be able to win elections, safe seats will remain safe and the diverse, multi-layered needs of citizens will remain unrepresented.

Citizen empowerment through democratic process is at the root of dealing with the most pressing issues we face, and apathy about how our votes are counted and who gets to vote for what betrays a complete failure to grasp the importance of this subject. Voting is not a dry subject for “policy wonks”, it is the most vital issue at the heart of our evolution! Efficable democracy that harnesses the collective wisdom of everyone’s input is the vital building block on which we can make the changes necessary to move to a sustainable prosperity. This is too important to be be left to the whims of incumbent politicians, so the citizenry must take the lead on moving to the best available models for voting and representation.

If we are to retool our civilization for sustainability, the extent, depth and breadth of the changes we need to make to our economic and social structures will require us to have a massively more participatory and effective political structure than we have today. The politics we need must include:

self-selected constituency boundaries defined by the resident citizens, not by the politicians
multi-layered, multi-constituency, multi-member democratic structures that reflect all the glorious diversity of humanity spread across the surface of the planet
bottom up power structures that allow jurisdiction to originate at the bottom and move up and back down the layers, locating decision making power at the appropriate layer for the scale of the decision

These are not difficult structures to imagine or implement, but they will only come about when we, the citizens for whom democracy is supposed to work, take control of the agenda and require proper, modern and comprehensive change. A referendum proposed and framed by incumbent politicians is not the way to change this properly, real change will come as part and parcel of the policy framework of a government specifically elected to make the changes. Over to you, citizens.

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Analysis – Tiger Tails

Inflation. Inflation is the increase in prices without any corresponding increase in value, i.e. when the same thing costs more. There are three possible causes for an increase in price: an increase in the underlying cost of producing the thing, an increase in the demand for a thing that is constrained in supply, or an increase in the price just because there’s so much money lying around. The first two cases are not within the control of bankers or politicians and are simply a fact of life as materials, products and services become more or less available, and demand for them falls or rises. The important thing about the first two types of price changes is that they represent real changes in wealth, in other words the price changes are aligned with the change in the value of the thing. It is the last case, the one where the price of something changes without any change in its value, that presents a real problem for capitalist economies and politicians. This kind of inflation can only occur in a “capitalist” economy because the value of the currency in a capitalist economy is not based on anything real – the money supply is managed by special banks called “central banks” who are also responsible for minting the paper/coin money we use to pay for things and controlling the credit which commercial banks use to lend out.

The job of a central bank is manage the amount of money that is flowing around the economy such that it is roughly equal to the amount of value, or wealth, that is recognized in the economy. As you might imagine, this is a pretty tricky thing to get right because the central bankers have to have a really keen grip on the state of the economy, the quantity of transactions and the amount of wealth being generated. If central bankers print too much money, or allow commercial banks to lend too much money, and that money is not matched to real increases in wealth, then the wealth that does exist simply gets revalued in terms of how much money is available: this is called “inflation” because the price of the same thing gets inflated over time without any real change in the value of the thing itself. If the central bank doesn’t print enough money or allow commercial banks to lend enough money, then the economy cannot grow at its natural pace and the lack of money can gum up the works. Not having enough currency can even lead to the strange situation where the price of a thing goes down even though its value remains constant, because the currency has gone up in value to reflect an increase in wealth that has not been matched by an increase in the supply of available currency. In fact, to stop this kind of problem happening, central bankers err very slightly on the side of extra money and allow for a minimal rate of inflation as normal, typically this inflation is considered controllable when it is less than 2% a year.

