On The Money; What’s My Objection To Objective Science?

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

The Method To My Madness pt 2

What’s My Objection To Objective Science?

For centuries now, objective science has ruled the world. About 500 years ago, objective science overthrew God, and replaced religion as the chief source of human knowledge about the world, during a period known as The Renaissance, or “The Enlightenment”. Sure, religion was ripe for an overthrow. Religion had become incredibly corrupt, violent and oppressive, and did little for the millions of poor people who served it so, well, religiously, but today, objective science has failed, and the seeds of it’s failure were there from the beginning.

For a while, objective science seemed like a wonderful thing. The freedom to study the world, and publish your findings without fear of being condemned to death as a heretic must have been quite refreshing. In its early years, objective science made great strides in understanding how the world worked, especially in the field of physics.

Sir Isaac Newton, besides earning himself a knighthood, and a distinguished place in history, remains a household word to this day for his groundbreaking work in describing the mathematical relationship between objects in motion. This was such a big deal, they even named a cookie after him. Newton’s way of looking at the world, as a collection of objects, in motion or at rest, falling and bumping into each other, became the foundation of “objective science”. Suddenly, science, specifically physics, was all about objects, and the transfer of energy between them.

Lots of people jumped on the “objective science” bandwagon, and soon, the “scientific method” was born. Science teachers all over the world, in all kinds of fields, from chemistry to sociology still teach this scientific method. The scientific method is a way of designing experiments, and scientists all over the world use it religiously.

Using the scientific method, the scientist tries to isolate one particular variable in a complex system, and then looks for something that determines change in that variable. For instance, a scientist might start a number of identical plants, raising them in exactly the same soil and nutrients, and then vary the amount of light the plants receive, to see how that effects the plant’s growth rate. Ideally, the scientist finds a cause and effect relationship, that can be expressed in the form of a mathematical equation, x hours of sunlight produces y amount of new growth, for instance.

While physical objects yield very easily to this kind of experiment, producing mathematically predictable results, complex systems, specifically organisms, like plants, animals, people, families, cities, or the economy, do not yield such cut and dried results. Organisms teem with variables, and scientists find it difficult, if not impossible, to control all of them, as well as they do the variables of objects, like chemicals, rocks, or metal parts.

Objective science taught us a lot about organisms, but never with the kind of mathematical accuracy and predictability of physics, and the more complex the organism, the less predictable the results, and the harder it was for scientists to find these mechanical cause and effect relationships. That didn’t stop them from trying, though. In the mean time, the objective science of physics really took off.

Thanks to “objective science”, physics gave birth to modern technology. From the steam locomotive and the cotton gin, to the ipad and the X-Box, the world of applied objective science, commonly called technology, transformed the world, and our lives. Not only did theses new things change our lives, objective science itself, made us feel smarter and more powerful.

We began to believe that through objective science, we could unlock all of the secrets of the universe and know the mind of God. This was the goal of “The Enlightenment”, to explain how the universe worked, in scientific equations, rather than religious terms. When we saw the first nuclear explosion, and learned the equation E=MCsquared, a lot of people thought we were getting close to that goal.

Despite the fact that physics had left biology, psychology, sociology, economics and other sciences that study organisms in the dust, many scientists in those fields, and most laypeople, still assume that objective science will eventually unlock all of the secrets of the universe, and so they continue to pursue objective science, believing that only the vast number of variables inherent in the study of organisms, prevents scientists from completely grasping the mechanics of life, but they think they are getting close too.

These scientists think that unraveling the mysteries of the universe is a good thing, in and of itself, but more importantly, they believe that we can use this knowledge to make the world a better place to live. This idea has guided our culture for the last 500 years. These were the assumptions behind the rise of objective science: That objective science would unlock the mysteries of the universe, and that we could use that knowledge to engineer a better world.

That’s why they overthrew God and religion to begin with. Not that God and religion didn’t deserve to be overthrown, but now objective science has led us into a system more corrupt, violent and oppressive than even the sickest ambitions of the most sadistic Cardinals of the Spanish Inquisition. Objective science has become a scam, a way to make money, and a political tool to bamboozle the public, and instead of helping us to engineer a better world, it has unleashed hell on Earth.

Fans of objective science, and there are many, usually see the mysteries of the universe as falling into two broad categories: The stuff we already understand, and the stuff scientists are studying right now, so that we will understand it pretty soon. Most of them still believe that we will someday unravel the mysteries of the universe through objective science, and that we will use that knowledge to make the world a better place to live, but they couldn’t be more wrong, and the further we pursue objective science, the more obvious that fact becomes.

The truth is, We don’t have a freakin’ clue! We are no closer to unraveling the mysteries of the universe that we have ever been. The mythology of the Big Bang has no more truth in it than the story of Adam’s rib, or the story that the whole world sits on the back of a turtle. These stories all provide convenient ways to explain what we see around us, but I wouldn’t take any of them too seriously. Before you call me a heretic for renouncing the Big Bang, you should consider a few things.

First, almost all of the scientists in the world are working on projects aimed at developing new products. They’re developing new drugs to treat depression, finding ways to make weapons more lethal, figuring out how to make computers smaller and faster. Sure, some of them are staring out at the universe and trying to make sense of it, but more of them are creating dangerous new life forms that they can patent and unleash on the world, to make money.

They aren’t unraveling the mysteries of the universe, so much as they are unraveling the fabric of life itself, because that’s where the research funds come from. The companies that fund science, expect to turn a profit from it. The same people who drive scientific research, also drive our economy, the scientists working for them care more about their paycheck, than uncovering the ultimate truth of the universe. The Big Bang is not really a big deal to most of them, it is just how the universe looks to them.

Second, and this is the important part. Even though the world looks to us like its made of objects, some living, like plants and animals, some not, like rocks and ice cubes, the world only looks this way to us because this is what we need to see in order to survive. Our brains don’t have anywhere near the capacity to understand the universe. We only see what we need to know to get ourselves fed and laid. In other words, how the universe looks to us, has almost nothing to do with how the universe is. What we don’t comprehend, and doesn’t help us survive, we simply don’t see at all.

