Seeing The Wood For The Trees

Sometimes, the problem with concepts, is you really are fighting ingrained ways of looking at things.
Sometimes, an ingrained way of looking at something is hard to fight. A comment on a previous post by a commenter who is highly intelligent in many ways made me realise this.
That in explaining the obvious regarding the huge flaws in Capitalist Economics, is hard.
Because sometimes, making a conceptual leap is hard.

And I admit, it took a while for me to grasp the Marxist argument, simple as that argument is, once you see the point.

I suppose it relates to how easily the human mind gets stuck in ruts.

I remember at scout camp once the topic came up of how many states there are in the US. It kind of become a running joke. That I could be wound up on the subject. Because I had had the argument before, with the female cub scout leader. She was a primary school teacher and maintained there were fifty two. As many states in the US, as there are weeks in the year, that's what she taught her class.

Many people believe it. That there were fifty, but then Alaska and Hawaii joined, making it fifty two.
I know it may sound trivial, but it really is a commonly held piece of ignorance. And I got very wound up about it. I even listed them all. But it turned out I'd left Texas out, someone noticed.
God know what state I said twice.

Anyway, when we went into Swansea, our troop leader went to a bookshop. And grudgingly admitted I was right. The US has fifty states, no more, no less.

The point is, if an opinion is widely regarded to be correct, it's hard to shift it.

But also, it's sometimes hard for people to grasp something that YOU think is obvious.
For example, space.
Trying to explain to someone that the universe is FINITE, but LIMITLESS.
In other words, there isn't an end to it.
But it doesn't go on for ever.

There isn't an edge, where you can go out beyond into nothingness. Every direction leads back to it's starting point. Of course, you couldn't actually DO that, because the universe is expanding faster than you could travel, but ultimately, in our universe, any straight line goes back to its starting point.

And the point about why it is the Capitalist Economy can't actually work any longer, isn't that human technology can't advance- of course it can.
The point is that the Capitalist economy can no longer achieve that, can no longer power it.
Because the Capitalist economy has turned to eat itself.

It's not that our capacity to progress has halted.
It's how that progress was funded.
And it was funded by having a sufficient portion of the new wealth brought into the economy every year, being sucked up in interest payments.

In other words, the Capitalist economy can only survive by adding more money to it every year.
And in the nineteenth century this was done by literally expanding the economy every year. Adding more consumers.
And in the twentieth century it was done by having a good number of people living off handouts so they consume but don't produce, and by continually printing more money every year. Having permanent inflation.
Capitalists hide that.



That once you really have turned everyone into a consumer in the same economy, the only way the total amount of money in circulation grows- is by adding more money.
Except it's not real wealth. You're not actually adding materials.
You're simply devaluing the money.
This means the interest can be paid, because by the time you pay it, the interest, like everything else, will be worth less in real terms.

But even that stopped being enough.
So we had to invent money that didn't exist.
Credit.

And eventually, more money will be owed out than actually exists.

And that's pretty much where we are now.

So the problem isn't to do with our ability to invent new technology.

The problem is, the system we have of working out the relative values of things, and the relative value of human energy contributions, no longer makes sense and is no longer efficient.

The flaws in it, lead to us making daft decisions.

If you catch fish in the North Sea, and the fishfingers made from those fish, are to be eaten in the UK, then if your 'Economy' really is telling you that the most efficient place to bread those fish fingers is the Czech Republic, than the flaw clearly lies in the accounting system being used.

Our Economy is making something INEFFICIENT, efficient. And it's increasingly going to deliver silly answers like that.
Because it is now so skewed, it cannot help but warp our own systems of production and distribution.

Quite clearly, being OBJECTIVE, breading the fish fingers in the Czech Republic, is NOT, in terms of use of human systems of production and distribution, remotely sensible.
It is NOT cheaper, in terms of energy costs, labour put in, or any other tangible factor.
But it turns out to be cheaper in terms of these little exchange tokens that exist primarily on computer screens.

Now if these tokens weren't called money, and we weren't so wedded to treating them as sacrosanct, if it was a computer told us something as STUPID as 'Catch the fish in the North Sea, bread the fish in the Czech Republic and then bring the finished product back to the UK' we'd get a software engineer to rewrite such an obviously flawed program.

But Bird's Eye are doing just that. Closing down UK operations.
Because MONEY has told them too.

And no one seems to have twigged...
The money is now giving us WRONG answers.

Money itself is screwing up the Economy.

Money is telling us to go for solutions that in REAL terms, in terms of USE OF TIME AND RESOURCES are less efficient.

Because Czech money is cheap compared to the Pound in international markets. So converting your money to Czech money to pay Czech workers means you can pay a lot more Czech workers than you can British workers out of the same money.



So the problem is simple.
Money doesn't do what it's supposed to do any more.

Accurately reflect the relative value of things.

And that's what is screwing up the world.

That we use a system for determining the value of things that- doesn't in fact do that.
And all economists ACTUALLY do, is explain to us why their flawed system gives us the flawed answers it does.

And this blinds us to the fact that the answers are obviously flawed.

That half us working fifty hour weeks and having new kitchens every two years, whilst others are paid by us to do nothing is a flawed answer.
That having a quarter of the world living a continent run by warlords where rape and pillage are an everyday feature of life, is a flawed answer.

That using up most of our communal technology to point expensive missiles at eachother, when we can't afford to make sure we can maintain radio contact with a probe we send to Mars, is a flawed answer.

That having a system of human relations based on finding as many ways to waste human energy as possible, is a flawed answer.

That we have in place a system of determining the values of things and how we should best use human energy and resources.
And we trust in it blindly.
And it's called money.

And yet the answers it gives are clearly wrong.
Because it isn't delivering the answers that are in fact the best use of human energy and resources.

The answers it gives just cannot, logically, be the right answers.

So the only conclusion any rational human being can draw, is that the money system doesn't work.
Not any more.