There are two tools in the central bankers’ briefcase that have proved invaluable for getting this tricky balancing act right: caution and confidence. Normally central bankers are very cautious about increasing the money supply and spend most of their time trying to make lots of small changes over time in response to continuous monitoring of the state of the economy, changes in wealth, and keeping a really keen eye on what the commercial banks are up to. The central bank controls the commercial banks by forcing them to keep a certain amount of cash on hand, as a deposit against what they are lending out – these are called “reserves”. Also, because in a capitalist system the commercial banks can lend more money than they have taken in deposits, there is always the risk that they might get asked by their deposit customers for the return of more money than the bank has on hand; so commercial banks can always turn to the central bank and borrow the money they need at an interest rate set by the central bank. This interest rate, that a commercial bank may at any time have to pay for money they borrow from the central bank, effectively sets the floor on interest rates charged by the commercial banks on loans they make to their borrowers, and in this way the central bank controls the “cost of money” in the marketplace. If the central bank is cautious in managing the supply of money, and keeps the commercial banks on a tight leash, then everyone’s confidence in the ability of the whole system to properly represent their real wealth in paper money is maintained and everyone stays calm.

Now, if things start to go wrong they can head south pretty quickly: prices inflate, depositors loose confidence in the value of their savings, they withdraw their money from the banks, more customers get worried about the ability of the banks to give them their money back; traders lose confidence in the ability of the currency to represent their wealth and start jacking up their prices, or start asking to be paid in other things that they think will maintain their value, like gold or some other country’s currency. It can get really messy really quickly and will cause an economy to collapse with wholesale destruction of wealth and confidence. It is the job of central banks to stop this from ever happening, and that’s why they typically operate independently of politicians so that they don’t get asked to do silly things like just start printing money to pay for things the government wants but doesn’t have any real wealth to pay for. Caution and confidence, caution and confidence: the watchwords of effective, modern, monetary management.

When caution is defrayed, confidence is sure to follow at some point, and that is what happened in 2008. After a couple of decades of deprecated caution, a sudden fall in the perceived value of assets on which the commercial banks had staked their reputations led to an almost complete collapse of confidence overnight. The commercial banks were bankrupt and the central banks were on the hook for keeping the whole system running – the massive fall in real wealth was absorbed by the taxpayers, in the form of loans and gifts to the commercial banks, to stop the commercial banks from actually going bankrupt. At this point in the debacle there was a choice: recognize the loss of wealth and reorganize the banking system, or try and cover the bases until the loss of wealth was regained. The central bankers and politicians chose the latter, and that is the world we live in now. Money was printed and credit expanded on a massive scale to shore up commercial banks around the world, especially in the US and Europe, on the grounds that the depreciated assets would regain their value and any permanent loss in asset value would be made up for by increases in wealth derived from other activities in the economy. In the meantime there shouldn’t be an inflationary risk because all the extra money printed was just going to be absorbed by the balance sheets of the commercial banks and wouldn’t leak out into the rest of the economy. In theory, as assets values recovered and economic activity picked up, the commercial banks would re-establish their balance sheets and the central banks would simply draw back in all the extra money they had printed, so that some time down the road the total wealth and the total amount of money sloshing around would be back in equilibrium again. Neat, tidy and easy, eh? Not quite so much.

In other parts of the world, like China, that weren’t directly affected by a collapse of their commercial banks, they did still feel a pinch from the slow down in economic activity that occurred. In those places they increased the money supply by letting their banks lend out tons of extra credit so that people and business could spend lots to make up for the lost demand that previously came from the economies that are now having banking problems. In these countries they figured they could control the inflationary risk of printing all that money by making sure that the money went into activities that resulted in real increases in wealth, like railways and other infrastructure investments. The trouble with that plan is that real increases in wealth only occur naturally with the development of better things and ways of doing things, wealth does not simply increase in response to expanded cash spending. Just boosting the amount of cash in the system leads to people making silly decisions about what to spend that money on, and too often those decisions fail to generate any real increase in wealth; so the money is wasted and sloshes around looking for a quick bet, like the “inevitable and certain” rise in the price of property or other assets like gold.

Now its 2011 and here’s a summary of where we have ended up. The commercial banks have taken all the cheap money the central banks gave them and used it make huge “profits” using activities that do not create any additional wealth, often by lending the money back to the government at a higher rate than they borrowed that same money from the central bank. There has been no re-appreciation in the value of the assets that lost their value in 2008. The extra money injected into the system by the central banks has found its way into “quick bets” on assets around the world, jacking up the prices of property in Asia and raw materials in developing countries. One intended consequence of the rescue plan has come true: there has been relatively little fall in overall demand, a few percentage points here and there but nothing like the 20% revaluation that the other choice in 2008 would have required. Lastly, we live in a very financially orientated world because we are trying to use money to provide for the future security of our old age, and that means that we have a lot of wealth tied up in financial investments we call pensions. All these investments are effectively part of the overall money supply, and in places like the US the total of these investments is greater than the total annual GDP of the country – that’s a lot of free-floating money in the system.

