PART 1 – ECONOMICS

1.      THE COMMONS
2.      CURRENCY AND CREDIT CREATION
3.      GOODWILL
4.      BARTER SYSTEMS



The first aspect in looking at the existence of a Local Self-Sustaining (or Self-Sufficient) Community (LSSC) would have to be the viability of that community. There are plenty of ghost towns dotted across our continent to clearly remind us of this fact. In addition to viability, I would also like to add to this the concept of 'vitality' which I'll explain more about in a minute. So let's begin to analyze the various components of an economy to discover what those components are and how they might constructively and productively work together. By 'working together' this applies to everyone involved within a community as opposed to what benefits the relative few to the disadvantage of the remaining many.

Personally, as I've been studying this topic, it's becoming more and more plain to me that there are certain components inherent in or to a group of people working together to create an 'economy'...and  even more specifically, that some of the most important elements have been buried, glossed over, ignored, or not fully understood. I'm also realizing that I have greatly misunderstood or not even recognized how this has contributed to many of the problems we're experiencing today...and tragically on a global scale.

I'm certainly no economics expert and barely made it through entry-level economics in college. However, despite that being the case, no professor in any of my business (‘be-useless’ – as I’ve heard it referred to lately) courses ever truly explained the general concepts and imagery of what economics actually represents and how it flows. It also doesn't mean that this very general understanding requires a Ph.D. in Economics from an ivy league to comprehend. So what, on a very generalized level, are these concepts? And how in the most general sense do they work or interact? Perhaps if we can better understand them in a more broad perspective, then we can better apply them in a practical manner on a local level.

One of those concepts falls under the category referred to in the following article as the commons. This 'commons' includes what we inherit from the earth itself as well as from previous generations. This has also been otherwise known as the 'commonwealth' or those innate benefits we share in common. The most significant factor being the important questions that arise in determining what exactly our collective responsibility is in utilizing, dispersing, and preserving that commonwealth for current and future generations. Then we must determine what methods best protect and uphold this essence of the commonwealth and its innate value.

Lots of people have lots of ideas and strong opinions about this stuff..obviously. And it's certainly much broader than just politics and activism. It also covers much more than just the 'environment' and 'protecting the environment' with the controversies and arguments running rife in those directions.

This first concept is a biggie and is certainly fraught with inconsistencies and malpractice today - whether it's intentional or not. What this article articulated for me was a broader understanding of what the 'commons' or 'commonwealth' is all about and what all it indeed implies. Once again, it appears to me that much has been misunderstood and also manipulated to arrive at certain outcomes or conclusions.

So let's just erase the blackboard of all the current noise, step back in time a bit, and try to be as objective in all of this as we possibly can...especially given our current circumstances in our nation and the world today. There is definitely a unique balance that needs to be walked in regards to how we care for and maintain what we have been endowed with in this generation...and we need to hold ourselves accountable to this very important fact. It's not our place to steal from and plunder the next generations for narrow short-term goals...whether we realize this is what's happening or what we're doing or not. It's our responsibility to get it figured out.

As much as we decry the deplorable state of affairs in our economy and with our culture, this all didn't just happen overnight. Yes, human nature will always be human and that underbelly will always exist, but does that give us carte blanche excuse to give up...to simply take the laizzes-faire approach...whatever will be will be? For all you middle-aged and older (those from the Greatest Generation) conservative Christians...which includes myself....we'd better just listen up and pay attention here.

We need to ask ourselves what specifically have we done and what are we doing now to provide anything remotely close to the blessings and quality of life we were given the luxury to experience, take advantage of, and grow up in? The "ME" generation didn't just bubble up out of a vacuum and it's not just applicable to the baby-boomers and young crowd either. Who's responsible? The older, wiser, more mature, more experienced, better educated, largely over-privileged crowd that should know better. That's who. And especially those who call themselves 'Christian' in my humble opinion...that is if we truly believe what we say that we believe.

This isn't something any government is going to solve for us or any nation for that matter. It starts with a basic attitude and desire to do the right thing - not just for today but also for tomorrow. It starts on the grassroots level which basically means personal decisions and choices regarding the family unit. It's what we do in regard to our own families and what we set up and/or protect for our children and grandchildren. Our question shouldn't be 'how does this benefit me now?' but 'what are the repercussions and impact of what I do now?' What kind of example am I setting and would I appreciate having this done to me - especially if I never had any say in the matter?

As we progress in this study, I ask you to consider from a very broad context more of the moral, ethical, and even spiritual ideas and concepts that come to bear. It has brought into stark focus specific teachings I've seen in the Bible but brings an entirely new light and comprehension to what they imply. A few of the big ones jump out immediately and I'll highlight those as they come up in the articles in [] as we continue. Of course, I'm also realizing there must be so many more. Who would've thought that esoteric economics could have spiritual ramifications? It certainly makes sense that it does and would, but other than perhaps, tithing or charity, do few ever truly study economics in light of religious tenets. And that's not what this will be about...not to mention the fact that I'm sure I couldn't even pretend to do the subject justice. I guess I'm just simply relaying that for me the veil is being lifted in this area and it's all very intriguing.

So enough of that already. Let's now read through this article and glean what we can from this general idea of The Commons. Shall we?

This article can be found in its entirety here. It also gives the background info and intro to the author, Peter Barnes. Since I'm treating these articles as a type of 'study guide' format in this blog, I've taken liberties to use excerpts and to change the order of some of those excerpts presented below. However, I haven't changed any of the wording whatsoever.




Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right
by Peter Barnes


Schumacher wrote eloquently about many things. For some people, his most important contributions had to do with scale and appropriate technology. For me, rereading him thirty years later, what stands out is his focus on permanence. “From an economic point of view,” he wrote, “the central concept of wisdom is permanence. Nothing makes economic sense unless its continuance for a long time can be projected without running into absurdities.”

One major problem with capitalism is that the market, as Schumacher noted, “utterly disregards things which cannot be, or have not been, privately appropriated, but are nonetheless an essential precondition of all human activity, such as air, water, the soil, and in fact the whole framework of living nature.” The result is that we humans are destroying our own nest. And not only our nest but the nest of all other creatures who share our planet. The second large problem with capitalism is inequality. Schumacher didn’t dwell on this, but another of my favorite writers, Tom Paine, did. I’ll come back to inequality and Tom Paine later.

[Actually, I'm going to skip right down to this 'inequality' topic first..so we'll be starting here basically with his conclusions. First, though, I'll let him explain in more detail the essence of The Commons.]

Today I want to look at these twin problems of capitalism—inequality and the lack of permanence—through a new lens. That lens is the commons. Why this particular lens? Let me back up and say that even before I read Schumacher, I had been struggling to understand the capitalist system in which we live. First, as a boy crunching numbers for my father’s books on the stock market, then as a student of economics in college, later as a journalist and a political activist, and lastly, for twenty years, as a business person. My main motive for being a business person was not to make a lot of money but to see how far the boundaries of capitalism could be pushed by working from within.

I think I have a pretty good understanding of capitalism by now—both its virtues and its flaws. And I should say that I like many aspects of capitalism; I like the freedom, the dynamism, the creativity it unleashes. I would never, ever, want to do away with the market as the primary engine of productivity. Yet, while I appreciate the market’s virtues and know the problems it can solve, I also recognize those it cannot solve and those it inexorably makes worse. In this latter category are the two very big problems I mentioned earlier—tragedies, really, of major proportion: the destruction of age-old natural systems and the exacerbation of inequality among humans.

These are fundamental systemic flaws. Not something that can be fixed by patches here and there, by stopping this or saving that, by spending more on education or adding a few government regulations. Such reforms may make us feel better and may even be beneficial, but they do not fundamentally change a system that disregards permanence and increases inequality by its very nature.

Let me be clear about this. Any economic system whose core mathematical calculus is to maximize short-term profit for a few is bound to create these results. It is no accident that despite more than a century of nonsystemic reforms, the great profit-maximizing, nature-destroying, wealth-concentrating juggernaut that modern capitalism is, marches on.