Objective scientists themselves have provided plenty of evidence to prove it. According to astrophysicists, everything we have managed to detect in the universe, only accounts for about 2% of what they suspect is really there. They don’t mean that beyond the reach of our telescopes there is more stuff, they mean that all around us, there is more stuff, like dark matter, dark energy etc. We simply have no way of detecting it.

Einstein’s theory of relativity showed us, quite dramatically, with the first nuclear explosion, that the world is not made of objects, however tiny. Instead, the universe is made of energy, and that space and time aren’t nearly as real as we, or Newton, imagined, at least not outside of the observer who experiences them.

Even though the universe appears as though it sprang into existence out of nothingness, from one single point, no one was outside of the universe to observe it. There is no such thing as absolute space and time. Instead, space and time only exist in relation to an observer, that’s what Einstein meant by relativity. Since there were no observers, outside of the universe, before the big bang, there wasn’t any space or time in which that mythical event took place. What would the Big Bang be without any time to expand, or any space to expand into?

I know its hard to imagine anything outside of space and time. It’s impossible really. That’s what I mean by incomprehensible. Looking at the universe as something that exists in space and time is kind of like looking at a pie chart. When you see data expressed in a pie chart, you can make some sense of it, but when you only see pages and pages of raw data, it doesn’t make any sense at all, so you don’t bother. Everyone knows that a pie chart is not a real pie, and that data does not become sweet gooey filling when you make one. This is not a perfect analogy, but nothing is, really. It’s incomprehensible, that’s the whole problem, and that’s my point.

Does all of that seem incomprehensible to you? Good! It should, because it is. It’s time we faced that fact. The universe is simply beyond our comprehension. We don’t really know any more about the universe than an orangutan, or a chimp or a hamster for that matter. None of us in this world really knows any more than we really need to know to get ourselves fed and to get ourselves laid, and some of us don’t even know that much.

By the way, what I’m telling you here, is called a phenomenological analysis of objective science. Phenomenologists don’t make discoveries that capitalists can turn into products, and so they don’t make much money, outside of the philosophy departments of some colleges and universities, where they occasionally find work as professors. If this stuff sounds interesting to you, I suggest you find a college or university who employs one, and take a few classes in phenomenology.

Alright, now that we’ve gone over the deep end, you are probably asking yourself, “What’s all of this got to do with economics?” The short answer is that while objective science taught us a lot about objects in space and time, it never really told us much about organisms. Phenomenology, on the other hand, can tell us a lot about organisms, not everything, but more than objective science. Again, if phenomenology sounds interesting to you, find yourself a good phenomenologist, and take a few classes.

One basic principle of phenomenology is that organisms are always more than the sum of their parts, unlike machines, which are simply the sum of their parts. Plants, animals and people are organisms, and they are also part of a larger organism called the ecosystem, which is part of a larger organism called the world, which is undoubtedly part of a larger organism we call “The Universe”. . There’s much more to us than meets the eye, and that’s why objective science never really told us as much about us, as it did about objects. The economy is also an organism, and it’s part of a larger organism called “society” which is also part of the ecosystem, etc. This means that there is more to how we feed each other, trade with each other, and compete with each other than meets the eye.

On The Money, Economics for the 99% offers a phenomenological analysis of economics. You’ll notice that I include my personal perspective, as well as an environmental perspective, a workers perspective, a consumers perspective, a political perspective and a social perspective on the subject of economics, instead of just looking at the mechanical flow of money around the globe.

The phenomenological method of study, involves observing phenomena from many perspectives, rather than trying to describe it as an object or a machine. The world is more than resources, people are more than consumers and the economy is more than a machine that feeds one to the other. I also include a bit of humor, because readers are more than just digesters of information. Call me crazy, but there’s a phenomenological critique of objective science that’s On The Money.

On The Money; The Method To My Madness pt 1

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

The Method to My Madness pt 1

The Black Hole Swallowing The Earth

Every year economists write more fat impenetrable books, and every year their theories get further and further from reality. Money itself has become completely unhinged from the real world, as increasingly abstract mathematical concepts get transformed into incomprehensible financial instruments. Derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, high-frequency trading algorithms, etc have so little to do with real economics that I won’t even dignify them with discussion, except to say that they have become a huge part of the financial services sector of the economy, and financial services have become a huge part of total global economic activity. Financial services, now account for about 1% of our national GDP, even though this gigantic industry makes nothing at all.

The Financial Services Sector has become a black hole, from which nothing escapes, and into which everything is drawn and destroyed in the process. This black hole has become the central focus of the science of economics. In this rarefied world, money masturbates, knocks itself up, and multiplies without any contact with the real world at all. The more this happens, the more central the Financial Services Sector becomes to the global economy, and the less everything that really does happen in the real world matters to economists. The Financial Services Sector spawned the recent housing bubble, and economists all over the world praised its transcendent genius, even though any idiot, and I’m talking about myself here, could see that it would inevitably collapse.

Economists find all of this monetary masturbation incredibly fascinating. They find the process of making money out of nothing irresistible, and they seek ways to understand and perpetuate it, much the way theoretical physicists feel about their equally insane quest to discover the Higgs-Boson particle, the so-called “God Particle”.

No doubt you’ve heard of the recently built, 17mile wide, Large Hadron Super-Collider that straddles the border between France and Switzerland, designed largely to search for this astoundingly tiny particle. Perhaps you even heard the warnings of some physicists, that this enormous device just might, accidentally, produce a black hole, that might then proceed to swallow the entire Earth, destroying the planet and every living thing that inhabits it. On the other hand, there’s an equally small chance that we might learn something useful from the experiments at the large Hadron Super-Collider.

Similarly, economists concoct increasingly dangerous, and pointless ways to study the behavior of pure greed, in a vacuum at very near the speed of light. These experiments require enormous amounts of resources and energy. The Financial Services Sector sucks these resources and energy from the real world, threatening whole stock exchanges, global markets and national currencies with instantaneous collapse.