Now, before we bring the strings of this story together, I want to remind you of the other types of price increases that occur naturally in markets: increases in the demand for constrained things (‘materials, products and services become more or less available, and demand for them falls or rises’). We live in a world where demand (population x aspiration) is increasing faster than we are developing new ways of meeting that demand, so the demand for the materials that drive our current way of life (food, oil, metals) is increasing without a commensurate increase in supply. This means that we are living in a world where the price of basic inputs is rising naturally, and will continue to rise until we retool for sustainability. The more successful we are at raising living standards (aspirations) the greater the increase in demand, and the higher the prices go. It is important to recognize this because the effect on the economy of naturally rising prices is the same as the effect of inflationary price increases: workers demand higher wages to allow them to maintain the same standard of living. This is the “price-wage” spiral that central bankers have learned to fear, because once it starts it stokes inflationary price rises through cyclical reinforcement, and it is really difficult to control without severely affecting living standards, which often results in social unrest and upheaval.

Think of money supply management as the tiger than drives the incredible development of wealth in a modern economy; so long as the tiger remains in a cage, or at least on a leash, the economy grows and wealth can appreciate naturally as a result of everyone’s efforts to add value to each other’s lives. The growth in wealth is not constrained by the availability of some fixed material, like gold, and every contribution by every participant can be recognized at the point when value is created. But if the tiger gets out of its cage and off it’s leash, it marauds around the economy spreading destruction and fear. Then it becomes the problem that has to be dealt with, instead of the enabler of greater good.

The inflation tiger is out of it’s cage and walking around the world economy with a gaggle of central bankers holding onto it’s tail.

While we would all like to wish the central bankers the very best of luck in their attempts to hold on to the tiger’s tail, the following factors suggest that they will not be able to hold on for long:

demand for finite resources is increasing naturally (outside of their control) and that will result in price increases
price increases will lead, and has already, to demands for increases in pay
the imbalance in the ratio between available cash and real asset values remains uncorrected from 2008
the socio-political system of attempting to provide social security using financial instruments (i.e. pensions) means that there is a lot of money floating around the system that cannot be controlled without degrading the social security that that money is supposed to provide; i.e. in a capitalist economy where social security is provided by pension investments, it becomes politically unacceptable to properly manage the money supply in line with real asset values if the value of those assets falls, effectively quashing the independence of central banking and degrading the ability to keep the true value of monetary investments in line with wealth
democratic politics and capitalist economics both require processes for orderly failure, a “permanent” political power structure cannot accept failure so it will inevitably intervene (unsuccessfully and counterproductively) in monetary management to preserve its political hegemony
the money in the current system is controlled by a very small percentage of the population who are already wealthy and who do not see the need to maintain the ratio of money to wealth, they simply seek to increase the quantity of money they have; remember that money affects the human brain the same way that sex and drugs do, it acts on the most primitive reward structures of our brain, overriding the newer “thinking” parts of our brains

The benefit of a capitalist economy is the near universal and instant recognition of value added as wealth; the condition of that is the requirement to carefully manage the money supply. If the social security of the people or the political power of the rulers is dependent on the preservation of wealth, then the necessary leeway to control money supply in line with wealth will be degraded and the economic system will collapse. Capitalist economics requires the ability to recognize wealth destruction, and that in turn requires a political system that allows for the destruction of power and a social system that survives the destruction of wealth.

In the end the only way to maintain monetary credibility is to be able to adjust money supply in line with wealth, both up and down, and that will require that we decouple social security from financial investments. In the meantime we/they will try and make the current system work for as long as we/they can, and so we are in for a spectacle of monetary gymnastics over the coming years as the bankers of the world try and keep the tiger from running loose.

