Think about this: Coal and Oil were nature's way of sequestering carbon at a time when there was too much in the atmosphere. What we have done is quickly realeased millions of years worth ( as CO₂) in a couple of hundred years. Oops! When we get a handle on dealing with this excess CO₂, what's left will probably be something like limestone, or chalk. Wouldn't it be elegant to pave your factory floor with marble made from your carbon emissions? Beats turning grandma into a diamond.

I truly believe that in a few hundred years the area where I live will be repopulated. The buidings will have been replaced with more practical ones. Some farms will be family owned, others will be cooperatives, a few will be owned by groups that want to control thier own food production but will use hired help. The giant farms will have been broken up; tractors will be small and most will be electric. Some people will use oxen and horses for the same reasons people have for thousands of years: they work hard and reproduce themselves. The pace of life will be slower whether you live on a farm or in a town, regular or factory (dedicated to the production of some locally relevant thing or service).

Healthcare will be universal and people will be much, much healthier in general, not because of the healthcare but because of restrictions placed on food additives, pesticide use and misleading advertising, widespread education on nutrition, and a general enjoyment and appreciation of physical work. There are certain things we are built for. The couch and the computer are not on that list. Walking is. Getting to universal healthcare will be painful but we will catch up to the rest of the developed world eventually.

For those who cringe at universal healthcare for reasons of higher taxes I would suggest beginning a dialog on just what are the basic purposes of government. Why do we even bother to have one? What do we absolutely want it to do? Perhaps if we can get back to basic principles, rather than focusing on falsly polarized rhetoric, we can, as a society, figure out what IS important to us, and what we are and are not willing to pay for. We already crossed this bridge on the idea of a national military, an interstate highway system, and the education of our children, to mention only some of the biggies.

Here in Minnesota we have been quietly experimenting with an extremely regressive pay-as-you-go fee based government while shouting about "no new taxes." The rhetoric hides the reality that with fee-based government, only the well-off can afford services while everyone pays for infrastructure. For example, the ticket for seatbelt non-compliance is $25, enough to get your attention, which I would argue is the point of traffic tickets to begin with, but the state now has levied a $75 "public safety surcharge" raising the total cost to $100. When I worked as a multimedia elearning designer I could afford a $100 fine and laugh about the embarrassment of being pulled over (which alone was enough to make me want to follow the law better). Now that I am a public servant and making about one-third what I made before, ("under-employed" which is not considered a valid labor statistic, by the way) a $100 fine is excruciating. Seriously, I need to figure out what I will go without in order to pay the fine. I live near people who make less that I do now, I can only imagine the significance of the cost to them. As a percentage of income, this fine impacts them much, much more than it impacts a wealthier person. (Anecdotally, my father used to park behind his studio in Beverly Hills every day because the parking ticket was $4 while it cost about $10 to park legally. What does that tell you about the effectiveness of this style of ticketing? In Norway they are using a sliding scale, the more money you have, the more the violation costs you.)

Another example is State Park Entry fees. Who are the state parks kept for? (Basic princilples again: why do we bother having state parks?) The easy answer is "citizens of the state." If this is true what happens to lower income citizen's access as the fees go up and up? Another example is state college tuition costs. To me this is so very obvious I feel the fool for spelling it out, but when it comes down to who can afford college there is obviously a line drawn somewhere between those who can and those who can't. As tuition (and fees) costs increase (much faster, by the way, than increases in the cost of living and wages) the percentage of those who can't afford it increases. As a society, our investment in our children is our most important investment in our future. This is why we, a society that deeply embraces capitalist and free-trade ideology, still insists on a socialist educational system where taxes pay for (manditory, I might point out) education for every child in America.
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We will learn to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere. We will develop the will to pay for it. That will be more painful that reaching universal healthcare. Carbon that has been bound to hyrogen for millions of years is now bound to atmospheric oxygen. If its enough carbon to impact our climate, what about the loss of all that formerly available oxygen? Maybe it means nothing. Of course we thought that about CO₂ emissions until a few years ago.