The primary problem is the economic system itself, and by that I mean not only the market but also everything that surrounds and interacts with the market. It is the economic system as a whole that must be reprogrammed—“upgraded,” if you will, like a computer operating system. But how? What’s wrong with the current operating system? What’s missing? As I’ve thought about this question from various perspectives, the answer I have come to is this: the missing piece. The piece, without which the market will never function properly, is the commons. It is that part of the whole system I want to draw your attention to today.

In many ways the commons is like the dark matter of the universe. It’s everywhere, but we don’t see it. The only economic matter we see is the kind that glistens with dollar signs. In my mind, the great challenge for the twenty-first century is to make the commons visible, to give it proper reverence, and to translate that reverence into property rights and legal institutions that are on a par with those we currently give to private property. If this challenge is met, I think we can solve the problems of lack of permanence and of inequality while retaining what is best about capitalism.


WHAT IS THE COMMONS?

It is important to distinguish between a commons and the commons. A commons is specific: the playground down the street, the Housatonic River, the Boston Common. The commons is an abstract concept similar to the market or the state. It is the sum of thousands, perhaps millions, of individual commons. Today I will talk mostly about the commons as a concept representing the sum of many smaller commons.

What, then, is the commons? There is no simple or obvious answer, so let me wander around a bit before I offer a modern and I hope useful definition.

First of all, the commons consists of stuff we share. That is to say, whether it is a street or a river or the air or the vast store of human knowledge—none of these belongs to you or me or private corporations. They are something we share in one way or another.

Second, the commons consists of stuff we inherit. It is not made up of anything that you or I or some corporation makes. One can present a very good case that if you make or invent something, it should be your private property, at least for a while. This is an entirely appropriate way of rewarding people and businesses for value they create and risks they take. But air and water and ecosystems and DNA and language and legal as well as political institutions are not made by any individual or corporation. They are gifts we inherit, either from nature or from the collective efforts of millions of humans.

Third, the commons consists of stuff we must pass on to future generations. Just as we receive the commons as a gift, so too we have a moral obligation to pass this gift on to our children in at least as good condition as we received it. If we can add to it, improve it, so much the better. At a minimum we must not degrade it, and we certainly have no right to destroy it.

Fourth, the kinds of things that tend to be commons are not small; they tend to be large, and they tend to be spaces or systems—natural systems or social systems. Within these spaces and systems there can be private pieces: for example, many pieces of the Internet or of a watershed may be privately owned. But the Internet and the watershed as whole systems are commons, and we share them. The systems, if not all the pieces, are parts of the commons.

And fifth, let me dispel two myths that have obstructed clear thinking about the commons for many years. One is the myth that all commons are inherently self-destructive. This myth is largely the result of a 1968 essay called “The Tragedy of the Commons” by the late biologist Garrett Hardin. Hardin assumed that there is basically only one kind of commons: the unfenced pasture or waste dump with no management system, areas to which individuals can add animals and wastes freely and at will with no limitation. As a result destruction can result. What Hardin overlooked is that there are many kinds of commons and many ways to manage them. For example, you can put a fence around a pasture or you can put a fence around a waste dump and charge a dumping fee; you can have fishing and hunting limits and sell licenses. There is no tragedy if a commons is treated properly.

The other myth is that a commons must always be free and open to anyone who wants to use it. In an uncrowded world, this would be the ideal way to run a commons, but in a crowded world, such as the one we now inhabit, we must not allow unlimited dumping into the air, the water, and the soil. We must put limits on the uses of many of our commons: on the noises we allow into the shared spaces around us, on hunting and fishing, cutting of trees, posting of billboards. We can charge tolls for parking on city streets, for using congested highways, and for driving into the center of cities such as London. All these are legitimate management tools to protect and preserve different kinds of commons.

[NOTE: I'm not sure if he subscribes to the 'world is way too overcrowded' theology from these statements or not. I definitely do NOT subscribe to that theory which ushers in all sorts of atrocities in the name of 'crowd control' or population control. However, I do see that there are concentrations of people in certain areas that necessitate certain prescriptions or certain guidelines, and those should be perfectly acceptable if done in an ethical and equitable fashion.]

There are numerous reasons why the commons is so important. We all know why the market is important: it produces and distributes the vast array of goods and services that characterize our high-consumption society. What the commons does for all of us is less obvious—in part, I should note, because the commons never advertises!

1. For most of human existence the commons supplied everyone’s food, water, fuel, and medicines. People hunted, fished, gathered wild fruits and herbs, collected firewood and building materials, grazed their animals in common pastures, and farmed on common lands. In other words, the commons was the source of basic sustenance. This is still true today in many parts of the world, and even in the city where I live, San Francisco, there are people who fish in the Bay, not for sport but for food.

2. The commons is the source of all natural resources and nature’s many replenishing services. Water, air, DNA, seeds, topsoil, fire, electricity, minerals, wild animals, domesticable animals, edible plants, healing plants, solar energy, wind energy, water power, forests, rivers, ultraviolet protection, climate regulation, biodiversity, and much more. These are all parts of the commons.

3. The commons is our ultimate waste sink. It recycles water, oxygen, carbon, and everything else we excrete, exhale, and throw away. It is the place where we store, or try to store, the toxic residues of our modern industrial system.

4. The commons holds and disseminates humanity’s vast accumulation of science, art, customs, and laws. It is the seedbed of all human creativity. As Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Without the open sharing of ideas, there would be no religion, science, mathematics, philosophy, children’s games, musical instruments, dances, jazz, hip-hop, fashion, sports, democracy, universities, libraries—the list goes on and on.

5. The commons is essential to human communication. We talk to one another with shared symbols and languages that are the living products of many generations. Most of the spaces we communicate through—the air that carries sound, the visual environment we use for traffic signs and billboards, the vast global web of wires and switches we call the Internet, the electromagnetic waves we use for radio, TV, and cell phones—are parts of the commons.

6. We use the commons whenever we travel from place to place, whether by land, water, or air. If we could not use the commons in this way, we would be prisoners in our private homes.

7. We rely on the commons for our sense of community. The commons is the village tree, the public square, Main Street, the neighborhood, and the playground. In addition to families, it’s the glue that holds us together.

Now I’d like to speak about the history of the commons, which is as old as the earth itself. As I said a moment ago, for most of human existence it was—and for many still is—the source of basic sustenance. From a conceptual standpoint, the idea of the commons goes back hundreds of years.

The Romans distinguished among three types of property: res privatæ, res publicæ, and res communes. The first consisted of things capable of being possessed by an individual or family, the second of things built and set aside for public use by the state, such as public buildings and roads, and the third of natural things used by all, such as air, water, and wild animals. This was codified in the Institutes of Justinian, the grand summation of Roman law, which said: “By the law of nature these things are common to mankind—the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shore of the sea.”

In the United Kingdom during the Middle Ages, the commons were shared lands used by villagers for foraging, hunting, planting crops, and harvesting wood. In 1215 the Magna Carta established forests and fisheries as res communes, resources available to all.

In America, four early states—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky—called themselves “commonwealths.” Several states declared in their constitutions that natural resources belong to the people and that the government acts as the people’s trustee. The Pennsylvania Constitution still contains the words: “Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”

This, in a nutshell, is the good side of the history of the commons. Unfortunately, there is a bad side, a tragic side, as well. That is the long history of enclosure of the commons, which began in eighteenth-century England and continues to this day, in America and almost everywhere in the world. As Andrew Kimbrell said in his Schumacher Lecture a few years ago: “It’s no longer just the enclosure of the lands: it’s the enclosure of our genes, it’s the enclosure of the seas; it’s the corporate enclosure of virtually the entire living commons.”

Enclosure is an old-fashioned word for privatization. At first it meant privatization by the landed gentry; today it means privatization by corporations. Either way, it means that what once belonged to many now belongs to a few. Enclosure is usually justified in the name of “efficiency.” And sometimes it does result in efficiency gains. But what also results from enclosure is the impoverishment of those who lose access to the commons and the enrichment of those who take title to it. In other words, enclosure widens the gap between those with income-producing property and those without .

