The Post Agrarian Times
www.agkaiser.org
06/15/2005


Original text and editing by:
A G Kaiser
email to
agkaiser1@gmail,com
When we’re all rich and live on our investments no one will have to work. There will be no poverty or slums. We’ll all have a PH.D. What a glorious vision it is! If hunter gatherers had envisioned the service economy 20,000 years ago the human race would have achieved its glorious end long before any of US were born. . . .
"A good slave works for food alone."

Volume V Issue 06:

   An equilibrium or balance between wealth production and consumption must be maintained to have a sustainable economy.
   In the beginning all wealth consisted of the goods we produced with our own hands. It is still that way. The introduction of slaves, employees or machines between consumers and production changes nothing about the source of wealth. It’s always been and always will be produced by doing work. Employing others to produce your wealth and growing rich by profit on our work, does nothing but deprive the community of the goods you take from US, without contributing to production or doing anything necessary and useful yourself. The use of money as a token to symbolize wealth changes nothing about the nature of the real goods that are represented. At the start, all land was held by the community. In the end it is still so, though we have abstracted civil means to determine its usage and we call it private property. We formed communities for mutual protection and support. It is still so today. The social imperative is an adjunct to the survival instinct, which is the primary law of nature and life.
   Over the millennia, social mechanisms have developed to concentrate the produce of the work of many, the wealth or the money that represents it and the land of the community, into the hands of a few. Such means are supported, in a democracy or democratic republic, by the desire of the many to be rich like the few. There are obvious limits to such schemes. Not many can be takers who contribute nothing but arrogant greed. The miracle of loaves and fishes doesn’t work in the real economy. We cannot consume goods unless we produce them. Those who take goods from the community but produce none themselves, cause economic dissipation by upsetting the equilibrium.
   The wealth, the material goods are needed by the many who produced them with their work, if they are to be able to obey the natural law. "Thou shalt survive!" Economic equilibrium is predicated on equitable give and take. That’s the only kind of market that can distribute the wealth efficiently. That is: put things where they’re needed and have enough to go around. Only value for value exchange produces equilibrium. Profit, like interest on debt, produces inflation of the money supply without producing more goods. We must afford some useful and necessary services. As a rule of thumb, the more abstract, the more separated from the material goods or transportation of goods that is the domain of economy, the less necessary is the service. But whatever the theory of the marketplace may have been or has become, it is concentrating the wealth where it’s needed least. The reality is: the economy’s not working for most of US. In fact, most of US are working for IT! I won’t accept this intolerable condition. It not only offends morality but more importantly it is unsustainable and leads to economic collapse. It is as if the human race is possessed by the demonic spirit. IT is the desire of the truly greedy to have all the work of the community done for their enrichment and we are ITs slave. IT claims the right to plunder the community, which supports our lives, and doesn’t care if we die as long as it is able to take and hoard the goods we produce.
   The few who have used economic means to take most of the wealth for themselves, resist any mechanism that will redistribute it to those who created and need it. This is called economic conservatism. Ironically, it upsets the equilibrium required for economic stability and is antithetical to a conservative system. The only mechanisms allowed by conservatives are of the kind that take from many and keep it for themselves. That means: those who want more of the community’s produce are required to get it from those who have less, presuming they aren’t clever enough to con a rich person or one of the corporate clones they’ve created on paper to obscure their existence. In the unlikely event you are capable on conning those who invented the fraud that economy has become, it does the rest of US no good to have you replace one or more of the masters with the same amount or even more economic entropy. It is the dissipative instruments that do the harm, regardless of who wields them. As long as the means to loot the community exists, i.e. as long as the financial industry is allowed to be a for profit venture and trade is able to dominate production, the economy cannot achieve equilibrium.
   If the promise that you too can be rich is fulfilled for the entire population, the obvious limit to economic disequilibrium is exposed. But the "service economists" and their latest alias, the "ownership socialists" don’t see so far ahead. Most of them still see taxes on the rich, the only people who still have money to tax, as destructive to their wealth acquisition [community looting] mechanisms. In reality, redistributing some of their ill gotten gains through taxation would tend to restore economic equilibrium. If that happened they could loot the community all over and upset the balance again. Unless we change the rules of the game. Of course only they’re allowed to change the rules in the middle of the game and then only if they’re wholly owned conservative politicians bonded to the rich’s corporations.
   The proponents of "Service" and "Ownership" (of stocks and real estate presumably) so called conservatives, probably don’t even see that outsourcing of production is tantamount to the enslavement of foreign populations. They’ve cast off their old slaves due to the high cost of maintenance. I don’t believe that those they think are going to buy their products will be able or want to. There’s no way they can realize the profits from the cheap labor. The cumulative effect of their individual pursuit of profit is the impoverishment of consumers in the only real market they will ever have. There is a limit to the debt we can absorb. Even if Chinese etc. middle classes do spring up, why would the masters, who have abandoned US, be given access to the new market to re-export the imported goods that were made there in the first place. Economists and MBAs who promise this are idiots. All that outsourcing can accomplish is the further disruption of economic equilibrium. The equilibrium can’t be restored by payrolls in the US that are dependent on foreign production. Check out the trade imbalance and the declining value of the dollar. Besides, there are fewer service jobs each year as engineering, accounting and data processing are outsourced. The final joker in the fool’s deck is that no one knows how long China will continue to allow their people to be used to make even a declining number of US rich. The childishly naive and foolish designers of the service/ownership society failed to predict the obvious termination of their scam in declining consumer buying power [and common sense exclusion from foreign markets, even if they could compete buy reselling them their own products] which could only be restored by increasing debt. Never in their deepest subconscious cavern did it occur to them that China et al. must end up with all the ability to produce real wealth. They couldn’t even see that China must end up with all our money and that which we still have would be worthless. Why? Because they only see their own individual profit. They never see the cumulative effect of destroying the community that is the source of that profit, both as producers and consumers. So we have to borrow back the money and then some, that we spent in China, just to keep going. The fools of the corporate empire and their subsidiary politicians anticipate nothing, not even the most obvious: all of the destruction of economic equilibrium in the name of profit is become a threat to our survival. Some will starve to death sitting on the couch waiting for Fox news to tell them how well we’re doing. Or, equally likely, waiting for the power and TV to come back on.

