Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>]

I've been reading along as it all gets discussed. Interesting how each thing that comes up creates another solution. Like my niece's furnace, where the service guy 'adjusted' the flame sensor a month ago, and now it stops in the dead of winter cold so he has to come out on an emergency call.
He gets paid twice that way.

The bottom line is that industrial civilization has a consumption problem, and that consumption problem is because humans don't know what they should be doing with their brains. Instead of using technology to make things better and extend the availability of the planet for future generations (humans and other life), they do just the opposite: they shorten the future for immediate desires. The government debt is run up even further when immediate gratification doesn't create enough jobs for people to satisfy their advertising-coerced wishes.

The idea of "free choice" has never worked. That's why we have laws. It isn't ok to kill someone just because we 'want' to, so why is it ok to buy stuff (oil that kills people) just because we 'want' to. Notwithstanding that most people don't even know they want most of the stuff they buy until after they bought it and come up with reasons canned for them by TV, there needs to be some mechanism that moderates human consumption at the point where they make decisions: the cash register.

They don't buy crappy foods because they can't get good food: they buy crappy food because it is cheap and easy. They buy processed foods to save time that they think they have to be working to afford entertainment for themselves and their children. The decision is always whether it is cheaper and easier to buy something than to make something. The result is that the bankers decide what farms are viable, what people are viable, and we end up with nobody making anything useful.

The simple solution is for buying to be more costly than making. It won't occur naturally because it is more profitable for our leadership if people buy stuff from the industries which bribe the leadership(especially 'buying' loans from banks or forced to buy 'sick care' from insurance companies). Since it is an entrenched system of cash doing the talking, it is no wonder that few would think of putting an end to the delusion of "opportunity" that capitalism provides.

But it will end, one way or another. Either we eat each other as the Empire falls, or we implement conservation of the future. In a capitalist system, conservation of the future requires taxes on consumption. In a communist system, simply reducing the production rate of factories by decree does it.
We have a solution proposed in Congress already: it's called the FairTax. It's sponsors think it would encourage growth, and it would at the rate they suggest (23% sales tax to replace all income taxes and eliminate the IRS). This should be passed and then doubled each year until we have clean water and clean air and reliable local systems again.
The failure mode of the FairTax is that people stop buying stuff because it costs too much and grow their own food and trade with their neighbors for stuff. (huh?) The success mode is that people stop buying stuff because they realize that they didn't need it in the first place and they didn't really need the government to protect or provide the things they were buying.

What are people for? That is the only question that needs to be answered. All of the rest of the noise we hear from the 'greenies' or other social engineers is about entertaining humans while still consuming the planet. If we don't make humans stay within consumption boundaries and become useful to each other's future, then they are worse than loose heifers in a patch of peas. Humans have no self-control. That's why they invented laws and social agreements: so the individual doesn't have to rely on his own conscience all of the time. Any sailor can tell you how unreliable that is. (With fingers crossed, "I will never, ever, ever, EVER buy another ____ of napalm/alcohol/wine/heroin, so help me God.")

Dan C.
Belgium, WI