At this point, having wandered around a little, I am ready to offer a modern definition of the commons. I say “modern” because I want to erase from our minds the antiquated notion of the commons as a pasture or a plot of land. The most useful way to understand the commons today is as the sum of all we inherit together and must pass on, undiminished and more or less equally, to our heirs. (Here I include nonhuman as well as human heirs. Another way of saying this is that the commons consists of that which nobody owns or which we all own together—in contrast to the market, which consists of that which we own privately.

Either way, the economy as a whole system is divided between the market and the commons. Within the market part of the system is what we manage mostly for the short-term monetary gain of a property-owning class; within the commons part of the system is what we manage—or should manage, because we don’t at the moment—for the long-term enhancement of all living beings.

Economists, politicians, and the media have tended to focus almost exclusively on the market side of the economy, even though the commons is just as important. (In fact, the commons happens to be worth more, even in crude dollar terms, than the market, but I don’t want to get into bean-counting here.) Whatever their relative value, the commons precedes the market, and is the source of most that enters the market and the sink for all that leaves it. To put this in visual terms, we might say that the commons surrounds the market. Or, more dynamically, that the commons is the pond in which the fish of private property swim.

I like the fish-in-the-pond image for a couple of reasons. First, it conveys the notion that both the market and the commons are living systems, with constantly moving and interacting parts. The pond is a soup of water, air, light, heat, currents, nutrients, and life forms; the fish are active, competitive creatures constantly on the move, taking what they need from the pond, growing, excreting, reproducing, and dying. This is pretty much how corporations operate. Second, the pond-and-fish image points to a rather remarkable aspect of corporations. Unlike real fish or any other life form, the corporation has no optimum or maximum size. It can grow, or presumes it can grow, ad infinitum, without damaging the pond. Of course, if we think about it, this is an impossibility.

In any case, the economic system as a whole has these two distinct sectors, the commons and the market. They have different rules and different guiding principles, and the boundaries between these sectors shift over time. For the past three hundred years this shift has been in one direction only: the market has steadily expanded into the commons.

What I am proposing is that from this moment forward we reverse that direction. I believe this is not only absolutely necessary but eminently doable—if we put our minds to it. In the rest of my lecture I would like to show how. First, though, I need to say a bit more about the market and the state.


THE MARKET AND THE STATE

In the minds of most economists the market floats in an unbounded universe. It takes resources from this universe, transforms them into products that can be profitably sold, and returns all wastes into unlimited sinks. If any particular resource runs out, the market can—thanks to human ingenuity—replace it with another. Because both sinks and resources, with substitutions, are unlimited, this game can go on forever. But as Schumacher and many others have pointed out, this view is a delusion. It is a delusion not so much because we will run out of resources but because we will run out of sinks. This exhaustion of sinks is most imminent, somewhat surprisingly, in the sky. In the 1970s Schumacher warned that we would shortly run out of oil; in fact, there is still a fair amount of oil left in the ground, and a great deal of gas and coal as well. But long before we run out of fossil fuels, we are going to use up the atmosphere’s capacity to safely absorb the wastes produced by burning them.

[Obviously we know where he's going with all of this...and it buys into global warming and other theories. This represents a HUGE other topic that you can read further in his article in the link above. Let's just all agree that we need to be respectful and cognizant to our collective impact on the world of nature and the environment.]

Let me now offer another way of thinking about the market. I’m sure many of you have seen the classic Disney movie “Fantasia.” In it there’s a wonderful segment starring Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Mickey is charged with cleaning up the workshop; he thinks he can make his job easier by having the broom carry a bucket of water for him. With a wave of his arms he gleefully directs the broom, which then goes out of control. In a panic Mickey takes an ax and chops the broom into many pieces, but each piece turns into a new broom carrying a new bucket, and soon the entire workshop is engulfed by a raging flood. Only when the wise old Sorcerer returns is the watery chaos brought under control.

In many ways the market is like those out-of-control brooms. It is populated by an army of corporations that are programmed, like robots, to maximize short-term profit for the few. No matter how you shout at them or chop them up, they keep doing what they are programmed to do. The Sorcerer who knows how to stop them is nowhere to be found.

Of course, corporations do create useful products and jobs. But the robotic calculus that drives them compels them to pay as little as possible for the resources they use and to shift as many costs as possible to others—be it workers, tax-payers, future generations, or nature. This happens daily, automatically, and on a massive scale, with nobody able to stop it.

Now, the fact that corporations act like profit-maximizing robots, shifting as many costs as possible to others, is not a shocking revelation. It has been pointed out repeatedly for at least one hundred years. What is new is that the accumulation of these externalized costs has reached the point where the biological integrity of our planet is in grave danger. I don’t need to describe the indicators—extinction of species, alteration of the climate, accumulation of toxic chemicals, degradation of forests, oceans, aquifers and wetlands, etc.—because you know them well. My point is that this cannot go on much longer. The problem we need to solve—and quickly—is how to stop, and indeed reverse, this systematic carnage.

It is helpful to look at this problem through the lens of the commons. I’ve talked about enclosure and how for three hundred years the market has been privatizing everything it can get its hands on. And I’ve talked about externalization and how for roughly the same period of time the market has been dumping wastes and unpaid costs into the commons. In effect, what has been going on is a relentless, two-pronged assault by the market on the commons. With one hand the market takes good stuff from the commons; with the other hand it dumps bad stuff into the commons. If someone were keeping a balance sheet of our common wealth, it would not look good.

Part of the problem is that no one is keeping such a balance sheet, which is quite odd, given that double-entry bookkeeping was invented in the sixteenth century. Every economist and business person knows that one person’s income is another person’s expense and that liabilities for the most part offset assets. Yet when it comes to keeping double-entry books for the market and the commons as a whole, we simply don’t do that.

A bigger part of the problem is that the contest between the market and the commons has not been an even one. It’s been like a World Series between the New York Yankees and the Portland Sea Dogs. One side has all the money, the top hitters, and the best pitchers; it also, I might add, pays the umpires. Sports metaphors aside, it is extremely important to understand why the market is so much stronger than the commons. There are multiple reasons, to be sure, but there are two that I would like to highlight today. One has to do with law—or, more precisely, with property rights; the second has to do with institutions.

[Now before we go into his ideas about how the Commons can or should be managed, I'd like to interject this aspect of inequality because in all the hub-bub surrounding preserving animals and the environment, the human and labor factor gets removed from the mix. Human life trumps animal and plant life, but to what extent needs to definitely be considered. We are commanded in Genesis to take dominion over or subdue the earth. I realize that those of the 'Dominionist Theology' persuasion take that to mean more than what is actually put forth in the wording of the text - giving themselves permission to regulate behavior from an authoritarian or regulatory manner as opposed to a persuasive, instructional, discipling manner. Our job, as spelled out in Genesis, in 'subduing' actually refers to a 'nurturing' and 'caretaking' perspective...like tending your garden or caring for your pets or livestock. It explicitly pertains to 'subduing' plants and animals, too...NOT other people...except in a gentle, nurturing, caring way. This is not an autocratic principle regardless how much it may be couched in 'democracy' lingo. And, by the way, 'democracy' is far from being 'equitable' just in case that hadn't been clarified before. And really, this whole idea of 'being equitable' needs to be discussed in greater depth as well. I think a better term for 'equitable' should be 'just' or 'fair' or 'non-exploited' but that's, once again, a whole other topic.]

INEQUALITY

The perpetuation of inequality is built into the current design of capitalism. Because of the skewed distribution of private wealth, a small self-perpetuating minority receives a disproportionate share of America’s nonlabor income. If the inheritance tax is completely repealed, as George Bush and most Republicans want, we will truly have recreated a permanent aristocracy of wealth, one of the feudal privileges the American Revolution sought to end.

Tom Paine was an amazing man who lived an amazing life. He was born in England when the commons was being enclosed, came to America and participated in the Revolution here, then moved to France in time to join the Revolution there.

In one of his greatest essays, “Agrarian Justice,” written in 1790, he argued that because enclosure of the commons had separated so many people from their primary source of sustenance, it was necessary to create a functional equivalent of the commons in the form of a National Fund. Here is how he put it:

There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe—such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property—the invention of men.

