I dunno if he meant it as such, but that’s what came to mind when I began reading an essay brought to my attention by The Endervidual. Let It Die seems a worthy counterpoint to at least some of NonEntity’s Synthesis.
I’ll leave the strong opening for interested readers’ enjoyment, and focus specifically on the bits that speak to my point [all emphasis the author’s]:
I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It’s not just that I saw the downturn coming–it’s that I feared it wouldn’t come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. ....
Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it’s a whole lot easier to make these arguments. And, if anything, it’s even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.
Back in the good ol’ days—I mean as far back as the late middle ages—people just did business with each other. As traveling got easier and people got access to new resources and markets, a middle class of merchants and small businesspeople started to get wealthy. So wealthy that they threatened the power of the aristocracy. Monarchs needed to come up with a way to stabilize their own wealth before the free market unseated them.
They invented the corporate charter. By granting an exclusive charter, a king could give one of his friends in the merchant class monopoly control over a region or sector. In exchange, he’d get shares in the company. So the businessperson no longer had to worry about competition—his position at the top of the business hierarchy was locked in place, by law. And the monarch never had to worry about losing his authority; businesses with crown-guaranteed charters tend to support the crown.
But this changed the shape of business fundamentally. Instead of thriving on innovation and progress, corporate monopolies simply sought to extract wealth from the regions they controlled. They didn’t need to compete, anymore, so they just sucked resources from places and people. Meanwhile, people living and working in the real world lost the ability to generate value by or for themselves.
There’s much more—including the irony of this anti-corporatist having his forthcoming book published by one of the largest extant American publishing houses—but I prefer to give my esteemed Conspirator a chance to confirm that this view is at least a partial antithesis of his perspective before going further.
Hell, I don't know!
But let me say, I like what you've quoted. Antithesis of my point? I'm not sure I even see the connection yet. But I DO want to hear more of your thinking on the matter, so have at it.
I have long felt that governments and corporations are criminal in that they are fictitious entities who control real ones with no responsibility. At least when there was a king he was in his castle and you knew where to find him. But Dubya's now out of office and immune from anything (and the millions he's partially responsible for killing). Same with corporations. With a company you can go after the person who owns it. Life being life there's a good chance you may not get satisfaction or recompense for injury, but at least there is a responsible party. Not so with corporations.
But I don't see how this has anything to do with what I was pointing at, or even maybe what you are pointing at. Or maybe I'm just cunfoozed right now, which is likely, as I'm awake.
- NonE
Addendum... Okay, I see I wuz confoozed. I see the article you're quoting from and will want to read it later when I have more time. So far, it looks as though I don't have any disagreements with it, so I'm not sure how it can be an antithesis to my point of view. More than likely I did such a piss poor bit of writing that I not only did not communicate but actually left the world worse off than when I started.
I think mostly what I was attempting to point out is that the world works best when people are not controlled and when ideas can interact freely without having to follow a preconceived script, which by it's very nature must be wrong. As whatzisname, the baseball player said, It's dangerous to make predictions, especially when they concern the future.
- N.
[edited by NonE to put the Troll back in conTrolled. (the spell chick had the day off...)]
Confoozling confoundings
Your addendum does help me understand, NonE.; thanks. My error was seeing you praising cities and money and thinking you were including some of their less-desirable traits too. And his “people just did business with each other” is evocative of my conceptualization of barter, as was mentioned yesterday ... Mea culpa for adding to your confoozion.
Excellent article! But tangential to my post.
Thanks for the pointer to that, Sunni. I don't really see how it connects with what I was attempting to convey, but I'll get to that in a second. First let me comment on the article. For the most part it made a lot of sense. It appears to me that the issue underneath all of his complaints is fiat, debt-based money requiring interest.
Edward Griffin's book and talk, The Creature from Jekyll Island, describes this process in very clear and simple terms and I'd not really grasped the concept until I heard his talk. I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone.
But there were two things that bothered me in Ruskoff's article. First:
Maybe I'm reading too much into his use of the word "public" here, but that set off bells for me. It sounds as if he's supporting socialism, which I didn't get from any other part of the article, so I may be jumping to conclusions.
Second, he seems to be confusing things with his take on speculators. As I currently understand speculation, it is a boon to society in that it tends to smooth out the peaks and valleys in production and consumption and thus is a good thing all around. He says:
I think he's confusing the problems inherent in fiat currency, printed at whim, and the the resultant inability of the users of that money to be able to accurately price ANYTHING (and the subsequent impossibility to plan), with the speculators who are trying to work the system. The problem is not the speculators, after all, saving for a rainy day, or for a future project, is speculation. No, the problem is the unreality of fiat currency and THAT problem is exacerbated by speculation with it.
Actually (I just made this connection), the truth about socialism that one of the Austrian Economists made, that it prevents one from being able to determine the price of anything, is exactly the same problem with fiat currency!
So I guess I find Ruskoff's article really good but think that he is not yet totally clear on a few minor points. I wonder what his book will be like. I think I'd enjoy reading it.
So back to my own post wherein I pointed to the synchronicity of the different articles. I don't see, Sunni, where what I was attempting to highlight has any real connection with the material Rushkoff was describing. There is a tangential connection, but not more than that. What I was aiming more at was the idea that time and again, in a variety of different specializations and fields, we are finding that freedom of action and generosity of spirit as it regards sharing of knowledge tends to dramatically increase human creativity, wealth and well-being. The nature of the open source software community points to this. The nature of bringing people together in clusters to foster commerce (how cities came about) points to this. And so on. I was attempting to point out the idea that underlies the success of these various differently appearing fields of activity. The core issue that is similar to all is freedom of action and sharing of information. It is the nature of random interactions with new ideas and the ability to act upon them which provides the petri dish of progress. And that is exactly what so much of the mindset of modern society is working to thwart, with all of the belief in "the need for regulation," and the idea of proving something is of value before "allowing" it to be pursued. What kind of idiocy is that? As Mark Shuttleworth pointed out so well, innovation is NOT linear. You never know what random bumping of one idea into another will bring about the next giant leap forward in a completely new and unpredicted direction. Regulation is anti-life. Freedom is pro-life. The data is clear. The data is MORE than clear, and I'm trying to point to it such that others might perhaps see what they have been missing.
Sorry I'm such a poor communicator. I'm just muddling along here doing my best, hoping to improve as I do, hoping to promote freedom and love, joy in life. Cities are the wealth of nations as it is cities which are the manifestation of commerce, of people coming together to share and trade and benefit each other and in so doing make everyone better off. That is why I think that the survivalist mindset is so terribly wrong. We are not lizards, we are humans. We need each other. Seeking control is seeking death. We are more than the sum of our parts. As Julian Simon so well pointed out, humans are the ultimate resource.
- NonE
(Lest anyone jump to the conclusion that I think everyone should live in a city, NO, that is not it at all. Cities are a part of the process, as are quiet walks in the woods. "Cities" as a concept - to me this represents people coming together to trade and to share and to learn and to celebrate. Sadly what we have today in many of the U.S. cities is the total antithesis of this. So it is not that I think we'd all be better off living in ghettos. ;-)