----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2003 1:07
PM
Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re:
[Futurework] David Ricardo, Ca vema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Interesting Robert,
But where are the great towering human achievements
beyond the cows? You have to imagine both. Can
you imagine orchestras and great architecture from the stories
below?
But if we are just imagining a pastoral future, here is
mine.
The American Indian version:
You sell the dumb cows
Pool all of your land with your neighbors and
buy buffalo.
Develop a family system where the entire family cares
for the children.
Make the family responsible for infractions having to do
with death but
individuals responsible for infractions having to do
with property.
Teach that people are not good or bad but can do good or
bad things.
Develop the justice system around healing by agreement
of the community.
Plant corn, beans and squash near your house
and regularly burn the forest to incourage grass, large
trees and open prairies.
Encourage all of the animals to return.
Form a council to plan for a central grainery for over
production,
Study the complete plant and animal ecology of the
region.
Plan for both systemic and
individual balance as the ideal of the culture.
Develop a time schedule that encorporates the cycles of
the rain.
Develop your spirituality around the truth of the
sacredness of all life,
balanced with the necessity to eat and clothe yourself
and your family.
Plan for the lives of all of the animals and plants as
members of the family network.
Develop taboos as teaching tools. Such as
incest, cannibalism, etc. Even though we are all life and meat,
certain meat we won't eat. Not because
its special but because its taboo.
Study nature intently to understand the ways that you
should fit comfortably within it and florish.
Teach health as an alternative to healing.
Consider that everyone must find their own vision for
their own life and that the community serves the facilitation of that
purpose.
Teach that without the community, the individual is
alone.
Develop an integration of the education of your children
with the cycles of the plants/animals so the children won't bust the system,
Teach the relationships as a part of the
spirituality,
Develop status based upon who is strong enough to give
the most.
Develop a give back from the poor to the strong so
no neither strong or disadvantaged are enslaved.
Form all reality around the natural cycles of life and
existance.
Develop trade with your neighboring nation based only
upon excess production and political games.
Hold no more than you can acumulate in your house,
giving away the excess.
Work three of four hours a day and spend the rest of the
time with your families
and contemplating the nature of
the Great Mystery of life.
Give at least a couple of hours to communicating with
the rest of the world on the internet.
Ray Evans Harrell, Cherokee
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2003 9:09
AM
Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re:
[Futurework] David Ricardo, Ca vema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
As there is sometimes an ideological mix-up
going on, on the list, I thought you might be amused by this post from the
TOES list:
Those economic scenarios you sent were probably written by somewhat
callous Royalist Libertarians who think that non-regulated capitalism is the
best system. So I have written the following, comparing the RL to the
Geo-Libertarian, and modified the one on
CAPITALISM,
AMERICAN STYLE.
Royalist Libertarian
You have two cows and
several acres of land.
Your neighbor is a single mom, has no cows, no
land and works a minimum wage job.
You tell your neighbor that if she
works longer and harder she could buy one of your cows and become an
enterprising capitalist.
Your neighbor takes on the night shift in
addition to her day job, leaving for work after the kids are in bed and
arriving home just in time to get them dressed for school. After a year she
has saved enough money to buy one of your cows. Realizing that she needs
some land for the cow she asks if you will lease her some of your land which
you are happy to do at the highest possible land rent.
She pulls back to
a regular 40 plus hours a week of work in order to take care of the cow and
market its milk, soon realizing that she has to feed the cow steroids to
produce more milk to pay the land rent to you.
Your neighbor tries hard
to become a successful cow milk merchant, but in just a few months the cow
dies of exhaustion and soon thereafter she dies of a stress related illness,
leaving her children to fend for themselves in the streets because
libertarians have dismantled all social services including those for
orphans.
Meanwhile you have been earning dividends from the stocks you
bought with the cash your neighbor paid for your cow plus the land rent she
had been paying to you on a monthly basis. The milk from your cow is
supplemental income.