In the latter, equality is impossible; for to distribute it equally, it would be necessary that all should have contributed in the same proportion, which can never be the case . . . . Equality of natural property is different. Every individual in the world is born with legitimate claims on this property, or its equivalent.” [emphasis added].

Enclosure of the commons, he went on, was necessary to improve the efficiency of cultivation, but “[t]he landed monopoly that began with [enclosure] has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.”

The remedy he proposed was a fund remarkably similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund, except that it was financed not with oil revenue but with ground rents paid by landowners. Out of this fund there would be paid to every person reaching twenty-one years of age the sum of fifteen pounds sterling (the equivalent of several thousand dollars today) “as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance.” An additional sum of ten pounds per year would be paid to every person over age fifty, an idea that foreshadowed Social Security.

This essay, written 213 years ago, could not be more timely today. Surely from our vast common inheritance—not just the land but the atmosphere, the broadcast spectrum, our mineral resources, our threatened habitats and water supplies—enough rent can be collected to pay every American over twenty-one a modest annual dividend and every person reaching twenty-one a small start-up inheritance. And remember what I said earlier about scarcity rent. The more we restrict use of the commons, the more dividends we can pay, so there is a double benefit .

If this sounds dangerously communistic, consider the familiar board game Monopoly , the capitalist game par excellence, with players buying and selling property and trying to build monopolies. But Monopoly has two rules that make it very different from capitalism as we know it today. First, all players receive an equal amount of start-up capital. Nobody starts off either penniless or inheriting Boardwalk or Park Place. And second, all players receive an equal dividend every time they complete a trip around the board. Or consider professional sports—the profit-seeking leagues of baseball, football, and basketball. Each has a set of rules designed to shift money from the richest teams to the poorest and to give the losing teams first crack at the best new players. These businesses have learned that too much inequality hurts everyone. The rules of Monopoly and professional sports in no way inhibit the vigor of the market. Indeed, they make the market stronger by making it fairer and more competitive.

In a postmodern, overproductive economy like America’s, there is absolutely no reason why every baby should not be a trust-fund baby. Commons-funded inheritances and commons-funded dividends would strengthen our market economy. In addition, they would correct the two systemic flaws I spoke of at the beginning. On the one hand, by limiting commons usage, they would diminish pollution and the destruction of nature. On the other hand, by distributing common-property income to everyone, they would partially offset the maldistribution of private-property income. The commons would again be a source of sustenance for all, as it was in pre-enclosure days.

Now, if there are any economists in the audience, I’d like to engage you in a thought experiment. I want you to think about incentives. Right now there is a huge incentive to pollute because (a) it’s free to do so, and (b) no one profits if you reduce pollution. But imagine a system in which pollution sinks are commonly owned through trusts. These trusts sell a finite number of pollution permits for whatever the market will bear. And every American receives a dividend from these trusts—one person, one share. The trustees have the power to decide how many permits to sell. Leaving aside all ecological and legal issues such as the trustees’ fiduciary responsibility to future beneficiaries, my economic question is twofold: Under what circumstances should the trustees sell more permits and under what circumstances should the trustees sell fewer permits?

It’s important to be clear about what I am not suggesting. I’m not suggesting that we abolish the market or change its fundamental calculus. Quite the contrary, I strongly believe we need a sector of the economy that is driven by short-term profit maximization for the few. We need it for productivity, for creativity, for vitality, and for freedom. What I am saying is that we should not confuse the calculus of the market with the calculus of our entire society. As a society we have values that differ from those embodied in the market; therefore, the calculus of the market needs to be balanced by other calculi, other property rights and boundaries. Limits of nature need to be respected, as do the interests of future generations, those without private property, and nonhuman species. Within this framework—and, I would argue, only within this framework—the market can flourish indefinitely.

It’s important to note that under this sort of economic operating system, the rules of the market will still be as they are today. CEOs will not have to change their consciousness; businesses will not have to learn new tricks. They will still be driven by profit maximization. The bottom line will still be the bottom line. The big difference from a business point of view is that costs which are routinely externalized today will, instead, be routinely internalized. Nature and future generations will be represented in real-time transactions, and money from these transactions will flow to a broad set of “owners,” whose added purchasing power will spur economic activity.

It will be claimed that this new operating system in which the market and the commons are on a roughly equal footing will reduce Gross Domestic Product, depress the stock market, and cost millions of jobs. Washington think tanks will busily grind out studies “proving” this. My response would be to look at the city of Washington itself. There is a height limit: no building can be taller than the Capitol. This limit enhances the city’s beauty without in any way impoverishing its economy. The same will be true when we put limits on other kinds of economic activity, especially if we recycle the commons scarcity rents equitably. Markets and businesses and workers will do just fine. More importantly, humans as a whole and other species will do much better.


CONCLUSION

My generation—the generation born in the mid-twentieth century—has had a grand party. We have consumed more resources and created more environmental destruction than all previous generations combined. We are leaving behind one horrendous mess for our children. But we haven’t departed quite yet. We still have time to leave a legacy. The question I often ponder is, “What can my generation’s legacy be?”

The species we have exterminated can never be revived. The harmful chemicals we have deposited in the biosphere cannot be removed in our lifetime. The forests and wetlands we’ve destroyed will take a long time to heal. I wish we could summon a Sorcerer who, with a wave of the hand, could put an instant end to the chaos we’ve unleashed. Because that is not going to happen, the best legacy we can leave, it seems to me, is a blueprint for incorporating permanence and greater equality into our runaway economic system.

I think this can be done. My remarks today are an attempt in that direction. I think we have the ingenuity and the tools to do it. The basic tools are familiar: property rights, trusts, limits, prices, and dividends. We also have some time-tested principles to guide us: the riparian principle, the polluter-pays principle, the precautionary principle, and the centuries-old notion of the commons. We can extend the principle of one person, one vote, to one person, one share. We can redraw the boundaries between the commons and the market, and we can shift the divine right, in whole or in part, from private to common property.

It will, of course, take decades to build a strong common sector. But at least we can see where we should be going and how we can get there from here—one step toward reverence for the commons at a time, one legal precedent at a time, one institution at a time. I propose that we start now.

[So now here are some of his ideas on how some of this might be accomplished. And you may just want to stop here and come back later after the rest of this has soaked in a bit. Specifically, I think it's important to understand this 'scarcity rent' concept more fully which he goes over in Rebuilding the Commons. I doubt that any one body of governing rule can truly do full and perfect justice in walking this tightrope between market and commons, however, we should give it our valiant effort. These principles may be more manageable, too, on a smaller and more localized scale. I'm stopping here for today and I'll add more thoughts to all of this as they arise.]

DIVINE RIGHT

Let’s look first at property rights. Marjorie Kelly has written a brilliant book called The Divine Right of Capital. By “divine” she doesn’t mean God-given, although there are indeed some apologists for capitalism who attribute the current design of our economy to the Almighty. What she means is that under the current laws of our land, the rights of capital trump everything else. The rights of employees, the rights of communities, the rights of nature, and the rights of future generations are all subordinate to the right of capital to maximize short-term profit for the few.

This primacy of capital is embedded not only in state and federal law but also in international treaties such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Thus, a California company, Sun Belt Water, wanted to export water from Canada in supertankers and sell it to southern Californians. Canada said no, so the company sued Canada for billions of dollars in damages, claiming that under NAFTA its right to make a profit trumped Canada’s right to protect its natural resources.

Now, the question of who gets the divine right in any society is always an interesting one. Because I have a fifteen-year-old son who is learning to drive, I read the California Drivers’ Manual the other day and came across the following rule: “At an intersection, yield to the car which arrives first or to the car on your right if it reaches the intersection at the same time you do.” Why does the car on the right trump the car on the left? It’s unclear. Quite possibly the rule is entirely arbitrary, but someone has to have the right of way or cars will collide.The same is true for boats at sea and for moving objects in any complex system. Someone has to be “king of the road.”

