A resource based economy

The news item today about the soldier who was killed while trying to defuse a bomb in Afghanistan mentioned the view of one expert that more hi tech kit for remotely carrying out such dangerous tasks should be available to the armed forces.

Yes, maybe the same company that makes the bombs or the bits for them could make a robot to disarm them. That would all of course generate work for people to do and therefore be a good thing according to the current system.

More generically this is creating a problem and then creating a solution for it - many suspect more mundanely that firms who sell anti-virus software can also ensure that the viruses are created to keep them in business. If this were to happen it would be no more than a racket, but the justification that it creates work is just the same.

We do not want to create work. We want to be more efficient - get the same yields /outputs from less work. It's only our no work = no food stricture that means we have to create work so that people can get money for doing it, so that they can buy food. Very silly. We've seen the success of mechanisation in agriculture, where the yields per person employed have grown astronomically. I'm not saying agriculture has got everything right, my point is why should we not want to get the same thing for less work?

To argue this point people often use the analogy of a closed community on a remote island. They have finite resources within which they must live. Now they could co-operate and find the ways that the least work gave them the best sustainable use of resources, or they could invent money, and compete to get more of that. But money isn't a resource. It would be no good if, say, they had more oranges than they could ever eat, because no-one would ever buy one. They would have to make oranges scarce so that they could be monetised.

Well the earth is the same as an island in this sense. It is a closed system with finite resources. What are we doing wasting them? The competitive model has got us where we are today - a world at war and in the slavery of working to pay back the bank the money they have lent us, either directly, or through the taxes we pay to the government to pay to the banks.

Yes all money is on loan from the banks. All loans have interest on them. Where do you get the money to pay the interest? It has to be a bank loan, which -er - has interest on it. Yes the money owed to the banks is more than all the money that exists, because of interest.