Accelerating purified greed to near-light velocity within the vacuum of the Financial Services Sector generates enormous heat. This heat triggers expansion. As the Financial Services Sector expands, it draws the real world into the direct path of this superheated high-velocity greed, with which, it inevitably collides, as happened most recently in 2008.

In this collision, we saw greed shatter into its constituent components: dishonesty, fraud, violence, error and theft, which we can then trace by examining the damage they inflict on community, culture, and environment. However, as the Financial Services Sector becomes more central to the economy, economists study these high-velocity, purified greed experiments with little regard for their effects on the real world, our lives or the environment. They simply seek to understand how a system based on unbridled greed, functions at its highest level. That’s their job. That’s what they get paid to do.

Like the unbelievably expensive and inordinately risky experiments at the Large Hadron Super-Collider, designed to answer misdirected questions about the imperceptibly tiny, economic experiments involving purified high-speed greed do nothing to make the world a better place, or help us make sense of our lives. Instead, these experiments simply seek to expand the emptiness of finance, until it swallows the real world whole. These experiments exemplify our cultural insanity.

They have not solved humanity’s problems. They have only created more of them. They have not unraveled the mysteries of the universe. They have driven themselves insane, and taken a lot of us with them. They do not bring us closer to understanding the mind of God. They have created hell on Earth, while they try to tell us how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Economists, like those nuclear physicists at the Large Hadron Super-Collider, have lost their minds. They’ve lost their grip on reality as they reach further and further into nothingness. They have reached the limits of objective science, and economists have seen the end of capitalism, but they refuse to admit to themselves that it is over.

They have failed. Their endeavors were doomed from the start, and now, they have proven it. They failed because of flawed assumptions, which date back 500 years to “The Enlightenment”. These flawed assumptions led them to adopt a flawed methodology.. We call that flawed methodology, “objective science”. Mark it well. While objective science produced great leaps forward in the science of physics, it never did much for the science of economics, and it never delivered on its original promise to unlock the mysteries of the universe. The time has come to face the real limitations of objective science.

Next week, part two

On The Money; What is Money, and Where Did It Come From?

 

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

What is Money, and Where Did It Come From?

Money is a pretty weird thing if you think about it. Money can level forests and move mountains. Money can drill for oil on the bottom of the ocean, land a nuclear powered car on Mars or hunt people down and kill them with remote controlled aircraft. Money can turn your life upside down, make your tap-water catch fire and drive you out of your home. When people talk about their problems, money, or lack thereof, is usually at the top of the list. So, what is money, and where did it come from?

For most of human history, people had no money. People still had to work to get the things they needed, but the work was much more direct. If you wanted meat, you had to hunt and kill an animal. If you wanted a home, you had to build it from whatever you could find around you. All of this stuff was just hard enough to do that you wouldn’t want to do any more of it than you needed to, but easy enough that most of us could accomplish what we needed to do to survive.

Before money, trade was a much smaller part of people’s lives. If you wanted to trade, you had to find someone who had what you wanted, and you had to have something that they wanted. This might happen once or twice a year. The rest of the time, you made do with what you could find around you, all of which was free for the taking.

Before money, nature was “the bank”. People made withdrawals, in the form of the plants and animals they ate and made their clothing from, the trees they made their homes from and the stones from which they crafted tools and weapons, and they made deposits in the form of shit, piss, food waste and eventually, their own bodies, which nature would rapidly recycle into more plants animals and minerals. The system was so well balanced that no one needed accountants, tax preparers or lawyers, and so stable that it lasted for hundreds of millions of years, including over a million years of human habitation, without outside intervention or regulation.

If the natural system worked so well, why was money invented in the first place? The answer is beer. Sure, you can find plenty of food, water and stuff to build a house from in nature, but beer is pretty hard to come by. Occasionally, people could collect enough grass seeds, soak them in water for long enough to produce prehistoric beer, but not nearly often enough to satisfy the thirsts of the ancient Sumerians, who lived in the Middle-East, where it gets mighty hot in the summertime.

The ancient Sumerians were the first people in the world to domesticate wild grasses, and begin farming. They burned huge tracts of forest land that had sustained them for eons, in order to grow wheat and barley. This took an enormous amount of work, and led to major headaches, like plagues of frogs, locusts, and flies, as well as turning a lot of habitable forest land into barren desert, but it did give them beer, and beer was very precious to them. It must have been, or why else would they have worked so hard and sacrificed so much in order to make it?

So it should not surprise you that the first unit of money was the price of a beer, the Shekel. A shekel is equal to 180 grains of barley, roughly the amount needed to produce one beer. While everything else in the natural world was free, beer was expensive. So people counted their shekels, traded shekels and bought things with shekels of barley. Making shekels was no fun at all, but everyone liked beer, so shekels became the currency of the Sumerians, and that is how money was born.

In economics classes they will tell you that money is a medium of exchange that facilitates trade. They’ll tell you that money is a technological advance that made trade more efficient, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, money was invented to facilitate alcoholism.

Many people, economists especially, overlook the central role of alcoholism in civilization. Archeologists have discovered ancient Mesopotamian recipes for beer, and friezes depicting beer drinking on Egyptian pyramids. It was only after beer-making had evolved to a high art, that people began eating the yeast-risen loaves of grain, what we now call “bread”, that were originally used to make to make individual batches of beer.

People eat cereal grains, sure, but compared to a fat steak from a wild antelope, a bowl of cream of wheat is nothing to get excited about. On the other hand, you can’t make beer out of a deer. The psychoactive effects of alcohol, no doubt, made cereal grains especially prized, and as people became habituated to alcohol intoxication, their craving for it grew.