So too in a market economy. When two property rights come to the same intersection, one has to trump the other. Either capital can trump labor, or labor can trump capital. Either my right to pollute trumps your right not to be polluted, or vice versa. One of the conflicting property rights, you might say, has to be the divine right. But which one? Invariably, those who hold the divine right in any era say there is no choice: they are the only conceivable holders of this right. Kings said it three hundred years ago; capital owners say it today. Kings hired priests to lend moral credence to their claims whereas capital owners now hire economists to lend “scientific” credence to their claims.The truth is, though, that we do have a choice. Society chooses the divine-right holder, and its choice can change over time.

Bear in mind that even if we aren’t talking literally about divinity, we are talking about reverence. Reverence doesn’t come from “up there”; it comes from “in here.” Today, despite all our speechifying about family values, God, and nature, we in the West revere capital above all.That is why we give it trumping rights in our economy—indeed, that is why we call our economic system “capitalism.” If we were to revere the commons as fervently as we currently revere capital, our divine right would shift.

To bring our discussion back to the problems of impermanence and inequality: it seems to me that if anything is divine, it ought to be those things we inherit together and should pass on, undiminished and more or less equally, to future generations. Permanence should trump impermanence. Broad benefit should trump narrow benefit. The commons should trump capital.

From an historical perspective the explosion of the market over the past three hundred years has been a logical response to the problem of scarce goods and services; it makes perfect sense that, during this time, capital held the divine right so that it could efficiently flood the world with goods and services. But now we humans, as the dominant imperial species, are approaching what Schumacher called “the tolerance limits of nature.” Today our problem, at least in the West, is not the scarcity of goods and services; it’s the scarcity of nature and of equity, time, and quiet. Therefore, it makes historic sense that the divine right in modern, postindustrial economies should shift to the commons.

Of course, this is easier said than done. I can think of only one American law—the Endangered Species Act—that gives precedence to permanence over transience, to the commons over capital. The Endangered Species Act says that the right of a species to survive trumps the right of capital to short-term profit. The trouble is that the law comes into play only in extremis, when a species has been so decimated that it is on the brink of extinction. The more general situation is not just that capital trumps the commons but that the commons has no rights at all. Protections for private property are enshrined in our Constitution, whereas the notion that there even is such a thing as the commons is still in its infancy.

I want to add two more thoughts about legal rights here. The first is that there is a difference between human rights and property rights. Human rights include the rights to life, liberty, speech, and so on; property rights involve the power to own, control, and sell things, to limit other people’s use of them, and to charge prices for using them. There may also be a third class, that of nonhuman rights, such as those proposed by Thomas Berry this morning. I want to be clear that what I’m talking about today is property rights, recognizing that these property rights have significant implications for human and nonhuman rights

The other point I want to make about property rights involves one of the more original economists of the twentieth century, Ronald Coase. Coase worked with Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and is considered a conservative. A Nobel Prize winner, he is most recognized for his theorem that pollution can be reduced more efficiently through property rights than through government regulation.

One aspect of Coase’s argument is that if pollutees are given the right not to be polluted, they can bargain in the market with polluters, and the end results will be that (a) polluters will pay pollutees a price based on how much pollution the pollutees are willing to accept as well as how badly the polluters want to pollute, and (b) there will consequently be less pollution. He also argued that the property-rights approach would work just as well if polluters are given the right to pollute and pollutees pay them not to pollute. He was strangely indifferent to the question of who should get the initial property rights and who should pay whom.

Coase’s theorem became the basis for so-called “cap-and-trade” programs such as the trading of sulfur dioxide initiated in the 1990s to reduce acid rain. These programs, which are now fairly popular as ways of reducing pollution , are generally supported by business because they allow polluters to figure out the cheapest ways to reduce pollution. Unfortunately, they have thus far been set up with the initial property rights given free to polluters. The economic result is that billions of dollars have been paid by pollutees to polluters.

How does this work? Well, economists have a concept called “scarcity rent.” Scarcity rent is like a bonus that owners of something in high demand collect from other people just because of scarcity. The Mona Lisa, for example, has a high scarcity rent; because there is only one, it is in great demand. In general, the scarcer things are—such as buildable land, Barry Bonds home-run balls, and New York taxi medallions—the higher the bonus for scarcity. As OPEC or any other cartel knows, when you restrict supply you can raise prices and profits, sometimes by huge amounts.

What happens when we set up a cap-and-trade system and give the initial property rights to polluters? First of all, we reduce pollution, which is good. Secondly, we raise the price of polluting, currently at zero. This is also good. And thirdly, we raise the prices of all goods and services now made with expensive polluting processes. This too is appropriate. But think about who gets to keep the extra money we pay for these goods. If polluters are given scarce pollution rights for free, then we, the ultimate consumers and pollutees, end up paying scarcity rent to them forever. Imagine that! Because a corporation polluted in the past, it gets free money forever. Over the long term, this would be an enormous transfer of wealth to shareholders of historically polluting corporations. I’ll come back to this question of who gets initial property rights—polluters or pollutees—in a minute.

The other reason the commons is much weaker than the market, in addition to the supremacy of capital’s rights, is institutional imbalance. As I noted earlier, the market is populated by aggressive, profit-maximizing robots armed with property rights, money, lawyers, and lobbyists. The commons, by contrast, is institutionally threadbare.

There is no institution that “owns” the sky or the Housatonic River watershed and that can say to a corporation: “Stop! This is common property. You can’t trespass here for free.” There are just a handful of institutions whose mission is to preserve common assets for the future and who have the property rights needed to carry out that mission. This institutional imbalance means that the commons is essentially defenseless against the ceaseless aggression of the market.

This brings us to the subject of the role of the state in defending the commons. The first point we need to be clear about is that the state is not the commons. The state is the state and the commons is the commons. Americans often get confused about this because so much land in our country is state-owned. In theory these public lands are part of the commons, but at best they are a small part, and the mere fact that the state owns them in no way guarantees that they will be managed as the commons should be managed. Quite the contrary, the state more often than not has been a co-conspirator with private industry in managing public lands for short-term profit rather than long-term preservation. The U. S. Forest Service, for example, has spent billions of tax dollars building logging roads in national forests; it then sells logging rights to private companies for less than private landowners do. Similarly, grazing and mineral rights on federal lands are sold for a song. And the public air-waves that carry radio and TV signals are given free to giant media conglomerates owned by Disney, General Electric, and Rupert Murdoch.

There is a legal principle called the Public Trust Doctrine that I should mention here. This principle arose from common law, though it is embodied in several state constitutions, such as Pennsylvania’s. The Public Trust Doctrine holds that natural resources belong to the people rather than to the state and that it is the state’s responsibility to act as trustee of these resources for present and future generations. If the state does not act as a trustee should, the people have the right to hire another trustee. The principle of trusteeship is very important, and I’ll come back to it shortly. Suffice it to say here that a private trustee who gives away entrusted assets would be sued, fired, and probably sent to jail. But this rarely happens when the state is trustee.

As for the Public Trust Doctrine itself, the difficulty is similar to the difficulty with the Endangered Species Act: it comes into play only in extremis, after a state has failed to protect a resource. In such cases, citizens can sue the state and a court can order the state to remedy its breach of the public trust. But it costs millions of dollars to bring such a suit, and needless to say, it is seldom done. For this reason, despite its sound philosophy, the Public Trust Doctrine is an inadequate tool for defending the commons against the everyday assaults of the market. Of course, if the state were acting as a proper trustee of the commons in the first place, lawsuits under the Public Trust Doctrine would be unnecessary. Which brings us to three critical questions:

1)What is the role of a commons trustee?

2)Why has the state not been a good commons trustee?

3)If the state isn’t a good commons trustee, who can be?


THE ROLE OF TRUSTS

When we think of capitalist institutions, the one that immediately comes to mind is the corporation. But there is another institution that is as old and as firmly established as the corporation, and that is the trust.