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News – SPAN gets wings, fly with us!

This the first issue of the new newsletter from LIFE: Situational Policy Analysis and News (SPAN). LIFE SPAN is published online and provides more in-depth coverage of situations at the forefront of public policy at the current time.

To keep information flowing we encourage you to sign up for direct delivery of LIFE SPAN to your mailbox, so that any disruptions in the availability of Facebook, the blog site or the web wiki site do not affect your ability to get the latest news and updates from LIFE. Just send an email to lifespan@standardsoflife.org and we will add your email address to the distribution list, you can always do the same to unsubscribe at a later date if you want to. We will never share your email with any other organization.

Euro Tour 2011: if you are in Europe and would like to meet up to discuss starting a Local LIFE group, we are scheduling events from June 13th to July 7th. Email europe2011@standardsoflife.org if you’re interested in hosting an event.

Wake up!

Sleep-walking would be a particularly tragic way to go. After all that evolving, developing and civilizing, to just sleep walk into oblivion would hardly seem to do those millennia justice. The good news is that there some fairly sharp jabs to the collective ribcage happening, and there seems to be some awakening.

America makes for a good example because its big, and when a giant is sleepwalking, you can see the others in room scurrying to get out of the way. Mr Obama is a nice enough guy, and that guy Ryan looks decent, but they are both selling a load of twoddle. A 10% cut or a 20% cut? Either way the giant’s pants will fall down, and he’ll trip. Last week Obama warned the good people of the USA that in 14 years from now (2025) the amount of taxes paid would only be enough to cover pensions and medical costs for the poor and the elderly. Wow! Except that: the taxes paid today (2010) are only enough to cover pensions, medical costs for the poor and the elderly, interest on the debt and the other mandatory programs – the entire military and discretionary budgets of the US are uncovered! No education, no transport, no infrastructure, no defense! See for yourself.

This economic model doesn’t work, it simply cannot add up; no matter how many cuts are made or how many taxes are raised. Total Economic Awareness (TEA) is bust – not everything can be priced in dollars and paid in dollars. The TEA Party are the only honest ones about this: their solution is to disband society, every dog for itself, and devil take the hindmost. That’s the only economic model in which TEA works, and it’s not a world I want to live in, do you?

“Can’t we just go back to where we were a few decades ago?” (Old liberals ask some version of this simple question, born of a lifetime fatigue of fighting the good fight and a nostalgia for less urgent times.) No, we can’t. We can’t because we no longer live on borrowed infrastructure, with swollen productive demographics, and easy exploitation of a ‘third world’. Sorry, those times have expired and now we have to deal properly with billions of people, a finite planet and honest respect for everyone’s rights.

We didn’t pay for what we’ve got.
We’re not paying for what we’re using.
We haven’t saved for what we need.

This not a budget balancing problem, this is a philosophical realignment problem.

If we don’t want to live in a TEA-dog-devil world, what’s the alternative? The only real option is a universal-social-love world. It so happens that that is also the cheapest, most sustainable and funnest world to live in!

Let’s get some clarity about the world we do actually live in, so we can be clear about why TEA economics doesn’t and won’t work. We live in relative peace, with fairly good healthcare and decent nutrition: that means that our society has a “balanced demography”, in which less than half the population is out of school, able bodied and under retirement age. We live on a warming planet, on which the next 50 years of climate instability are already locked in by our actions during the last 100 years: a healthy, sustainable society has to have the kind of infrastructure that we will have to work really hard for several decades to build. In a multi-polar, mutually-respecting world, a prosperous economy cannot be dependent on the exploitation of other people, stored energy or the waste of resources: that is going to require a really fundamental reorganization of our society and its economy. We need to be able to rebuild our global infrastructure for sustainability while we support a majority of our contemporaries, without exploiting each other or the planet.

Is it starting to get clearer now? Are we going to get to where we need to go, in the time we have available, with spending cuts and tax rises? No, tinkering with the percentages simply won’t do it. Universal Social Awareness (USA) is the route to understanding how we can rearrange our social and economic structures to achieve what must be done in the coming decade or so. As we wake up we will start to see that our mutual promise of social support is not properly represented in a cheque, and when it is delivered in kind instead it liberates our economy, empowers our democracy, and liberates our nature.

