You are Part of It

Funding and management of energy, water, will be excluded from the second floor economy and will be funded through the conversion of NASA and military funding described previously. The administration of this agency through the action of the federal legislature would have the ability to tax local labor and second floor economic activity if necessary secondary to the pursuit of developing clean environmentally sustainable energy and adequate supplies of water. There are many interesting proposals that have been made by visionary environmental activists.

The mother of all economic systems is food production in excess of requirements to support the present population and it?s projected growth rate. In the face of climate change the most resilient food production system would be a complex web of small local production, large scale regional production, and minimal large scale trans regional production. Climate, water, and soil quantity and quality are the bedrock of this productive capacity. Externalities that impact this part of the economy must be properly valued and the costs paid by the producer of the externality.

Corporations would not have the rights of an individual, but individuals would have the right to organize around the purpose of creating economic goods and services. Corporations serve as a fig leaf that is designed to obscure the fact that the economic system currently serves the function of moving and concentrating financial resources in the hands of a few individuals.

Building an Economy is like Building a Two Story House Our current economy is a suck up economy, it sucks resources up and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands while depleting the generating capacity of the resources from which the resources are sucked up from in the first place. The global economic model of the developed world can be compared to the process of building a house. The current model tries to build a house that continually remodels and expands it?s self.

It?s not that you can?t build a second floor on a house, it?s that you can?t sacrifice the foundation to do it. A new economic model that is sustainable within the parameters of the natural world would build an economic house that continually replenished the foundation and the first floor and then built a reasonably sized second floor that stayed connected with it?s foundation through it?s connection to the first floor. The foundation of all economic activity is the health of the soil and the water used to produce food for human consumption.

Discussion of efficiency and profitability are based on the assumptions of current accounting methods. These methods are based on the point of view of the irreducibly separate individual. The only way that profit can accrue is for the minus on the side of where the resources are taken (outside the self, in the externalities) is ignored and attributed to the seller/producer of the good or service. Discussion of efficiency and profitability are based on the assumptions of current accounting methods. These methods are based on the point of view of the irreducibly separate individual.

Self-interest remains the driving engine of the system but self is redefined to the view of self as the whole person, both separate and non-separate, with the world around them are figured into the system. This simultaneously relieves the payers of negative externalities from the un-chosen cost of the negative externality (increasing their wealth) and relieves the business environment of the perverse incentive to create products and services that have high profit potential due in large part to high negative externalities.

Given that our current economic and political systems have been developed exclusively in response to human social needs a systematic reorientation to take human continuity with the ecosystem into account will seem to be a radical departure from the norm. In this case the norm is the problem because it has not adapted to the reality of our situation. In our public discourse about the issue one of the dominant themes is the absence of widespread serious discussion about changing our economic system.

Capital is really a function of how much human time can be aggregated and how that time can be amplified through the use of extra-biological power. The number of people and the time they are able to spend in either individual or group pursuits is the foundation of human capital formation. The degree to which that can be magnified by expanded human consciousness/knowledge and extra-biological power is what generates capital accumulation. There is no necessity to any particular form of accumulation but at base it is all human time + social alignment.

We have ignored the reality of time from the biological perspective in devising our current economic system. We have also largely ignored the reality of touch in devising our economic system. All things touch, touch has present and future consequences, when touch extends farther beyond the immediate sphere of the individual it becomes less private. Time is the epitome of all material both in the time it took for the material to be created by nature, the time it takes to replenish the stored time of used materials, and the human time it took to create the product out of the materials.