Hi Ed Weick and folks at Futurework,
This note was written to a private party, but it seemed an
appropriate contribution to this discussion.
Thanks for your thoughts Ed Weick It seems that you have
read all of the literature which defends the status quo, but
have not yet found a way to move beyond the status quo.
That move is not made easily, nor by more than a few who
happen to get hooked on the subject by some event in
their lives.
Here are some of my observations:
One, I have never met a person who seemed evil, who
would willfully waste the environment, or harm other people.
But they all act in evil ways if coerced by threats to their
safety and security. Sad to say, we are all coerced by our
century old public policy of 4-10% unemployment, 2-3%/year
decline in the value of our money, and a perennial shortage
of purchasing power in the lower end of the workforce.
We are much like the laboratory rats in the biology experiment
described in the second note at URL:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/3142/IR/items/19990119WesBurtSustainab
leFuture.html
Two, There is so much emphasis put on the excessive
power of governments and corporations that no one pays
any attention to the fact that the great majority of people
enter their adult lives as financial cripples. Thomas Paine
wrote about it in Agrarian Justice, and Rights Of Man
(Part II) and proposed the necessary corrective action,
which Japan, Germany, and Western Europe adopted
after World War II, and the UK and the US have not yet
fully implemented.
Three, The Bible is probably right in saying, "The poor will
always be with us." But they should be very few, at the
margin of capability. To have half of the world's nations
classified as poor rather proves that people have not read
the bible themselves, but have let the WHIPS (the Healthy,
Wealthy, Intelligent, and Powerful minority) keep the
practical parts of the Bible (the purpose of the three tithes)
hidden as a secret of the temple.
If there is a great advantage to the WHIPs to charge the
support of children to each family, why not charge the
expense of K-12 education to each family, or charge the
defense budget to each family at $5,000/year/child? All
three expenses are about the same size, about 5% of GNP.
But there is no such advantage. It is hard to tell whether
the WHIPs are really evil, or just innocent of any
understanding of what in hell they are doing.
Kind regards,
Wesburt