As is the case with alcoholism, the more you drink, the less you care about anything else, until the quest for alcohol becomes the central focus of the alcoholic’s life. The more focused you become on alcohol, the more the rest of your life tends to fall apart. In order to feed their craving for alcohol, people worked long hours to cultivate grains. As grain farming expanded, farmed fields replaced natural habitat, and wild game became more scarce. With less wild game available, grain farmers increasingly traded with traditional hunter-gatherers, who themselves fell under the spell of alcoholism, making them dependent on the grain farmers for their beer. Thus, grain became a precious commodity. People who had a lot of grain, grew more powerful, and those with the most shekels, ruled.

So we see that money is, quite literally, a drug, and addiction to it has shaped, and continues to shape, the course of civilization.

An Open Letter to Humboldt County 2nd District Supervisor, Estelle Fennel

I sent the following letter to my County Supervisor Estelle Fennel after hearing her make some disparaging remarks about some of her constituents.  I also submitted it to both of our local newspapers.  The Independent ran the letter, while The Redwood Times refused to print it on the grounds that they don’t print third party letters.

The real issue is that the business owners downtown, especially the real estate agents, don’t want their customers to see poor people hanging around town.  Of course, they don’t want to admit that the real problem is declining wages and rising housing prices.  Instead, they want to blame the victims, and use taxpayer resources to drive poor people out of town, even though they constantly complain about paying too much in taxes.

Dear Supervisor Fennel,

As the county considers what to do with the area formerly known as “The Jim Demulling Memorial Grove”, I urge you to consider a few facts about Southern Humboldt that you seem to have forgotten:

1. Everyone in Southern Humboldt, without exception, urinates and defecates. Many, if not most of them, do it in a fashion that does not comply with county codes. As the former executive director of Hum-CPR, you actively lobbied to protect the rights of land-owners who choose to use non-standard and unapproved sanitation.

2. Most of Southern Humboldt’s adult population consumes alcohol on a regular, if not daily basis, and at least half-a-dozen business establishments sell alcoholic beverages in Garberville alone, to accommodate Southern Humboldt’s alcohol consumers.

3. Illegal drug use is not only tolerated in Southern Humboldt, it is celebrated as a proud and cherished tradition, and it has become the main driver of our local economy.

4. Willits Towing and Recovery recently removed hundreds of thousands of pounds of of junk cars and other scrap metal from rural parcels in Southern Humboldt, cheerfully, and at no cost to rural land-owners, a quantity that dwarfs the amount of garbage begrudgingly, and disparagingly removed by Eel River Cleanup. As I recall, you yourself took advantage of a subsidized program to eliminate unsightly and hazardous waste from our rural environment, by bringing in over 100 discarded tires. Clearly this community tolerates people who do not take responsibility for their garbage.

Were Federal, State and County laws strictly enforced, especially on the rural properties in Southern Humboldt, law enforcement would find flagrant violations of the law on nearly every parcel. While most of Southern Humboldt is poorly suited to agriculture, it is remarkably well suited to concealing ugly and illegal activity, a fact that has contributed greatly to its economic vitality.

As a public servant who represents a lot of ethically-challenged, full-time criminals, talk of “intolerable behavior” rings especially hollow. We tolerate a lot of ugly behavior here in Southern Humboldt, and a lot of people around here have grown obscenely rich as a result of it. That’s what makes this community special. I don’t think it fair to condemn the same behavior, only for those who endure poverty and have no place to go.

If you have managed to find a way to speak respectfully with and about the rest of your constituents, you should be able to speak respectfully about the members of this community who lack the resources to secure for themselves, the privacy of a home in which to engage in the same kinds of activities as the rest of your constituents.

If you want the poor and the young to have any respect for county government, you must first demonstrate that the county has respect for them, and their needs. As their representative, I urge you to refrain from using terms like “vagrants” to describe any of your constituents in the future. Instead, I hope you will work for a compassionate solution to the problem of greedy people, who lack compassion, intent on pressing their economic advantage against the poor and the young.

Sincerely, John Hardin

P.O. Box 2301, Redway, CA 95560

On the Money; Foie Gras

 

On The Money;

Economics For the 99%

Foie Gras

Edit

 

Despite their fat books, and complex economic models, economists fail to comprehend the nature of economic activity. They don’t realize that the economy is an organic part of a greater organism known as society, and an even greater organism known as the environment. In other words, the economy is not a thing in itself. Instead, it is a part of our lives, and our lives are part of life on Earth. Ideally, the economy should be a much smaller part of our lives, and much less of a burden to life on Earth.

 

 

To illustrate this relationship, you could think of the economy as the liver of a goose. The liver of a healthy goose is about the size of a human thumb, and at that size it serves the goose very well. In a healthy goose, this small organ helps the goose digest and process all of the seeds, plant material, bugs and small fish that a healthy goose eats, and turns that food into strong goose muscles, shiny warm goose feathers, healthy goose eggs, and gives the goose all of the energy that it needs to fly thousands of miles each year as part of its annual migration. That’s what a goose’s liver is supposed to do.

 

 

However, some people who raise captive geese, don’t care about the health of their geese. They don’t want their geese to fly, or lay eggs, and they don’t care if the goose is strong or if it has shiny warm feathers. Instead, they want their geese to grow the biggest liver possible, in order that they might dine upon a French delicacy known as Foie Gras.

 

 

They’ve learned that if they nail the goose’s feet to the floor, so that it can’t get any exercise, and they put a tube down the goose’s throat, so that they can force feed it huge quantities of leftover pasta, bacon grease, and lots of other fatty, high carbohydrate food, they can make the goose’s liver grow until it is larger than a human fist. So, this is what they do to their geese.

 

 

As you can imagine, this doesn’t make the goose very happy at all. The goose shows many signs of distress, but the people who raise geese this way, simply ignore those signs. The goose then becomes very ill, but the people who raise geese this way ignore that too. Instead of the liver serving the needs of a healthy goose, the people who raise geese for foie gras, sacrifice the goose in order to produce the largest liver possible.

 

 

Before long, the goose is near death, and the goose’s liver, by this time about eight times as large as a healthy liver, has become so distended and diseased that it barely functions at all. At this point, the people who raise geese for foie gras, kill the goose, and remove the huge diseased organ, for which they have sacrificed what was once a beautiful, healthy bird. This is the ugly truth behind that popular French delicacy.

