"Oh, Shit" said the King, and ten thousand arseholes heaved in the noonday sun,
for in those days the King's word was law, and the King ruled with an iron hand"
from, allegedly, "The Night of the King's Castration" - anonymous authors.
If some recent data is correct, approximately 7 Billion bums are in danger of sunburn,
because this moment marks the beginning of the end of the Industrial Age, and sooner or
later, the world will be crapping itself.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2017/01/light-bulb-moment"Measuring productivity is far from easy; it tends to be the residual left over when all other factors have been accounted for. The OECD says it "can often be a measure of our ignorance". Still, the attached table is very striking. It comes from the US Conference Board (here's the link, with thanks to Gervais Williams of Miton and Andrew Lees of Macrostrategy Partnership for drawing it to my attention). And it shows that, at the global level, total factor productivity fell last year, was flat the two years before, and has barely budged since 2007. Before the crisis, it was growing at 0.9% a year."
I'll begin by thanking Coincube for the link to "Sacred Economics". I'd met Charles Eisenstein
briefly some years ago, before I had got a grasp of the numbers driving economics, so while
his thoughts on living in a world without money were interesting, I couldn't see his
philosophy surviving the wider community's onslaught. That vein of thought continues through
his arguments in that book for and against Usury, though very much biased toward doing right by
others and being able to assess the ultimate benefits to communities of any action. In some
ways it's Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" but without the individual profit motive and with
limited competition.
We play games with winners and losers; we compete; in most cases we intuitively understand
the rules of the game. Hence when we play Monopoly, everyone knows here will be one
winner and many losers. We also understand that at the end of the game, when the winner is
declared, that the board folds, and together with the pieces, goes back into the box.
Nobody expects that the price of losing could be vital organs like kidneys, a liver, or
a heart.
Why should it be different in real life? Why participate in a system that creates unpayable
debt via Usury? Despite claims by some prominent Economists that our "debts don't matter",
any internet search for "India kidney Debt" will produce returns like this:
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/deep-in-debt-farmers-fuel-kidney-donation-racket-ap-india-today/1/256628.html"According to Vijay Kumar, an employee working in Rentachintala milk chilling centre, there are at least seven other farmers who have been paid a few thousand rupees for "donating" their kidneys in Hyderabad. The reason for this alarming situation, Vijay said, is the big kidney sale racket that surfaced in the Palnad area between 1998 and 2000. The Palnad area, comprising Macherla, Kambhampadu, Rentachintala, Dachepalli and Piduguralla blocks, has mostly rain-fed cultivation. It is dominated by big farmers who lease out their land to landless farmers."
The consequences of unpayable debt are not always so extreme.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2008/10/volkswagen-shor.html"Shares in Volkswagen were nearly halved on Wednesday after the controlling shareholder, Porsche, took steps to ease a squeeze on short sellers that more than quadrupled the stock in days.
Porsche itself had prompted the meteoric rise in VW stock with its announcement on Sunday that it had effective control of 74.1% of VW, leaving less than 6 percent in the market.
"In order to avoid further market distortions and the resulting consequences for those involved," Porsche said, it intends "to settle hedging transactions in the amount of up to 5 percent of the Volkswagen ordinary shares.""
Thus an unpayable debt, a squeezed naked short, became payable though Porsche's
pragmatic decision to take its profits and sell some shares into the market.
"You can't get blood out of a stone/turnip" - Sayings like these, and the need for a fit
and healthy common man to fight wars, have, in the past, limited inhumanity's excesses.
Today, to judge by some of the more lurid posts om the internet, the profit from
harvesting the right cadaver could be over $100,000. Of course, things like Limited
Liability and Bankruptcy Law stand in the way of such excess profits. If it weren't for
these things companies could: grown and sell foods that over a lifetime, destroy organs,
creating a market for transplants; build transplant hospitals, prisons, airports, and
transportation; push the world's most impoverished people into unpayable debt via access
to credit; encourage governments such as that of India to declare fiat paper savings
worthless; make organ donor contracts enforceable in law.
Result : Profits! and Real Economic Growth! and higher GDP! What's not to like?
Well, generally, in the Western World, unpayable debt doesn't get paid, but that's
because Limited Liability and Bankruptcy Law have been grafted onto Usury. The system
still cranks out unpayable debt, and we've learned to live with it, mostly because
the economies have been growing, and inflation raises all the boats, just some more than
others. Banning Usury would reverse the flow of profit from the poor to the already
wealthy. It will not solve all our problems. There's more to this, but space, and time,
is limited.
The link above shows that world growth will probably reverse. I'm adding "probably"
because the world is in a place it's never visited before, a place with no foreseeable
good outcomes and unprecedented uncertainty. A time when, if you can keep your
head when all around you are losing theirs, you haven't been fully briefed.