The essence of a trust is a fiduciary relationship, i.e., one that is based on the beneficiary’s confidence in the trustee. A trustee holds and manages property for another person or for many other people. A simple example is a trust established by a grandmother so that her grandchildren will have money to go to college. She then appoints a trustee, a bank for example, which by law has a fiduciary responsibility to manage the assets on behalf of the beneficiaries and to assure that the trust’s purpose is achieved. Other trusts include pension funds, charitable foundations, and university endowments.

The rules of trust management, which are defined by state statutes and by centuries of case law, include the following:

• Managers must act with undivided loyalty to beneficiaries. If a manager fails this obligation, s/he can be removed and penalized.

• In most cases, managers must preserve the principal. It is acceptable to spend income , but it is not acceptable to invade the corpus.

• If the beneficiaries of a trust span many generations, the trustee may not favor one generation over another.

• Managers must assure transparency . Information about money flows must be readily available to beneficiaries.

These rules are enforceable by the courts. The basic mechanism is that an aggrieved beneficiary can bring suit against a trustee, and the trustee must then prove that s/he acted prudently to carry out the mandate of the trust. This is in contrast to the state: the government can give away whatever it wants with impunity. There is no legal recourse, except on rare occasions; the politicians have a free hand .

If we were to design an institution to protect pieces of the commons, we couldn’t do much better than a trust. The goal of commons management, after all, is to preserve assets and deliver benefits to broad classes of beneficiaries. That is what trusts accomplish.

What, then, can we say about the state’s capacity to serve as a commons trustee? In theory, the state represents all citizens equally and should be able to protect our common assets. But in reality, the track record of the state as trustee of the commons has been far from exemplary. There are at least five reasons for this:

1. The elected officials who run the state do not have a long-term perspective. Just as corporate leaders are focused on the next quarterly statement, political leaders are focused on the next election. They like to please constituents here and now, not worry about future generations.

2. Elected officials, alas, need money to get re-elected. It is tempting to trade common assets for private campaign contributions.

3. Elected officials are not accountable to beneficiaries in the same way private trustees are. They can give assets away with virtual impunity whereas private trustees, because of their fiduciary responsibility, cannot.

4. The state and its leaders have many other things to do besides manage common assets. It’s easy for this task to get neglected.

5. The state’s finances are huge and complex. All sorts of funds are commingled. It’s extremely difficult for the public to track money from common assets or to ascertain whether these assets are being well managed.

Many of my liberal friends get nervous when I make these arguments. They think I’m aiding and abetting those conservatives who believe the state is always incompetent and the market is always right. So let me be clear that this is not what I’m saying. At heart I am an old New Deal liberal. I believe in limiting corporate power and in achieving a fairer distribution of income and property, but I am a pragmatist when it comes to the means to achieve these ends. I think the state is good at some things and not good at others.

When it is a matter of defending the commons, the state does have a critical role to play. That role is not to own and manage the commons directly but to assign common property rights, to nurture the commons with as much vigor as it nurtures the market, and to maintain a healthy balance between the commons and the market. The problem today is that the state has abandoned this balancing role and has become a single-minded champion of the market. This is what we must change.

[And I'm not sure that any 'state' will adequately be able to handle this dilemma. However, we can all be educated and aware of the complications as well as the balancing act involved. On a smaller more localized scale, we might be better able to come up with some more manageable remedies.]

[Next, he offers some of his own solutions to the situation. I skipped the majority of the article and went straight to where he talks about the proposition on who pays on the pollution question. This is very inter

REBUILDING THE COMMONS



There is one last principle I should mention, and that is the “polluter pays” principle. This principle has been endorsed by virtually every economist in the world, and the reason for it should be obvious. It would make a huge difference if this principle were actually built into the economy’s operating system. The costs of burning fossil fuels, bleaching with chlorine, spraying with pesticides, long-distance transport, and many other commons-diminishing processes would instantly rise, thereby making clean energy, recycling, local organic food production, and other commons-sustaining processes immediately more competitive.

Yes, prices for many things we buy would also rise, but if the money that polluters pay is recycled back to commons owners, which means to all of us, consumers would on average not be penalized. What’s more, if the dividends are equal, consumers who switch to less polluting products will come out ahead—that is, their dividends will exceed what they pay in higher prices. By contrast, those who use the most polluting products (and consequently make the most use of scarce common sinks) will pay for that privilege—that is, their higher costs will exceed their dividends. In short, total pollution will decrease, the right kind of individual behavior will be rewarded, and money will flow from overusers of the commons to underusers (which usually translates into “from rich to poor”). All this through just a slight tweaking of property rights. No new taxes or government bureaucracy required.

Introduction

The national as well as the global economy is looking rather shaky these days which leaves many of us wondering how we might better prepare ourselves in the shadow of an unpredictable marketplace. Although some analysts predict that this is yet another low just to be ridden through with the up-turn in the not-too-distant future, many out there today are questioning the fundamental vulnerability or exposure we put ourselves in when we are so dependent on others to provide for our most basic needs. So with this prompting, we've begun the first of a series on the Local Self-Sufficient Community - a topic that is as needful and essential for today as it is exciting and encouraging! The broad headings to be covered will fall under:

Building and Sustaining a Local Economy,
Supplying Local Produce and Products,
Enhancing Local Goodwill and Organization,
Developing Local Infrastructure and Utilities,
Community Plans and Layouts (Including Hydro and Solar possibilities)

Before launching into these various subjects, however, let's first at least attempt to get a better grasp or understanding of where we have come from and what has led us in some way or another to where we are today. Naturally, there are complex and multitudinous angles, reasons, and opinions for the various causes and effects, but it would be worth trying to understand a few of the pitfalls to avoid in the future as well as highlighting some benefits we wish to preserve.

Without getting into pages and pages of long dissertations, I did find an article today that I felt put some features of modern industrialism into focus and gives us some general points to ponder - a sort of cause to pause - and evaluate in light of the circumstances today. One of the questions that begs to be asked is:  WHY IS THERE A PUSH FOR SELF-SUFFICIENCY TODAY?

Why is there all this buzz about self-sufficient and sustainable families, lifestyles, and communities? Once again, the possible answers are numerous and far-flung. For one thing, there's no real face behind any of the things we buy for ourselves...including our food. We don't really know, except rather vaguely, who produces, processes, packages, transports, and delivers most of the things we consume...including our food. This is becoming a little unsettling for more and more folks out there - especially in light of wars, terrorists, incurable deadly diseases, unknown political and foreign agendas, and an increasingly shaky economy.

Another aspect of our situation today is a huge debt load - and the fact that we don't actually own outright many of the expensive things we need and use on a daily basis. All the while, these things are becoming more expensive all the time...this includes shelter and transportation. If you factor in health care, medical care or emergencies, insurance, taxes, gasoline, home and car maintenance, and basic utilities...the indebtedness we labor under for what is considered 'merely the basics' becomes quite staggering. And we haven't even touched all the things that we think we need, have come to expect...and definitely don't want to live without.

So, back to this article and its somewhat conceptual retrospective of the hamster wheel we find ourselves inescapably trapped on and enslaved to. Do we simply keep on running the wheel...maybe slow down a bit...but keep it moving steadily? Do we jump off long enough to go nibble some seeds then jump back on with new gusto? Do we abandon the wheel altogether only to grow dull and fat in our largesse? We're still trapped in the cage after all. This is why it's becoming more and more relevant to discuss this 'cage'...along with the implications and parameters of the cage. Perhaps it's even time to consider escaping the cage altogether...if this is even possible. Let's just begin to see what some of the alternatives might be and how they might be able to work...given the possibility that we could in fact, escape. Some people might not even want to...yet some might.

This article can be found here. Bold lettering and [ ] are mine.




Modern Industry in the Light of the Gospel
By E. F. Schumacher




You have asked me to "attempt to define the nature of our society and to examine its significant institutions in the light of the Gospel" *

This is a task which is as challenging and difficult as it is necessary – indeed, urgent.

What is the "nature", what are the "characteristics" of this our actual, present-day Industrial Society"  Everything has a many-sided "nature' and many characteristics; by what standards are we going to distinguish the essential from the non-essential"  You say: "in the light of the Gospel".  This means that, in spite of my lack of qualifications in this respect, I must first define how the light of the Gospel appears to me.