We've been living off this natural savings account for a couple of hundred years now. We've built all kinds of wonderful things that rely on hydocarbons (this is why bio-fuel seems like such a sweet deal, we want it to replace, guilt-free, our reliance on oil and coal). One of the things we've built is this huge agribusiness model of farming. We routinely get twice (and more) the yield per acre that our grandfathers got from the same land. We do this by powering huge machinery that can work more land during the small climate based windows of opportuninty (planting must be done before a certain weather sets in, for example), and by producing staggering amounts of fertilizer from natural gas. We've learned to feed the world. The world has responded, as all natural bilogical systems do, by expanding to fill the now larger niche. What happens when we can no longer feed this filled niche? And how do we deal with the abrogation of what we see as our responsibility?

I worry about our national psyche. We are tearing ourselves apart with our insistance on what is basically magical thinking. It is easy to B. S. people with economic "theories" that claim to prove the possibility of constant growth. The people you are bamboozling are not educated in economic vocabulary, concepts, or history, they lack the background to argue effectively, even when they suspect that the logic is fuzzy and the math is missing a few key things. Losing an argument does not, however, change reality, but we seem to behave as if winning an argument does.
It is politically incorrect to look at any system as "zero sum" today, but some systems are exactly that. Only so much sunlight falls on our static-sized planet each day. Wishing for more will not change that. We cannot "borrow" from tomorrow's insolation, even at high interest. There are no "Sunshine bonds."
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300 Years Form Now
People will be much more physically fit. They will be used to labor as opposed to labor-saving devices. Physical activity keeps us strong and healthy in many ways. More physical work will be done by people; more "office" type work will be done by computers. Much of this will be due to decentralization of data management, and by the localization of agriculture, manufacturing, and much service industry work. More food will be prepared from local ingredients, less will be shipped, and much less will be "preserved" and stored for long periods. Americans will happily eat a quarter as much meat as they do now. All food will be much more expensive (taking a significantly larger percentage of one’s income) but then most things will be more costly. We will return, out of necessity, to quality manufacturing (and appliance repair) and away from disposables.
Small farms will return, but they will be significantly different from your great grandparent’s farm. (Petrochemicals made corporate farming practical) Many more farms will be co-ops that feed niche communities as manufacturing becomes much more decentralized (but not the data that manage it). Hydroponics and greenhouses will be standard practices, not for all food, but for specialties, the things we ship from the Southern Hemisphere now, and especially in northern climes.
Orbiting solar collectors will concentrate and focus extra planetary insolation onto small plots of land allowing for factory towns that will take advantage of the concentrated heat and light to generate electricity and melt metals (without the use of hydrocarbons). Solar electricity will become a major industry. Morocco will become like the oil-rich countries of today by collecting solar energy and shipping electricity across the Mediterranean to factories in Portugal and Spain. Southern Italy will become as wealthy as Tuscany.
People will recognize solar input as a finite resource, and this realization will lead to an understanding of many other finite values, carrying capacity will become a socially critical concept in planning. There will be tradeoffs within that set volume, but the awareness of the zero-sum realities of some systems will be widespread. Economics will look very little like the field does today, but there will always be some people who take advantage of others and in the process create economic crises.
Transportation of people and goods will be possible but will be more difficult and expensive after the oil is gone. Solar electricity will pick up some of the current demand, but habits will change radically. People will read about our time and wonder in utter amazement "what were they thinking?"
Government will take up the role of research and project management for things that people and small companies cannot (and large corporations will not) fund. Large corporations, after the brutal and arrogant excesses of our times, will not be allowed to exist. (Poisoning the people for profit will be the camel’s last straw.) Progressive economic systems will ultimately prevail as people realize that the alternative is a return to the feudal societies of the dark ages.