 

 

Unfortunately, this is also the ugly truth behind economics. For far too long, a small number of people who enjoy “the finer things in life”, have eagerly sacrificed the health of society and the environment in order to force economic expansion. For them, the quality of our lives, our health, our strength, and our culture only exist to deliver to them, the largest possible economy, so that they might enjoy the largest quantity of the richest possible delicacy.

 

 

Do not be fooled by fat books, sharp suits or white lab coats. Economists, businessmen and scientists generally do not have your best interest at heart. Instead, they seek to preserve, and improve their positions of authority and privilege, while they serve the interests of the 1%. Unless we overthrow the tyranny of objective science, escape the clutches of the 1%, and remember how to live our own lives, despite our fallibility, our goose is cooked. There’s an economic analogy that’s On The Money.

 

 

On The Money; The Economics of Drug Prohibition

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

The Economics of Drug Prohibition

I’m sure that it comes as no surprise to you that dealers of illegal drugs enjoy large profit margins on the drugs they sell. American taxpayers insure these large profit margins through a massive government subsidy known as “The War on Drugs” which costs tens of billions of tax dollars annually. Prohibition is the generic term for the policy of using laws, and law enforcement, to keep certain drugs out of the open legal market. Despite over 70 years of drug prohibition, use of illegal drugs remains resilient, and demand remains, no pun intended, high.

 

The lion’s share of this massive subsidy, gets spent in efforts aimed at the nation’s most popular illegal drug, marijuana, and the plant it comes from, Cannabis Sativa. Government expenditures for the prohibition of marijuana alone include the cost of arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating over one-million Americans every year, far more than the total number of people arrested for all other illegal drugs combined. It also includes eradication efforts aimed at killing cannabis plants wherever they grow, often with chemical herbicides. Economically, this huge outlay of taxpayer dollars functions to artificially inflate the price of marijuana, or cannabis, a hardy weed that would otherwise grow wild in every state in the union.

 

Because of prohibition, this prolific annual weed has become tremendously expensive for marijuana users and taxpayers, as well as hugely profitable for black-market dealers. Despite the high prices and risk of arrest, an estimated 10-20% of all Americans use marijuana regularly, creating a tremendous demand for it. This demand, in turn, fuels a multi-billion dollar black-market industry that operates in every state, county and locality in the US, insuring that every state, county and locality spends even more taxpayer money to battle this black-market activity.

 

Thanks to grassroots organizing by marijuana consumers and advocates, several states have passed laws legalizing the use and distribution of marijuana, mostly for medical use. As more states pass these laws, both the price of marijuana, and the subsidies, at least in the states that have passed these laws, decline as well. Since the passage of California’s landmark medical marijuana law in 1996, the first of these laws, the price of marijuana has declined by more than half, nationwide. As more states pass these anti-prohibition laws, we can expect the price of marijuana to drop still further.

 

As police make fewer marijuana arrests, courts try fewer marijuana cases, and prisons hold fewer marijuana prisoners, taxpayers pay less for marijuana subsidies. While the Federal government has not budged on marijuana prohibition, and still spends billions on cannabis prohibition annually, many cash strapped states, counties and localities, even those that have not passed legalization laws, have de-prioritized marijuana prohibition to save money.

 

As these marijuana price-support subsidies decline, marijuana prices continue to slump. This comes as welcome relief to the millions of Americans who use marijuana regularly, and to taxpayers who have grown tired of subsidizing untaxed black-market profits. Still, thanks to vigorous Federal enforcement, and backlash from law enforcement, who stand to lose a tremendous amount of funding, marijuana prices, taxpayer subsidies and black-market profits remain high.

 

Although those who argue for marijuana prohibition argue that marijuana is a dangerous drug that no one should ever touch, very little evidence supports these claims. On the contrary, tens of millions of Americans use marijuana regularly, and like it. Not one person, in the history of humanity, has suffered a fatal overdose of it, nor has much evidence been found that marijuana causes long term health problems. Marijuana does not produce physical addiction symptoms, unlike alcohol, nicotine, opiates, many prescription drugs or even caffeine which all produce strong physical addictions that can be very difficult to quit. Even long-term chronic marijuana users can kick the habit without much difficulty, if they genuinely want to. This, I tell you from personal experience.

 

Clearly, the reasons for continuing marijuana prohibition are completely economic. Without the massive taxpayer subsidies involved in prohibition, the marijuana black-market would collapse, eliminating a multi-billion dollar industry. Governments would reallocate tax revenue away from law enforcement, and prisons, eliminating thousands of high-paying jobs in those fields. While, no one really likes black-market drug dealers or narco-cops, or would miss them if they learned to do something productive with their lives, they form a significant part of our national economy.

 

The pharmaceutical industry would soon feel the pinch as well. 100 years ago, half of all medicines sold in the US contained marijuana. Plenty of evidence shows that cannabis, or marijuana still works better than many prescription and over-the-counter medications for a host of conditions ranging from glaucoma and chronic pain, to epilepsy, asthma and nausea, especially nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy. Some estimate that legal cannabis, or marijuana, could immediately replace 20-40% of all prescription drugs, working as effectively, with fewer side-effects, than the drugs it would replace.

 

Since marijuana, or cannabis, is a natural plant, it cannot be patented. Because cannabis cannot be patented, patients who need it, would get it from farmers, not pharmaceutical companies. This would cut deeply into the profits of pharmaceutical companies, but drastically reduce health-care costs for patients. Farmers wouldn’t complain either.

 

Further, recent medical research suggests that humans have had a very long, and symbiotic relationship with the cannabis plant. The presence of “cannabinoid receptors” in the human nervous system seem to indicate that the cannabis plant played a role in human evolution, and that our ancestors have ingested cannabis for millions of years.