First of all, it seems to me, the Gospels tell us that life is a school, a training ground, and cannot therefore be understood simply in its own terms.  The Great Headmaster's idea seems to be that we should not merely be comfortable (although comfort as such is not to be despised) but should learn something, strive after something, and with His help, become something more than we are.  This something is generally called "the Kingdom of Heaven", and the method of attaining it is described as loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves.  But the whole essence of the education is that it should proceed in freedom, that the end-product should be persons and not puppets.

It seems to me, therefore, that I am obliged to consider the characteristics of industrial society from the point of view of this all-important task.

THE WHEAT AND THE TARES

Before I do so, however, I feel I should remind myself of at least one of the great parables in the Gospels, the parable of the wheat and the tares.  It suggests that it is part of the great design that they are allowed to grow up together.  If we take this seriously, we must expect to encounter the coexistence, almost inextricably intermixed, of great good and great evil in our society.  For the indication – the signs of the times – are that the season is now pretty far advanced and the time of the harvest, when the wheat will be separated from the tares, may not be far off.

*Lecture given to a group of young Christians studying industrial problems, London, May 1961.

What indications?  What signs of the times"

I think there are many, of which I shall mention only one:  the extraordinary increase in the rate of change.  If you would draw a curve of the rate of change, it would appear as an exponential, or logarithmic, curve of continuous acceleration.   It is quite clear that no such curve can proceed for any length of time on this earth.  It must come to a stop before long, and that must mean the end of an era and "the revaluation of all values: or, in the imagery of the gospels, the separation of the wheat from the tares.

Looking at present-day Industrial Society I should expect therefore to find, almost inextricably intermixed, great good and great evil.  Very likely it is mainly a matter of temperament which of the two impresses you most.  But any view or description that includes only the one or the other would be likely to miss an important part of the truth.

IMMENSE COMPLICATION

Modern industrial society is immensely complicated, immensely involved, making immense claims on man's time and attention.  This, I think, must be accounted its greatest evil.  Paradoxical as it may seem, modern industrial society, in spite of an incredible proliferation of labour-saving devices, has not given people more time to devote to their all-important spiritual tasks; it has made it exceedingly difficult for anyone, except the most determined, to find any time whatever for these tasks.  In fact, I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.  If you would travel, as I have done, from England to the United States and on to a country like burma, you would not fail to see the truth of this assertion.  What is the explanation of the paradox?  It is simply that, unless there are conscious efforts to the contrary, wants will always rise faster than the ability to meet them.

The wide-spread substitution of mental strain for physical strain is no advantage from our point of view.  Proper physical work, even if strenuous, does not absorb a great deal of the power of attention; but mental work does; so that there is no attention left over for the spiritual things that really matter.  It is obviously much easier for a hard working peasant to keep his mind attuned to the divine than for a strained office worker.

I say, therefore, that it is a great evil --- perhaps the greatest evil --- of modern industrial society that, through its immensely involved nature, it imposes an undue nervous strain and absorbs an undue proportion of man's attention.  Of course, it might be otherwise.  It is still conceivable, for instance, that hitherto undeveloped countries might pick and choose what they wish to take over from Western industrialism, adopting only those things which really facilitate and enrich life while rejecting all the frills and harmful elaborations.  But there is no sign of this happening anywhere in the world.  On the contrary, it is cinemas, television, transistor sets, aeroplanes and such like which catch on much more quickly that anything really worthwhile.

THREE DEADLY SINS

Whether the tendency to raise wants faster than the ability to meet them is inherent in industrialism as such or in the social form it has taken in the West may be a debatable question.  It is certain that it exists and that the social forms exacerbate it.  In this country, expenditure on advertising falls only a little short of expenditure on all types of education.  Industry declares that advertising is absolutely necessary to create a mass market, to permit efficient mass production.  But what is the great bulk of advertising other than the stimulation of greed, envy and avarice"  It cannot be denied that industrialism, certainly in its capitalist form, openly employs these human failing --- at least three of the seven deadly sins --- as its very motive force.  From the point of view of the Gospels, this must be accounted the very work of the devil.  Communism, which rejects and derides the Gospels, does not appear to be bringing forth anything better; its main claim is that it will shortly "overtake" (as they say) Britain or even America.  British Socialism once upon a time showed an awareness of this evil, which it attributed solely to the peculiar working of the private enterprise-and-profit system.  But today, I am afraid, British Socialism has lost its bearings and presents itself merely as a device to raise the standard of living of the less affluent classes faster than could be done by private enterprise.  However that may be, present-day industrial society everywhere shows this evil characteristic of incessantly stimulating greed, envy and avarice.  It has produced a folklore of incentives which magnifies individual egotism in direct opposition to the teachings of the Gospel.

LACK OF DIGNITY

R. H. Tawney, one of the great ethical thinkers of our time, has spoken of "the straightforward hatred of a system which stunts personality and corrupts human relations by permitting the use of man by man as an instrument of pecuniary gain".  The "system" he refers to is again our modern industrial society, and again it may be a debatable issue whether these evils are the result of industrialism as such or of the particular capitalist form in which it made its appearance in the West.  I myself fear it is industrialism as such, irrespective of the social form.  In what way does it stunt personality"  Whatever Mr. Tawney may have had in mind, I should say: mainly by making most forms of work --- manual and white-collared --- utterly uninteresting and meaningless.  Mechanical, artificial, divorced from Nature, utilising only the smallest part of man's potential capabilities, it sentences the great majority of workers to spending their working lives in a way which contains no worthy challenge, no stimulus to self-perfection, chance of development, no element of Beauty, Truth or Goodness.

[Is it no wonder that so many people suffer huge burn-out, drug themselves in various forms, and long for early retirement? And once they might attain that 'retirement' still search for gratifying occupation? Then add to this the small children who begin this long process starting now around 3-4 years of age.]

"Every man," it has been said, "should be a special kind of artist."  How many men can be artists of any kind in their daily work?  The basic aim of modern industrialism is not to make work satisfying but to raise productivity; its proudest achievement is labour saving whereby labour is stamped with the mark of undesirability.  But what is undesirable cannot confer dignity; so the working life of a labourer is a life without dignity.  The result, not surprisingly, is a spirit of sullen irresponsibility which refuses to be mollified by higher wage awards but is often only stimulated by them.

AUTOCRATIC MANAGEMENT

In addition, industrial society, no matter  how democratic in its political institutions, is autocratic in its methods of management.  If the workers themselves were given more say in the organization of their work, they might be able to restore some interest and dignity to their daily tasks --- but I doubt that they would.  After all, they too, like everybody else, are members of modern industrial society and conditioned by the distorted scheme of values that pervades it.  How should they know how to do things differently?  It is a frequent experience that as soon as a working man finds himself saddled with managerial responsibility he begins to develop an almost uncanny understanding for and sympathy with the current preoccupations of management.  How, indeed, could it be otherwise?  Modern industrialism has produced its own coherent system of values, criteria, measurements, etc.; it all hangs together and cannot be tampered with except at the risk of breakdown.  If anyone said:  "I reject the idolatry of productivity; I am going to ensure that every job is worthy of a Man", he would have reason to fear that he might be unable to pay the expected wages or, if he did, that it landed him straight in the bankruptcy court.  All the same,  autocratic management which treats men as "factors of production" instead of responsible human persons, is a grave evil leading to innumerable stunted or even wasted lives.

Maybe a type of industrial society could be developed which was organised in much smaller units, with an almost infinite decentralisation of authority and responsibility.  From the point of view of the Gospels, a hierarchical structure, i.e. authority as such, is not an evil.  But it must be of a size compatible, so to say, with the size of the human being.  Structures made up of, say, a hundred people can still be fully democratic without falling into disorder.  But structures employing many hundreds  or even thousands of people cannot possibly preserve order without authoritarianism, no matter how great the wish for democracy might be.

