Economics isn't Economical

ECONOMICS ISN'T ECONOMICAL

There is a natural economics operating in nature, supply and demand are in constant, dynamic flux, but economic systems are created by humans. Our conceptions of economies are artificial and incomplete. Economics is a game we play among ourselves, but we don't know all the rules. Most economic systems aren't economical because we can't see all effects and consequences. Human economies aren't self-regulating, perhaps a reflection that we are a poorly self-regulating specie. Good economies must be efficient, energy saving, ecological, in short, economical. Economics must be directly tied to the natural environment. Eco-economics is the wave of the near future. It should be the current wave. The root word "eco" is common to both economics and ecology. We must take that to heart.

The natural economy is efficient and economical; everything is recycled. Energy comes from the sun, plants use it, insects and animals eat them and other animals, they all defecate, bacteria and molds eat the remains, breaking down the organic materials to compounds that plants can use. Nothing is wasted. Yet even here there is some energy loss that is offset by the sun. Ultimately, it was our sun that produced our biofuels - coal, oil, gas, trees.

There are both competition and cooperation in the natural economy. Most human economies focus on competition, a one-sided approach. In our hands economics has become warfare by other means. Corporations are allowed to engage in "Hostile Takeovers" of other corporations. However, we can learn from the natural world how to achieve a sustainable, steady-state economy.

Our current economies are waste economies; they were conceived without any understanding of the natural energy flow and recycling. Economic flow doesn't match energy flow; it tends to loss. We are using up the planet's resources at an alarming rate because we are breeding more people who want more things. It can't last much longer. Many previous human societies have crashed because they didn't understand this basic fact.

Once we thought that the Earth's resources were limitless. Any scarcities were temporary and could be solved by technology. Now, we see peak oil on the horizon and rising prices for many natural resources. It can't be reversed.

Our societies are more fragile than many of us realize. In the event of a major natural or human disaster the social structures could break down, leading to a catastrophic domino effect. Diseases, famines, wars, etc., beyond our abilities to repair may await us. When medical, social and political services cannot perform their duties, then further social degradation will occur. Civilization could easily collapse. Everything in our developed societies is so intertwined that when one sector breaks down beyond easy repair, the rest will also collapse. Hundreds of millions of people could die, perhaps most of the human race. With population pressure reduced the environment would slowly recover and humanity would again begin the long climb back to civilization, but that likely would take thousands of years. And if natural resources, such as minerals and oil, had been so permanently depleted by us, could they ever achieve the kind of civilization that we have? Or should they?

We live at the top of the food chain, which means that our lives depend on the health of all the natural ecosystem. That health is dependent on having a large diversity of species, which we are exterminating. We already face serious environmental degradation with pollution, global warming and destruction of forests. To address these problems may cost more than we can afford.

The environmentalists' position that we are endangering the planet is very misguided and misses the mark. Mother Earth is doing just fine. She has been hit by asteroids millions of years in the past; at least twice most life has been destroyed, but it has come back. It's humanity that's in peril and only we are responsible for it. We have been shitting in our own living rooms, not noticing, and now we're up to our necks and sinking fast. There's no place to shovel it out to. We can't hurt the planet, only change it, but we can exterminate ourselves.

I don't want to panic you. Panic will not help, only make the situation worse. Our collective psychology makes us ignore the problems or at least belittle them. We're in a state of denial.

Our current world economy is primarily a consumerist one based on creating artificial desires. It's all based on greed, desire for political and social power and money. We want to make money, not useful products or services. That's insane - raving madness. In the U.S. it's primarily an entertainment and gambling economy. The entertainment part should be clear - we work to have leisure and things, but we don't get much time for leisure. Gambling is the stock market, especially with institutions that make money on high-risk speculation, such as Hedge funds, derivatives, not on any real products or services. There's no stability. The recent sub-prime mortgage debacle is a good example.

We buy lots of things that we don't need that are built to wear out quickly and get thrown out and buried in landfills or incinerated, all adding to pollution of land, water and air. What little recycling we do is minuscule compared to the amount of waste, and it sometimes costs considerable energy to recycle, adding to the use of dwindling resources and more pollution. Literally, we can't afford waste. Someday, not too far away, we will be forced to mine landfills.

Everything should be recycled. If Nature hasn't a way because our technological society has created unnatural processes and materials, then we must create ways to deal with it.

Our economies encourage the creation of more products and services that simply aren't necessary. Everything possible is done to create more jobs that aren't needed, just to grow the economy. It's the growing population pressure that drives it. We don't know how to have an economy that doesn't rely on increasing population. That population pressure is increasing competition among us just to survive and get our share of finite resources. It's a disaster beginning to happen.

Look at how skewed our developed economies have become throughout the 20^th century. Look at how we waste resources and energy. We ship most food products thousands of miles, even products that could be grown locally. Large agribusiness isn't a sustainable model. Not only does that waste energy, but places us in a terribly insecure position should any natural or human caused disaster interrupt shipping. Most manufacturing is done overseas because it is cheaper, but with rising shipping costs that is becoming economically unfeasible. We have been wasting energy all along, not seeing that it would come back to haunt us. Our economic models are crap. There's no long-term vision. By that I mean hundreds of years.