 

While it remains unclear exactly how these cannabinoid receptors contribute to human health, they clearly play an important role. Many, now common, ailments may stem from a lack of cannabis in our modern diet. Currently, doctors prescribe prescription drugs to treat these maladies, but the addition of a few green cannabis leaves into the diet, as other doctors recommend, might eliminate these diseases completely.

 

Beyond that, hemp, a high-fiber, non psychoactive, but also prohibited, species of cannabis, has a whole range of industrial uses from textiles and cordage to paper, plastics and building materials. Hemp, an agricultural commodity widely grown in the US before prohibition, could spawn a whole new hemp products industry. This new hemp industry might generate tens of thousands of new jobs in the long run.

 

New industrial hemp products would replace or reduce the need for synthetic fiber and forest products, thus eliminating the toxic pollution from manufacturing synthetics, and the habitat destruction that results from deforestation. While this potential new industry could create thousands of new jobs and spur growth in the economy, it also threatens the profits of some well established, and very influential corporations.

 

You can see that marijuana prohibition has much more to do with controlling “the economy”, than it does with dissuading people from smoking pot. If we could end marijuana prohibition today, black-market drug dealers, narco-cops, prison guards, pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies and forest products companies would all lose revenue. However, the rest of us would enjoy less expensive marijuana, better medicine, lower health-care costs, nicer clothes, cheaper paper and lower taxes, with less pollution or habitat loss. In other words, it would dramatically improve our quality of life. As Freewheelin’ Franklin of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers famously said, “Dope  will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.”

On The Money; What’s Wrong With Economists

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

What’s Wrong With Economists

Most economists write for policy wonks, not regular people. While they study consumer behavior and worker productivity, they have little, if anything, to say to consumers or workers. They might have something to say to voters, but only because they endorse a policy favored by a particular candidate. Economists write their books for the candidates, the political think-tanks, the rich and powerful and their advisers, but not for us, the 99%.

 

While economists may have some respect for you as a voter, as a worker, producer and consumer, you are simply a pawn to them. Something to be pushed around by fiscal policy, corporate coercion, and government taxation. Your life, energy, time, creativity and spirit mean no more to them than so many barrels of oil, tons of molybdenum or bushels of corn, and they don’t write economics books for bushels of corn.

 

To economists you are just a commodity to be bought and sold, consumed and discarded, just another anonymous drone, toiling away at meaningless work, in an empty life that you fill with pointless consumption. They don’t want you to read their books. They want you to go shopping, and let them, along with Americas smartest and greediest, worry about what’s best for the economy.

 

As a result, we now have an economy engineered entirely to help the richest and greediest acquire more. This economy demands that the rest of us sacrifice more and more of our lives, and our planet, every year, for their benefit. No, economists don’t want us to read their books, they want us to spend more time at work, more money for housing, and more money for health care. They want us to accept lower wages, give up job security, and to get used to being disposable.

That’s how they save “the economy”. As soon as we get used to working longer and harder for less, accept the destruction of the environment as a necessary evil, and learn to step around the human garbage left in their wake, the economy will be fine. Isn’t that great! As long as we’re willing to sacrifice our lives for it, the economy will be just fine.

Yet, too many of us still worry about “the economy”. Is it growing? How fast is it growing? Are prices rising? How’s the stock market? Who worries about us?

Why does it cost so much, just to have a place to live? How do the long hours I spend at work affect my family? How much of my current lifestyle would I choose, were I not economically coerced into working full time? How will global climate change affect my quality of life, or my children’s? Mightn’t I appreciate a clean environment more, if I had more time to enjoy it? Should I participate in a system in which I have no value, except as an exploitable resource? Why should economic growth trump all of these real human concerns? Whose job is it to think about these things? Not economists, that’s for sure.

How can you leverage maximum productivity from employees? How will environmental regulation effect energy prices? How does depression and suicide effect corporate earnings? That’s how economists look at these problems, and that’s why economists suck.

In On The Money, Economics For the 99%, I take the radical position that economics is about people, and how they interact with each other and the environment. Instead of simply looking for ways to help the rich and powerful increase, and accelerate the flow of money into their own bank accounts, On The Money; Economics for the 99% exposes the fundamental flaws in the capitalist system that have led to the gross inequality, and catastrophic environmental destruction that define our time. On the Money; Economics for the 99% shows you how to reclaim your life and liberate the world from the greedy clutches of the 1%, one step at a time.

On The Money, The View From the Top

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

The View From the Top

 

So who are the 1%, and why do they want all of your money? Don’t they have enough already? Why do they always want more, and why don’t they do something about global climate change or the rest of the environmental crisis? The fact is, the world looks very different from the top of the economy, than it does from the bottom, or even the middle, so let’s try to see it from their perspective.

 

The 1% take opulence for granted. Their consumption is limited only by their own imagination, not lack of resources. These people all have way more money than they can spend, and most of what they own, makes money, so they keep getting richer, no matter how much they spend. Still, they need a robust economy way more than you do. They need the economy, because the economy protects them from us. They use it to keep the riffraff in line. At the top of the economy, profit has less to do with making money, than it does with maintaining order, stability, and growth.

 

Order matters at the top. As solid, and resilient as our economic system seems, the 1% knows that without strict discipline, the capitalist system would collapse like a house of cards. Those 1%ers, who have become accustomed to opulence, know that the rest of us would lynch them if we knew how bad they were fucking us. So we must have cops, and standing armies, who will shoot to kill anyone who steps out of line. That’s what “order” means.

 

That’s why the military industrial complex, and the prison industrial complex form such a large part of our economy. Even though these endless stupid wars we get into, and the money we spend keeping millions of people in prison for drugs, seems like a tremendous waste of resources to the rest of us, to the 1% who control this economy, it is more important to punish disobedience, no matter how pointless and arbitrary the rule, than it is to reward obedience. The 1% never skimp on the guns, bombs, soldiers or cops.

 

All of those cops and soldiers need to get paid. That gets expensive, even for the 1%, so they make sure that we pay them. When the government has enough money from taxing working people to pay for enough cops, guns and soldiers to keep everyone in line, they call that “stability”. When we pay for our own oppression, and their protection, “order” becomes profitable, and self-sustaining, resulting in “stability”.