You buy four more cows, dupe another poor neighbor
and quadruple your wealth in one year,
Geo Libertarian
You have two cows and several
acres of land.
Your neighbor is a single mom, has no cows, no land and
works a minimum wage job.
You understand that there is a deep structural
injustice in the economic system, you know what to do about it, so you
become an activist.
You share your economic justice knowledge with your
neighbor and then get to work changing the tax laws so that (1) your
neighbor can keep all of her hard-earned income and (2) those
who have enclosed substantial amounts of land for their own private domain
now pay a fair land rent to society.
Your tax bill arrives and you
realize you have been holding more land than you really need, so you put
some of your land up for sale which your neighbor buys with the additional
income she has because of genuine tax relief.
Your neighbor, whose
"can-do" attitude is now fully operative having acquired a secure place to
stand on her own land, soon builds her own home from the timber from the
fast-growing species of trees she planted. She then develops her talents as
a visual artist painting pictures of cows, much more to her liking than
having to milk them.
You realize that you have found true happiness and
inner peace by helping to build a world that works for
everyone.
LIBERAL
You
have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being
successful.
Instead of giving your neighbor one of your cows,
you write to your congressman, demanding that he pass legislation for
more government programs to help your neighbor get a cow. You hold a
concert to raise awareness for the cow-lessness. Barbara Streisand sings
for the cow-less, who couldn't attend because ticket prices are so
expensive that only people with 3 or 4 cows can afford to attend. You
wear a ribbon that signifies that you care about cowless people, even
though you really haven't done anything to help them at all.
CONSERVATIVE
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has
none.
So?
SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The
government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a
cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.
COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you
with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive
and sour.
CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE (The obscuring
myth)
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a
herd of cows.
CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE (The real story)
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a
bull, and build a herd of cows. You put your cows on your
previously acquired piece of choice real estate and take a tax write-off
for agricultural land. You sell some of your land (the rest you keep for
speculation) to middle class working people who are now mortgaged for
life and you put your profits into offshore accounts, further avoiding
taxes. You lobby for a bigger military budget and a national policy of
full spectrum dominance so that you and other bullish elites can grab
other peoples land all over the planet.
DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The
government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man
in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your
government.
BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two
cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other,
pays you for the milk, and then pours t he milk down the drain.
AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell
one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one. You force
the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when
one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you
have down sized and are reducing expenses. Your stock goes up.
FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on
strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.
JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two
cows.
You redesign them so they are one tenth the size of an
ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on
unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow
school.
GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You
engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent
quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunat ely they also
demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.
ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While
ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.
RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two
cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have
four cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and
learn you have eight cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however
many cows you really have.
TALIBAN CORPORATION
You
have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them
because you cannot touch any creature's private parts. Then you kill
them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the hospital.
IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into
hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.
POLISH
CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly m aimed
and killed attempting to milk them.
CALIFORNIAN
(
This is the Goodwin Special....RWN)
You have a cow and a bull.
The bull is depressed.
It has spent its life living a lie.
It goes away for two weeks.
It comes back after a taxpayer-paid
sex-change operation.
You now have two cows.
One makes milk; the
other doesn't.
You try to sell the transgender cow.
Its lawyer
sues you for discrimination.
You lose in court.
You sell the
milk-generating cow to pay the damages.
You now have one rich,
transgender, non-milk-producing cow.
You change your business to
beef.
PETA pickets your farm.
Jesse Jackson makes a speech in
your driveway.
Cruz Bustamante calls for higher farm taxes to help
"working cows".
Hillary Clinton calls for the nationalization of 1/7
o f your farm "for the children".
Gray Davis signs a law giving your
farm to Mexico.
The L.A. Times quotes five anonymous cows claiming
you groped their teats.
You declare bankruptcy and shut down all
operations.
The cow starves to death.
The L.A. Times' analysis shows your business failure
is Bush's fault.
bb