Go to the wiki and read about how simple changes to the way we deliver social security, organize our democracy, and pay for it all, provide a path to a future we want to live in.

Peace, love and awakening.

Growing Brains

We’ve all got to start growing a brain. Then we can use that brain to see through the fog of our common delusions. Here are some examples of myths circulating in today’s “news” that you can see through.

Governments create jobs.

Jobs are work that you do that someone else is prepared to pay you for. Apart from working for the government doing things that the government is prepared to pay you for, the only thing governments do is decide whether to stop you working or not.
Governments can help create the conditions for employment by investing over longer terms than private enterprise is prepared to, and by reducing barriers to working. Governments can also protect work by preventing monopolistic and anti-competitive activity in private enterprise.

Governments do not create jobs. You have skills and desire and when you have the chance to put those to good use you create your own job. The two biggest barriers to full employment today are the lack of marketplaces for micro services and products and minimum wage regulations.

We can’t afford welfare.

Only societies that are dependent on exploitation can afford to pay for comprehensive cash benefits instead of welfare, but no society can afford not to provide welfare for all.
If welfare means sending out checks to cover the market value of every basic need in the society, then it’s true that no one can afford to provide welfare.
If welfare means ensuring that everyone has access to basic life sustaining materials and services, then it’s true that no society can afford not to provide those services to all of their citizens that need them.

We can afford to provide universal services.

The answer to global climate instability and the energy crisis is “X”.

There is no single answer to the problem of moving from the unsustainable exploitation of stored energy resources to the satisfaction of all energy needs from sustainable energy sources. This is a massively multifaceted problem that requires many massively multifaceted responses.

The simple change that will stimulate ALL of the many answers we need, is to price the energy we use today so that it incorporates the future cost of transitioning to new energy infrastructures and sources. It’s called “waste loading” and EVERY product and service, including energy, needs to include the cost of dealing with its waste, in its purchase price.

Private enterprise is the original source of wealth, and it allows us to collect the taxes that support our society.

Our society is actually the original source of wealth, and it’s our social infrastructure that allows private enterprise to exist at all. What part of basic history can we not remember from the oft repeated story of civilization?

Peace allows the flourishing of trade and education, which facilitates the development of infrastructure and technology, which stimulates innovation and enterprise. Without the social structures that engender peace, there is no wealth or enterprise.

We must steal our selves to remember the true order of things, we much pinch ourselves awake from our walking dream. The economy is a child of our society, not the other way around!

There’s nothing we can do about it.

Oh yes there is!

We aren’t bankrupt/trainwrecking/deluded, we just need to change this rate/law/rule.

It’s true that any single problem is amenable, in the short term, to a particular or minor change.

If we didn’t spend money on this, then we could afford that.
If we elected this politician instead of that politician, they would sort something out.
If people were just a little more free, it might work itself out.

If we only had one or two things wrong, if we only had one or two problems, if we could just get through my lifetime without having to address the big picture… then a little change would do.

But there aren’t, we don’t and you can’t. We need system change. Not because we like change, not because we’re jonesing for more excitement, but because the reality of our predicament is that we have arrived at the point of decision and time waits for no one.

Join us as we learn to grow our brains. www.StandardsofLIFE.org

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LIFE SPAN 2011.08.20 – Europe’s Future

Situational Policy Analysis & News from LIFE

Situation – Debts and Dangers

Policy – The LIFE Plan for Europe

Analysis – A Light for the LIFE of the World

News – LIFE Party launching in the UK in 2012, and the rest of Europe in 201… ?

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Wars will Stay Over There

The Poor can be Kept at Bay

The Law will Protect Us

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Sustainable prosperity.

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LIFE SPAN 2011.05.01

Situational Policy Analysis & News from LIFE

Situation – Nu-Clear

Policy – No Alternative to Voting

Analysis – Tiger Tails

News – SPAN gets wings, fly with us!

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