I have listed and discussed four main characteristics of modern industrial society which, in the light of the Gospels, must be accounted for great and grievous evils: its vastly complicated nature; its continuous stimulation of, and reliance on, the deadly sins of greed, envy and avarice; its destruction of the content and dignity of most forms of work; and its authoritarian character owing to organization in excessively large units.

THE USES OF LITERACY

All these evils are, I think, exacerbated by the fact that the bulk of industry is carried on for the purpose of private pecuniary gain.  And although some "big business" has civilized itself in recent years to a significant extent --- largely owing to the "counter-vailing power" of the Trade Unions in conditions of full employment --- there still remains a large fringe of big and small business which manifests the worst features of capitalist irresponsibility in an extreme manner.  Perhaps the outstanding examples are to be found in the field of "communication media" --- in sections of the press, the entertainment industries, book publishing and so-forth.  You may have read Richard Hoggart's "The Uses of Literacy", which is a terrible indictment.  The worst exploitation practiced today is "cultural exploitation", namely, the exploitation by unscrupulous money makers of the deep longing for "culture" on the part of the less privileged and under-educated groups in our society.  The exhibition of reading matter on most of the bookstalls in industrial localities is --- to my mind --- the worst indictment of present-day industrial society.  To claim that "this is what the people want" is merely adding insult to injury.  It is not what they want, but what they are being tempted to demand by some of their fellow men who will commit any crime of degradation to make a dishonest penny. 

THE IDOLATRY OF GROWTH

The great and blatant evils about which I have spoken are not on the decrease.  On the contrary, they are spreading right across the world and all the time gaining in intensity.  The modern industrial system has a built-in tendency to grow; it cannot really work unless it is growing.  The word "stability" has been struck from its dictionary and replaced by "stagnation".  Its continuous growth pursues no particular aims or objectives:  it is growth for the sake of growing.  No one even enquires after its final shape.  There is none; there is no "saturation point".  Who, it may be asked, calls the tune?  Fundamentally, the technologist.  Whatever becomes technologically possible --- within certain economic limits --- must be done.  Society must adapt itself to it.  The question whether or not it does any good is ruled out on the specious argument that no one knows anyhow what is good or evil, wholesome or unwholesome, worthy of man or unworthy. 

As Prof. A. v. Hill says in his recent book on "The Ethical Dilemma of Science":  "To imagine that scientific and technical progress alone can solve all the problems that beset mankind is to believe in magic, and magic of the very unattractive kind that denies a place to the human spirit."  What I wish to emphasise is that the modern industrial system does in fact just this and is effectively denying a place to the human spirit.  Too much contact with machinery has convinced the masters of the system that economic development is a mechanical, i.e. unalterable, process which could only be thrown into disorder but never stopped or modified by the intrusion of value judgments. 

On the homestead, the seasons roll through with a rythm and pace of their own. Once Autumn arrives, the harvest must quickly come in, wood is chopped and stored in the shed...or under the porch, butchering is done, and the canning of jellies, pickles, and preserves are neatly stored...row upon row of shiny glass jars gleaming from the shelves.

The animals are also tended to and nestled in for the coming months of winter cold. I promised you a tour of the Mere's marvelous chicken coop once it was complete. So here it is!

Karyn and I both relish the tidied up, all-snug-for-the-winter feeling. Come with me as we wander about their cozy homestead...as the bustling last days of harvest are slowing and the bounty is simply waiting to be enjoyed.

The low hinged door...easily accessible to little hands for egg gathering...

They've just started getting their first soft greenish-blue colored eggs from the young Araucana hens...that happen to be very docile, sweet-natured chickens!

The screen door acts as a perfect gate to the outdoor coop...

Chicken ramp into the backdoor of the chicken house...

Are there any chickens in there?

The meat poultry (broilers and turkeys) are now frozen in the freezer along with those scrumptious berries from the summer, and the rest sits prettily in baskets and jars...awaiting the winter feasts.

One of our fair-weather projects was to get the bunny cage expanded and make it a little easier for the kiddos to access and clean. Andrew used cedar posts with fencing on the ground (to prevent digging) as well as around and above. The board top from the old cage now slides over half of the new cage. It's very solid and the children have spent way more time with the bunnies now that they're easier to get to!

We happened upon the idea for using the cedar posts a.) because we had a bunch, and b.) because our friends and neighbors have used them for their cages with nice success. For example, the Meres have tried a variety of cage ideas...

They used branches to create the posts for the turkey cage then added the leafy limbs on top...

And used the lightweight pvc pipe idea for a chicken tractor...

They've now decided to majorly upgrade and enlarge the chicken coop using very large tall cedar posts along with a spacious new adjoining chicken house that has some nice features as well.

The door they're using was an extra one they had in their shed. Now painted a dark blue, it looks great! The wooden screen door will be used to enter the coop area - another advantage of the tall posts. Steve put a low, horizontal pull-up door along the lower half of the chicken house opening to where the nesting boxes are situated, so that their little ones could easily get to the eggs without having to actually go inside - we all know how messy chicken houses are! They even landed the wooden nesting boxes for free at a yard sale this summer. With a few adjustments they fit in perfectly!

Now Karyn feels that all she lacks is a nice birch-branch wreath to bedeck the wall or door of their new coop. We'll have to remedy that quick! I'll give you the full tour when it's completed.

The wonderful late summer, early fall harvest is rapidly coming in! But what to do with all this great fresh, organic food?

I've found some good sites and books that I'd like to share with you...and keep on tabs for ourselves! The root cellar is obviously an economical way to store the harvest, but what are the particulars and also maybe some other options?  And while we're talking harvest, how about extending the growing season itself...perhaps even into winter?

The Modern Homestead offers ideas for growing foods that don't require any processing at all...and ways to prepare those types of foods. They also give lots of ideas and practical hands-on experience on growing organic gardens and greenhouses, forest gardens, and soil management on small homesteads.

Hobby Farms offers a ton of valuable information on gardening and storage beginning to end. They focus on helping lovers of the rural life get the most from the farm experience - whether as a hobby or full-time operation. I've also happened onto these books with a wealth of information that I can't wait to absorb and begin trying a few of their tips next summer.

Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables by Mike and Nancy Bubel goes into extensive detail on all variations of root cellars and storage, as well as upgrading the harvest production.

How to Store Your Garden Produce: The Key to Self-Sufficiency by Piers Warren. I first noticed this book in my current issue of Hobby Farm Home, but I found these reviews especially helpful.

And Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from your Home Garden all Year Long by Eliot Coleman. In his book he

"introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine."

This all sounds very intriguing and very promising for those of us wishing to venture on toward the realms of our own year-round, organic foods and produce...perhaps even in the long winter months ahead!

I'm rather losing track of which actual week we're on these days! Since Andrew's only able to get over to our land on a rather spasmodic basis, it's hard to know which counts toward what! Anyhow, progress is being made and this (above) is what it looked like a couple of weeks ago.

While my dad was still here, they rigged up a scaffold-type platform that could be hoisted up and held in place with ropes...

But now that it's just Andrew alone again, he decided to use his tree saddle and rope himself in.

This is the re-bar cutter that he uses...it's working great!

 And this is where we're at as of yesterday. The weekend is rainy, so more won't be accomplished until the latter part of next week most likely. We have ordered the OSB decking for the roof while Andrew's concocting a plan for milling out the rafters...as well as getting up the support poles, ridge pole, and rafters in place. This will prove to be a little tricky, but he's getting a pretty good idea of how he can get it all accomplished.

He strung rope up above along the lifting poles so that he could wear his tree saddle and just tie himself in. This gives him much more flexibility and safety.

And we're closing in on the walls. He got up 7 more logs in the past 2 days and we just have 4 more courses to go to finish the walls. Then it's on to the rafters!

We...we, used very loosely, as in Andrew...did make some more progress this week. The log home is now officially up to the second story floor level now. And there's about another 7 to 8 feet to go for the walls. Then comes the placement of the ridge poles and cap logs.

This is looking at the inside of the walls facing south...

This is the view from the second floor looking north...

On certain clear days we can even see Mt. Katahdin over in this direction...

The girls wanted to see too! This will be the last opportunity...until we get the floors in anyway.</