 

Even though we, the 99%, pay for those cops, soldiers and armaments, they invariably serve the interests of the 1%, and the 1% always find something for them to do. It’s not pretty, but it keeps them busy. The 1% likes to keep the rest of us busy too, and that isn’t pretty either. Whether its drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating groundwater in rural PA with fracking chemicals, or removing mountaintops in WV, its all ugly work, and doing it doesn’t make us any more attractive.

 

The 1% need to keep this economy growing, because that’s how they keep us busy. They give us jobs and incomes to keep us from killing them, and turn us into obedient servants. As the population grows, as unrest grows, as dissatisfaction grows, as anger grows, so too must the economy. Every year the pressure to earn money must increase, because that pressure, more so than the cops and soldiers, serves to maintain order and stability, by keeping us busy. As more people compete for fewer resources, the amount of resources necessary to maintain order and stability increases as well, so growth insures stability.

 

You see, to the 1%, the rest of us just look like so many goats and sheep. We are just livestock to them. For them, the economy acts as a domestication program. As long as they can keep the economy rolling along, we will do whatever they want. We’ll go to school to learn the material, at our own cost, then take an unpaid internship to acquire the skills, and then beg them to hire us, and accept whatever they offer. It took no small amount of effort to reduce us to this level of submissiveness and obedience, and they’ve been at it for some time.

 

“Flexibility” they call it. We have a very “flexible” workforce here in the US. We’ll do pretty much anything for a job. Relocate? No problem, Pay cut? Sure, I’m a team player. No benefits? OK, I’m healthy enough. Unpaid overtime? Yeah, I always give 110%, just because I love my job, no matter how bad it sucks. How did it come to this? When did Americans turn into such pathetic little boot-licks, and why?

 

The economy did this to us. The 1% uses the global economy to make us more obedient, docile, and trusting, all of the traits you might look for in a dog. The 1% has exploited the resources of the world, laid waste to the global ecosystem, and expropriated the content of our lives, for the primary purpose of domesticating the human race, to make us into obedient servants. The 1% uses the economy to turn us, the wolf at their door, into the dog tied up in their yard..

 

It takes a lot of energy to keep us all busy, and we destroy a lot of the environment in the process, but to the 1%, that is a small price to pay for the order, stability and security that a robust economy provides them. That’s why the 1% completely fails to address global climate change. We don’t burn so much energy because we need it to live decent lives, we burn so much energy because they need it, to control our lives. To the 1%, the 99% represents a much more immediate threat than global climate change. So, for the 1%, order, stability, and growth will always take precedence over the environment.

 

Despite the fact that all money flows toward the 1%, we must understand that the vast majority of economic activity in the world is not about making the 1% richer, the purpose of most economic activity is to keep us all too busy, and too dependent, to challenge or even question their power. As long as we stay focused on money, and will settle for a paycheck, we remain loyal servants of the 1%.

 

That’s why the 1% get so concerned about the unemployment rate. None of them work at jobs, but for them, full employment means order, stability, and growth. Order, stability and growth may sound like good things, but you should always remember what they mean. “Order” means everyone does what they are told, and almost nobody dares to step out of line. “Stability” means that tomorrow, everyone will get up in the morning and do it again, just like today, yesterday, last week, last month or last year, even though we all hate doing it and its destroying the planet. “Growth” means that every year you will pay more, and work harder for less.

 

This human domestication program they call “the economy” produces order, stability and growth, for the 1%, at the expense of the environment, our quality of life, and our humanity. Neither our lives nor our environment will improve as long as we continue to serve their interests. That’s a view of the economy, from the perspective of the 1%, that’s On The Money.

ON The Money; Getting Emotional

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

Getting Emotional

In our culture, reason reigns supreme. In school they teach us to value reason, logic, and rational thinking, but they teach us to control our emotions, to keep them to ourselves, and not to let them interfere with our work. While the rational mind constantly gets rewarded through good grades, high-paying jobs, etc, our emotional responses, especially negative emotional responses, invoke scorn and discipline. We learn to override our emotional responses early in life, but we have emotions for a reason, and often they carry a lot of wisdom.

 

We learned to override our emotional aversion to school, which made it easier to override our emotional aversion to work. Pretty soon we start to recognize the thump of our heart, as it hits the bottom of a pit of despair, as the call of duty, and we do what we’re supposed to. We learn to expect life to suck. We rationalize it. We invent ethical codes and religions around it. We say it builds character, but have you looked around lately? I see more shallow, greedy, status conscious, small-minded idiots every day, and we here in the US work harder than anyone in the developed world. Is that the kind of character we need more of?

 

We learn how to pretend we like it, saying we love our job, doing extra work and kissing ass to prove it. We learn how to cope with life as a wage slave, while our desires, hopes and dreams turn to bitter resentment. After a while, when your emotions finally realize that you’ll never to listen to them, it all turns to depression. Depression sells pharmaceutical drugs like no other condition on Earth. If you have it, its why you can’t afford to be without health insurance. If you don’t have it, its why you can’t afford health insurance.

 

Depression, refers to the complete loss of enthusiasm for life. You may think emotions are inconvenient, silly, or irrelevant, but when your emotions give up on you, nothing else matters. Your emotions are smarter than they look, but they deserve close scrutiny. If your emotions are telling you to buy something, chances are they are being manipulated.

 

After almost 100 years of subliminal manipulation of our emotions through advertizing and mass media, we often find our emotions working at cross-purposes with our best interests. The 1% uses your emotions against you through a campaign of very sophisticated psychological warfare, carried out through advertizing and media. As a result, the more media you consume, the more inadequate you feel, the more needy you feel, and the more stuff you want.

 

Watching TV instantly turns you into the ugliest, poorest and dullest person in the room, by filling the room with sexy, witty, well-dressed people who completely ignore you. Don’t invite them into your home! Even though they seem to ignore you, everything they say and do is designed to take advantage of you, and use your emotions against you.