   As to outsourcing their wars of acquisition: a great idea but they'll never deprive US of the right to die for them. Notice how its them while they’re looting our community and US when there’s trouble.

   Conservatives, like those of the Heritage Foundation, make a lot of noise about any attempt by government to mitigate the damage to the economy that business, formalized looting of the community, has caused. They claim that any kind of relief, welfare, social security, medical care etc. is unaffordable and makes its recipients dependent on the government. They suggest that family, local community and churches should take social responsibility, not the government and certainly not themselves, the beneficiaries of the looting of the community that upset the economic equilibrium in the first place. While clamoring for US to take responsibility for our own lives and, by the way, reducing their potential tax burden, they deny the responsibility for having created the life conditions (which need redressing) by having taken the excess profits they’re trying to protect. They began the destruction of our independence, the family and local community at the time of the industrial revolution when they lured US away from our family’s farm. The capitalists that followed have since bought up and consolidated those farms and in the process made US dependent on themselves. Our independence was lost when we sold the farm and went to work for a corporation. But now they no longer wish to support US. They want the institutions they looted and ravaged in order to make their profit to deal with the havoc they’ve wreaked. Well they certainly reek, whether or not they themselves are deluded by their propaganda. But it doesn’t end there. Having destroyed our economy in their single minded pursuit of greater profits they’ve abandoned the dependents they’ve made of US, by outsourcing production. In the process they’ve made themselves dependent on foreign production, while we remain dependent on them and they deny responsibility for anything. No, they want to rely on the family and local community they’ve destroyed by looting to repair the damage they’ve done in the pursuit of profit.

   Let’s nationalize the government, like the indigenous people of Bolivia are trying to do to their’s. Corporate interests and privatization have eroded our control over the politicians who nominally run our republic. They can no longer be said to be democratically elected to represent US. The XNAT’s [Multi-National’s] campaign contributions and media see to it only the candidates they own are well known and/or well accepted choices. Marginal parties and independents and any with unfettered minds are discredited by the neo-con press executives, who choose what will be printed or aired, from the contributions of journalists. It doesn’t matter whether the hireling reporters are liberal or conservative. Their conservative bosses determine the lies we see and hear about our world and on which corrupted data we must base our choices. The politicians who win election by this fraudulent scheme, serve their corporate masters first, last and always. Any good or useful thing our government does is purely inadvertent. Though you wouldn’t know it by the spin and propaganda, all they do is for the profit of less than one percent of the population, who own more than more than 90 percent of stocks and everything. When the interest only mortgages mentioned last week by Alan Greenspan become the norm, we won’t even own a small percentage of our homes.
   Alan Greenspan-- now there’s a piece of work:

". . . The apparent froth in housing markets may have spilled over into mortgage markets. The dramatic increase in the prevalence of interest-only loans, as well as the introduction of other relatively exotic forms of adjustable-rate mortgages, are developments of particular concern. To be sure, these financing vehicles have their appropriate uses. But to the extent that some households may be employing these instruments to purchase a home that would otherwise be unaffordable, their use is beginning to add to the pressures in the marketplace. . . ."- Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan, before the Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress; 6/09/05

   How blithely he blames the victims of the dissipative parasitization of the economy, that is the inevitable result of banking and finance in general. It is the nature of usury that it destroys economy by concentrating the money that represents wealth in the hands of a few. Moses knew that 3500 years ago when he forbid interest. The "marketplace" is the cause of economic problems, not the solution. Every service that profits on the production of real goods made by the work of others, is a burden on the community. All services are partially abstract. They consume wealth produced by the community but they produce no goods to offset their consumption. Thus they are dissipative of economic energy. Some services, like medicine, transportation and defense, are useful and necessary. We must find a way to produce enough real wealth of material goods to support them. To avoid upsetting the economic equilibrium more than necessary, the cost of non-productive services must be minimized. Doctors could still have their exorbitant incomes, if we reigned in insurance and pharmaceutical profits. The latter are purely and mostly, in the order mentioned, financial and abstract . Abstract profits are the most dissipative to economy. Finance includes banking, insurance, stocks and offshore manufacturing. Finance is purely abstract and totally disrupts economic equilibrium. Like a casino, the financial industries must in the end have all the money and have the community enslaved with chains of debt. Greenspan’s "particular concern" overlooks the fact, as do politicians of the one party Repu-Dem corporate government, that including financial enterprise in the GDP is calling a liability an asset. That is: they’re cooking the books on their economic forecasts. It’s no accident that they want to divert our attention from the real causes of economic dissipation that have made them rich. But I suspect no conspiracy. They aren’t smart enough to conspire. They believe their own bullshit. They are idiots who want to live high at the expense of the rest of US-- the community. That’s the way its been for thousands of years and they don’t care to know that it’s always been leading to our final dissolution.

   If you wish to help, contact me:

agkaiser@yahoo.com
Greg Kaiser

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