I got asked the other day if I had any idea where it might be possible to make an intervention in the ongoing meltdown of the economic situation, the economic meltdown stressing the social structures of the world to the breaking point, a way to get behind the driving forces causing the situation and fix the problem rather than try and treat the symptoms. After a bit of thought here’s my best guess as to how to begin unwinding the current mess.
What I see as needed first and worst is a way to restore the concept of local production. When I say local I mean local on the global scale, that a nation (geographic region) should, for a great variety of reasons ranging from economic to factors of social psychology, produce what that region primarily consumes.
To stabilize a world economy there must be at least one element held stable as a safeguard against positive feedback loops in the various systems. With all due consideration I’m of a mind to believe that stable element should be the monetary value of a life-hour of productive labor, the one element of commerce which must, by every consideration of rational ethics, be considered of equal value regardless of where that element originates.
To accept any other definition can only be a rationalization of slavery by degrees, an open invitation for the corruption and corrosion inherent to slavery to find paths into the deep levels of the world’s various cultures and societies. For the macroscopic society of man to endure, much less advance, the world community must put an end to international trade wherein the man-hours of labor exchanged between the cultures are not of equal value.
So long as the physical location of manufacturing facilities are chosen on the basis of exploiting the differences in the assigned monetary value of a man hour of labor the inherent injustices of capitalism that drive conflict will continue. Until such time as there is no advantage to be gained in such a manner the entities of commerce will, to the self serving motive of corporate profit first and foremost, continue policies impacting the demand side of any free market economy creating social instability and the climate of conflict.
Now that... is one grandiose pile of fine first class philosophical sounding bullshit. I’m kind of proud of that one. Even more so because it’s most likely more true than not. Of course, naming the problem isn’t even close to figuring out how to fix the problem. Naming the problem is just a matter of stepping far enough outside day to day living you can see what it is you’re looking at. Fixing a problem requires a lot more thought, you have to not only see the what is but also see the what might be, and hardest of all pick through all the possible might be’s to find the one that will actually do some good without creating an even darker shadow somewhere else. If, huge if, you get so far as to think you know which of the possible might be’s would actually work then you get to the hardest part of all: HOW?
Nobody actually sat down to a big piece of paper and designed the economics of the world. It didn’t happen. The system we live in today evolved every bit as much as the eco-systems of the natural world evolved. You don’t mess with evolution, not ordinarily, evolution has had a gazillion rounds of trial and error to arrive at what works best. You talk to God and think twice before you even dream of tinkering with something evolved into being. Just the way it works. Still though evolution is not a foolproof process, just ask the dinosaurs. Things happen, things change, and sometimes what has worked for literally a million years doesn’t really work anymore and things start falling apart.
It’s looking more and more like the economic systems of the world are at such a crossroads, to many things have changed to quickly for the evolved systems to respond in time to avoid a meltdown, a total collapse. It’s looking to me like without a deliberate intervention the asymmetries, the out of balance forces impacting on the global economy will drive mankind into his darkest of legends. With a future hanging somewhere between Armageddon and Orwell’s blackest nightmare it’s looking like we must attempt a modification, or perish.
The technical details of the global economy are incredibly convoluted and delicate, twisting around and through every culture, every convention of mankind. There really is no one economy any more than there is only one government. There’s hundreds of them, all interlinked and interdependent. The only real hope is to introduce a Darwinian modifier into the systems and then get out of evolutions way, let it work and hope for the best.
The driving force of economics is, and for so very many reasons must be, a profit margin earned in fair and ethical trade. Some will see the word “profit” and recoil in horror. Profit is the monster that drives the injustices, perpetuates the greed, forges those golden chains, right? Perhaps, when the words “fair” and “ethical” are stripped out of the definition. But what profit is and will remain is the one point of motivation common to all economic endeavors, the one thought shared in common by each and every single entity involved in commerce. Where profit goes society will follow, and so I propose to change the environment of profit to better serve the true needs of humanity.
