Raise the Hammer

There's some truth in everything that's been said above. As Mitchell points out, there are so many independent things going on in our "system", all connected but so loosely that it often becomes hard to be sure there's anything can be called a system at work here at all.

But Henry Ford did get something going back at the beginning of the twentieth century that worked for about 100 years. He gave people two roles in our economic "system": one as producers of the goods they consumed and the second as the consumers of the goods they produced. You can see right away this is a delicate system that requires balance to keep going. That balance is often maintained through government subsidy. Lately, as things have slowed down, government has turned from priming the consumer pump to priming the production pump and there are arguments supporting both, but I think something larger is at work. The system itself is failing and we're slow attaching an economy to what people are doing now.

Technology has destroyed Ford's old system. You don't need as many people to produce goods and services as in the past. We're inclined to blame other countries for stealing local jobs, but that wouldn't be possible without the technological efficiencies in the transportation industry, and anyway, the return of all those disappearing North American manufacturing jobs will not put the local system back in balance if local workers have to accept Asian or maquiladora wages. If we get that work back it will be done by machines that will work for less than slaves. I call working for more than slave wages an advance, but it seems to me that the role of manufacturing as the driving force for increasing wealth has plateaued generally and maybe even declined in mature industrial economies.

Meanwhile there are problems monetizing much of the activity that might spread around the wealth that is still produced by the technological advances that came from industry itself. A lot of the work that gets done in the new economy is unpaid. In the information age the Spec employs fewer people to disseminate what it still calls news, and, so far as I can tell, this "editorial" information vehicle we call RTH pays no one at all. Ryan doesn't even promise that there's a cheque in the mail. Huge chunks of the explosion of information we produce so efficiently through digitization are disseminated through systems that work well with no constriction point at which to collect money. But people, ourselves included, keep producing useful products for it. In the old "supply and demand" terms, there's so much free information available we give it little or no value. Still, it is what we do. It is where we increasingly spend our labour energy, and the situation is going to get worse for economic "systems" as the collection of energy itself becomes more efficient and cheaper. I mean, we don't actually pay for energy now. We pay people to extract and distrite it, but I've got free energy falling free on my rooftop. When I figure out how to collect and use that I won't be paying to pipe gas to my my stove. If I tell you about it, neither will many of you. What does that do to the commodities market?

The old system was collective. We got to gether, split up the work and devised a means to share the wealth, the products, we produced together. As the old economy declines, and as we stumble trying to monetize new economies, people are displaced as producers, which displaces them as consumers. It's only natural that those of us with similar problems will congregate in certain areas to decide, or wait while we figure out, what to do. I'm not sure things are any different in Windsor, or Toronto or elsewhere.

As we've often said on RTH, government can contribute by enforcing more spending on services (through social programs, medicare, education etc.) These programs basically force people to spend money to do things that they are reluctant do voluntarily. People find it difficult to put money away for a rainy day, like when they get sick, but medical insurance forces us to do so, collectively. In my time Mac students were more inclined to spend their money at Paddy Green's than on books, so it's a good thing governments had taxed our parents to make sure there was cash held out for tuition etc. or much of my professors' wages would have been puked up on Main St. Anyway, at the moment we seem to devalue service jobs such as teaching in favour of throwing money after disappearing manufacturing jobs. I think we're only buying time. We want lower taxes and more manufacturing jobs, but we only seem able to hold on to fewer of them. We could create jobs by lowering the teacher/student ratio, but that would mean higher taxes and less beer money. In the long term though, if nobody's working there's not much money for beer anyway and somethings gotta give so I guess it'll be groceries. Same thing applies to medical care. We could tax and spend to train even more people for the health-care industry than we do now (because who has the money for knee-replacements on hand?) but instead we're spending our dwindling resources on freeways, hoping to attract manufacturerers.

C'est la vie. What do we do until government gets the picture? Personally I don't think there are solutions so much as coping mechanisms. If we've not as much money to spend, then I figure I have to find a way to get more from less. I have to become more efficiently personally, and I can use recent technological advances provided by industry to do it. I've gotten rid of the expense of one car and look forward to getting rid of the other. I'd like public transit to improve, but in the meantime I'll use a bike far more. I don't get paid for contributing to the internet, but I continue to do so and I will use that free info for more of my education and entertainment. I use the public library too, and would like them to get more of the books I want to read, but until they do I read the ones available free on the internet. I think it's good that there ARE more of the library's services available on the internet too. Like industry, I'm downsizing. Turning perspective to my advantage I've decided to use my big-screen TV less in favour of a notebook computer I can see equally as well because it's on my lap. I use earphones for surround sound. A computer and earphones are cheaper to heat than a whole room in my house and require less energy to run, too.

I'm not a virtuous person. Doing the above is not a consequence of my moral superiority. My motivation is entirely selfish. The economy in which I once participated has broken down, transformed by its own efficiency. It's not coming back, but I'm still here and to stay here and enjoy being here I've no alternative but to embrace the technology industry has left behind. I'm not that quick and am still engaged in the process. If I were clever I'd have done this long ago. In a way, I'm going back to basics, but I'm better equipped than people were before the industrial revolution. I'm getting rid of the old hot tub and looking at my back patio for fresh veg, using the internet to learn how to match my yield to my needs. For storage, actually for heating and cooling overall, I'm thinking of using a hole in the ground, better equipped than the old root cellar, however. That may take a while.

I haven't given up thinking collectively just because that collectivizing force we've called industry has run low on steam. When I see all those lots vacated by industry and other failed local institutions I tend to think of them as potential housing and newly available farmland. They might also be empty places to collect the sun's energy, directly, as in greenhouses. I see hunger as demand for product. I know that's cold, but if I think of it as a need that can't be filled, what use is that? If I say the government should prime the pump to help pay for this I'd be labelled a communist. I don't really care to be distracted into rounds of name calling. I'd rather eat fresh veg and I'm thinking pretty soon I'll have to grow it myself. I'm quite open to picking up a hoe and start chipping at the asphalt. I really only need others in order to get somebody's permission to do this, but in a democracy people only have the power to grant permission because, collectively, I'm one of many who have given them the power to stop me. Lately, I tend to see politics as more disabling than enabling.