 

Not only has the field of psychology completely failed to help the millions of people who suffer from serious mental illness, they have induced mental illness in millions more by collaborating with business to manipulate buying, voting, driving, smoking, or any other kind of behavior they choose. Psychology is not about understanding the mind, psychology is the study of behavior, and how to manipulate it. Right now, thousands of college educated psychologists, with mortgages and student loans to pay off, are telling their bosses how much they love their job, and really knocking themselves out to find new ways to manipulate your behavior, by using your emotions against you.

 

While real rich, snooty obnoxious people might make snide comments about you while they drink all your booze and grind their cigarette butts into your carpet, they wouldn’t have an army of mad scientists orchestrating every word and movement purely for the purpose of taking advantage of you. It really pays dividends in your sanity to strictly limit your exposure to mass media, because that’s how the 1% turns your emotions against you, and you need your emotions on your side.

 

Its worth examining your emotions, because sometimes they well up from the very fiber of your being, and that emotion always has your best interest at heart. Your heart instinctively knows what’s best for you, and it will tell you so. On the other hand, if your heart’s not in it, get your body, mind, time and money out of it as well, and quit telling yourself how much you love it. Remember “the pursuit of happiness”? You will not find happiness by plunging yourself headlong into misery, day in and day out, no matter how much it pays, how proud it makes your parents, or how secure it makes you feel.

 

While you read On The Money; Economic advice for the 99%, pay attention to how your heart reacts to the ideas in this column. If you hear that little voice inside you say “Yes!”, “Right On!”, or even “That’d be nice.” when you read the ideas I present here, it’s because these ideas resonate with who we are as human beings, and our hearts remember what it was like to have meaningful, satisfying lives, instead of working ourselves to death for meaningless stuff.

 

In On The Money; Economic Advice for the 99%, I show you how to break out of those destructive habits that define our sick culture, and help you reclaim your life, your time, your dignity and your humanity, the things that really matter in life. On The Money;Economic Advice for the 99% represents a completely original and revolutionary approach to personal economics that challenges conventional thinking in a way that reveals the deceit, cruelty, and violence of our current economic system, and shows you how to turn the tables on the 1%.

 

So, read this column with an open heart, and realize that economics is bigger than money, its bigger than goods and services, its bigger than “the economy”, in fact. Economics is about how we live, how we exchange goods and services, and our impact on the environment, but economics is also about how we think and feel about our lives, and those things matter a hell of a lot more in life than the GDP, the unemployment rate, or the movements of any stock index. There’s a view of emotions in economics that’s On The Money.

On The Money; Standard of Living

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

Standard of Living

 

People make a big deal about our “high standard of living”. Just last week local blogger Eric Kirk invoked the “high standard of living” in western Europe as evidence of the unrivaled superiority of the democratic system, as though democracy were an economic system rather than a political one, and completely ignoring the environmental impacts of the European lifestyle. Apparently, to Kirk, a high standard of living, regardless of how fleeting, or how high the price paid by the rest of the world, is the sole measure of success, but what do we mean by “standard of living”?

When was living standardized? Can’t we customize our lives individually? Do we have standardized tests to measure our standard of living? If so, how much do we “live to the test”, so to speak, just to artificially elevate the results? …and what do we mean by high? I know how high I have to be to reach my standard, but that’s a very personal thing. My partner Amy hardly smokes any pot at all. Does she have a lower standard of living than I do? If so, I think we’d all be better off with more people like Amy and fewer people like me, rather than the reverse.

Amy is a smart attractive woman who takes care of herself, me, two cats, two snails, our home and a few non-psychoactive potted plants that I would never bother with. She takes no drugs, has no interest in mass media, the internet, or fashion. She cherishes her interactions with wild plants and animals, enjoys living close to the earth, and has learned to do so responsibly.

I, on the other hand, am a fat, bald, multi-drug addicted middle aged white guy who spends his time thinking unclean thoughts about Bratz dolls, playing with electronic children’s toys and filling web servers with pointless blog posts about it. I can’t wait to try those new “bath salts” I’ve been hearing so much about, and even though about 80% of my waking thoughts revolve around sex, I still find it easy to blather endlessly on subjects I know nothing about, and I expect everyone to listen. Clearly I exemplify a higher standard of living than does my partner Amy, but who would you rather spend your time around?

While raising our “standard of living” has opened a Pandora’s Box of previously unimaginable new opportunities for fat, bald, sex-obsessed, drug-addled white guys with huge egos, like myself and Eric Kirk to amuse ourselves, those gains have come at tremendous cost to bright, good-looking people who know how to live on this planet without fucking it up, like Amy.  In fact a rising standard of living is always marked by the extirpation of healthy good-looking people who had quietly lived, in the same place where their ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years, without depleting their resource base, and by the rise of fat, bald, white egomaniacs who shamelessly exploit everything, and for whom, sustainability is, at best, an abstract concept.

Fat, bald, white egomaniacs, around the world, all live pretty much the same way. We all want anything we see any other fat, bald, white guy with. We think its great to live in a world where every fat, bald, white guy gets to have anything that any other fat, bald white guy has, so long as he has enough money. That’s what we mean by “high standard of living”.

On the other hand, the people who inhabited this world before this new “high standard of living” all lived differently. They all developed cultures adapted to the peculiarities of the places they lived. Nothing about human culture was standardized, but all of it was sustainable.

In the “high standard of living” world of fat, bald, white sex-obsessed egomaniacs, we have building codes, a general plan, and college educated, taxpayer funded eggheads who are full of advice, but none of it is sustainable.

This is why we should value our “high standard of living” over the rich diversity of our human cultural heritage. For unless we exterminate what remains of human cultural diversity, exploit the Earth’s natural bounty, and sacrifice generations of our own progeny in the name of our “high standard of living” fat, bald, white egomaniacs with money will not be able to use economic extortion to compensate for being so sexually repulsive.

There’s a view of our “high standard of living” that’s On The Money.