It is a fact that nearly two thirds of the Earth’s surface is water, open ocean, the high seas. It is a fact that for all of recorded history the seas beyond the coastal waters have been considered open, free to travel. It is a fact that even now the majority of international commerce travels the open ocean protected by maritime law and the navies of the world. Free passage of the seas is an open potential even now.
It is also a fact that at the end of the second world war an institution known as the United Nations was chartered whose stated purpose is to proactively resolve conflicts, and the reasons for conflicts between nations without the need for those nations to resort to wholesale warfare. In the years since its’ founding the world has seen a fundamental change: the economics of the world have expanded to become truly global, which to my thought would mean the impact of international trade on the status of world peace is now within the original charter of the United Nations.
Spinning off these two facts I would propose the following as an international law administered by the United Nations and enforced by the navies of the member nations: that protected passage of the high seas is conditional upon the commercial entities initiating such cargoes complying with an international tariff structured in the manner described below.
This tariff is to apply to all goods or materials which are transferred from one nation’s economy into another nation’s economy, in essence any transfer which carries a transfer of man hours of labor as a consequence of the commerce.
The purpose of the tariff is to set equal any differential value of man hours between the workers of the two nations involved in comparable endeavors, miner to miner, farmer to farmer, production worker to production worker. If there is no differential there is no tariff, that is to say if the workers are being paid the same effective wage* for each productive hour of their lives they’ve sold to support their life then the differential is zero and the tariff non-existent. The amount of the tariff is calculated against the retail value of the goods as they cross national borders regardless if there is an actual change in ownership of the shipment in question.
The concept of the corporation as a multi-national entity, an entity existing beyond the rule of law, a parasitic or predatory entity free to exploit the differences in any two nation’s law, is set null and void in the context of this tariff. The tariff, or the consequences of violating the tariff, will be applied regardless and this within the world-wide jurisdiction of the United Nations, the consensus of all nations that such law is needed and just.
The proceeds of this tariff would need be handled in the following manner: firstly, deposited into non-interest bearing accounts of NO collateral value in financial institutions located in any of several neutral third nations chosen by random lot at the time of collection; secondly, these monies will not be accounted as assets of that institution, they are NOT available to be loaned; thirdly, these monies will be dispersed under close UN scrutiny directly to the social welfare agencies of the two nations involved in the transaction proportionate to criterion engineered to the objective of restoring parity at the social scale to the value of the life-hours of the workers of the respective nations without regard to the ultimate profit margin of the commercial entities involved.
The intent is NOT to cripple the various forms of commerce between the nations, but rather to assure that such commerce may proceed into the foreseeable future in an environment of sustainable peace. The intent is to shift the ultimate degree of profitability in any commercial endeavor away from exploitation into the realms of stewardship, that the most profitable endeavors be those most efficient at maintaining equality in the value of the human life-hours purchased.
I am fully aware I am proposing a deep change to the socio-economic foundations of the modern world, perhaps the deepest change since the advent of the modern banking system during the Renaissance of the European societies. But I was asked for a best effort at a solution, and I’m confident I can defend the ultimately beneficial consequences of such a change, I’m confident the longer history might run after such a change the more history would validate and vindicate the effort required to establish such a system on a global scale.
Although I like the idea of voluntarily agreeing on such tariffs, Cyranos, it seems to me that "the devil is in the details." With an additional layer of bureaucracy such as this program would require, there are additional, horrific possibilities for corruption, for "loopholes" insisted on by powerful corporate collective entities. Systemic change will do no long-term good without a prior, worldwide, mass-consciousness spiritual awakening...
ReplyDeleteJochanaan, absolutely true. However, the corporate entities are only powerful because the humans are fool enough to grant them power, they can be utterly destroyed in a matter of months matched against the full count of humanity. A collective entity with no hosts is dead. The trick is to maintain all the legitimate functionality of those entities... they are what/who are feeding the world.
DeleteA spiritual awakening indded, an awakening of the human spirit of freedom from tyranny, a re-emergence of the concept of self not constructed from the socially prescribed attitudes of servitude and subserviene to the social. They are not invulnerable Jochanaan, far from it. But they'll bend hell around a saddle cinch to try and make us believe they are... it's really the only protection they have for their wickedness.