The shipping industry is an excellent example of energy unconsciousness and illustrates many similar threads in our economy. Because energy to ship anything long distance was cheap when this industry took off in the early 20^th century, anything could be brought from anywhere in the world. This realization led to an expansion of sea, land and air shipping that created more jobs. Because more people are being born, they eventually need jobs, and investors and business are always seeking new ways to create more jobs. As wages rose and some overseas countries developed stable economies, business leaders fueled the outsourcing of manufacturing to those countries where labor was cheap. This is turning out to have disastrous consequences. We have wasted enormous amounts of energy in this ill-thought-out process.

We need to move to regional and local based economies. Manufacturing and farming must be done near where products are consumed. Many small factories and farms would be better than large, corporate operations because they can be more responsive to changing needs.

The natural resources of our country should have been our birthright, owned and managed by all of us, but were either bought by private businesses or leased to them at a pittance by our government. Then, the products were sold back to us at highly inflated prices. We've been cheated even before the birth of this country. Much of our forests and minerals are gone.

We're destroying farmland to build housing for more people who will need more farmland to feed them. We're not biting the hand that feeds us, we're eating it.

Besides oil, some mineral resources are becoming scarce, more costly to mine and process lesser quality ores. Copper prices have skyrocketed because of this. How can we run a technological civilization without this immensely important metal we need for electrical conduction? What other mineral resources are in decline and what future crises will this cause?

Water shortages, even in the United States, especially in the southwest, are becoming critical. In many other countries this problem is well past the critical stage. This social problem is causing privatization of water resources because it's very profitable, but ruinous on human populations. It should be a human right to have access to clean water.

Have you ever considered how much timber it takes to make paper for all the packaging, catalogs, junk mail, magazines and newspapers produced everyday? Or how about all those billions of plastic containers we use and throw away? It's thousands of acres of forest, millions of tons of oil.

The clearcutting of forests was a cheap way to get materials, but with no thought for the future. This rape of the Earth is really a mass rape of ourselves. Forests should be renewable resources. All private forest product industries should be required to replant forests and use only those resources. Now, we should ban all paper catalogs, mass advertising (junk) mailings, newspapers and magazines, much of the office paper economy, which are the largest users of trees, but still allow books to be published. The Internet can and already is replacing these.

The "services" that Nature gives us are almost incalculable. What do we pay back to it? We need large areas of natural forests just to clean the air, act as watersheds, support many species of animals and insects for the health of the environment. And we will have to limit human ingress - they can't be tourist destinations, as are our national parks, because that would damage them. Then, we should buy and set aside from all development, under international law, many old-growth forests around the world. The same reasoning also applies to the oceans, which are under severe stress.

It's human beings who value things, not the impersonal market. Markets can set price, but can't determine cost. Markets are essentially amoral and based on short-term perspectives that tend to ignore long-term costs. Price doesn't account for cost and is undervalued. Value only operates within a social context. There is no intrinsic value in anything without humans. But our values aren't always rational. We often put wants before basic needs in our priorities. Every person has some values that differ from others. There may be sort of a collective conditional and consensual agreement in any society, but even that perspective may be flawed. Just because it is a majority opinion doesn't make it right for humanity. We need to revalue many things. Some things should be forbidden to have commercial value, but a higher value that no one can afford. A thing can be both free and priceless because it is a collective necessity.

The problem with modern economic theories is that they are ideological and political, not science, not entirely fact based. Economists aren't objective and impartial because they support growing an existing economy rather than analyzing it from a complete environmental perspective. Most of their theories are ways to increase the current economies, but don't take the whole environment into account. Most economists are capitalists and so promote capitalism, which is just a political and social ideology. Capitalism is confused with a free economy, but a totally free economy has never existed and may be impossible. Unregulated capitalism will eventually destroy itself; it isn't self-regulating, a belief that has been promoted by too many economists and politicians.

Capitalism is the encouragement of short-term greed, always a detriment to society. Economy should be secondary to society's needs; serve it. You may not make profit at the expense of society - that is what capitalism does. Socialism, that social/political opposition to capitalism, is no better and often leads to other kinds of coercion, such as limiting individual initiative and action, which usually benefits not only the individual, but society, as well.

We have experienced the problems with planned economies - they don't work because they can't take into account an almost infinity of variables - something important will be ignored that can crash the system or at least make it inefficient and unfair. But some social regulation must be done to direct the economy toward goals for the well-being of the entire society.

We need free economies in which each of us can earn livings of our choosing, start businesses, sell our labor, knowledge and skills to whomever we wish. The concepts of being an employee and of forced or expected retirement are just social and political adaptations that have had negative unintended consequences. The freedom of the individual to do these things has been demonstrated to work best to maximize personal economic health and happiness. However, this cannot be an unregulated free-for-all. Individuals may not step on others rights nor have a privilege to harm the environment or the social body. We need to have a consensus on what is permissible.

We need to reconceptualize economics. We don't live in free economic systems, no matter what political system we live in. All governments control and print money - a monopoly. Privatization isn't a solution because it thwarts broad social interests. The centrally administered and top-down approach of modern national economic systems is a massive, lumbering beast that limits diversity and the ability to quickly respond as conditions change. This one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn't work efficiently. We, the people, need more control over our private, personal and community economies and must move to regional and local systems that better fit conditions where we live.