The dark side: The planet will house 3 billion (or more) fewer people than today. The transition will be neither pretty nor pleasant, even for those fortunate enough to live in relatively fertile areas with low population densities. The United States is in a globally and historically unique position and will suffer much less than places like West-central Africa, Bangladesh, and urban China and India. This will cause significant resentment since the responsibility for global warming will be laid at our feet.
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I keep hearing about how we now have a longer life expectancy but this, like "comfortable retirement at age 65," is an artifact of a previous generation and will soon begin to (statistically) disappear. This is outmoded thinking, both convenient and wrong. The Cancer Lottery will be the primary undoing of the longevity trend, and those fortunate cancer-free people will indeed live a very long life, but as the incidence of cancer skyrockets the "average" will drop.
The cancers come from the post baby-boomer’s diet and indulgence in diet pop and preserved foods, along with the insidious inclusion of pesticide residues in nearly all foods. Preservatives, allowing tremendous shelf-life of processed food products take their toll on our own personal shelf-life. The formaldehyde compounds created by the natural breakdown of aspartame and other sweeteners are know carcinogens, but the FDA, whom we rely on to protect us from what we don’t know, refuse to abolish their use, instead lying to us about "safe levels" of carcinogens. Remember, the boomers, as children, drank soda as a rare and special treat, kids today drink it in place of water.

On Robots. Leisure, and responsibility

I grew up reading, amongst other things, Asimov and Heinlein. I read about how the development of robots would bring leisure and comfort to all of mankind. Competitive capitalism, however, will not allow this. So, then, what’s so great about competitive capitalism? First, does capital require competition to operate, or operate effectively? A competitive capitalist will heartily say, "Yes!" But is this true or is our perspective skewed by the heroic stories of the giants of competitive capitalism? Would the transcontinental railroad not have been built were it not for the inhuman drive of men like Huntington and Stanford? Again, a competitive capitalist will heartily say that is would not have happened, but I find this self-promoting theology ridiculous. This end result of that view is that we would still be taking sailing ships around the tip of South America to go from New York to California. Progress would obviously occur, but someone else might make it happen.

What is the purpose of capital? I would argue that capital, like corporations, allows the scale of ambitious projects to grow. I can build some pretty impressive things. I have built, with my own hands, a whole house, but I cannot myself build an ocean-going cargo ship. To do that I would need to pool the resources of a number of people. I need skillsets that I lack, I need time (man-hours) that one person just doesn’t have, and I need the money to buy things I cannot make myself, steel plate, window glass, acetylene. I don’t se where getting rich necessarily enters the program. In the heroic stories of competitive capitalism, wealth comes, but usually it comes only after great struggle (and often great risk). Today’s wannabe capitalists want it all, and they want it now, and they want it painlessly (which sounds like idealized socialism to me – everything belongs to you, the world at your fingertips).

And what is with the privatized profits but socialized risks? American voters treat this like more hollow rhetoric, but this is exactly what just happened! No one who (indirectly through stock dividends, value or bonuses) received TARP money has ever missed a meal, while employed or not. None of them are going to worry about being homeless (although there might be financial advantages to allowing commercial property foreclosures.)

The recent (2008) financial crisis was world wide because investors around the world invested in what was basically a Ponzi scheme (real estate, credit default swaps), at the root, and this is usually, in one variation or another, what happens. The presumed value of something is believed to inevitably rise (and the variation, crisis to crisis, is only in the "thing" and the verbiage used to describe the inevitability of the value to rise continuously). [These people are highly f**king educated and this is their field, if I can see the hubris, why can’t they?]

In some cases I believe (anyone able to cite or back this up?) that this is done maliciously. For example, if George W. Bush had been able to privatize Social Security, the stock market would have see the (admittedly forced) savings of millions of workers suddenly available for "investment" (although the word is used ironically here because it would not be an investment in the capitalist sense of the word). This money, streaming into the market, would have inflated the price of many if not most stocks. A correction, however, would be inevitable because the price increase would be based on a cash-flooded market, not an increase in base value, or even earning potential, of the companies. Those able to sell high and hang onto the money gained would be in a position to buy stocks back at corrected prices, fleecing the unwary working class "investors" who were forced to invest their savings in the market. It would have been a subtle, brutal, and effective way to skim the savings of the entire working class. (Tell me that this was not class warfare.)

One problem I see is the myth of the Protestant Work Ethic and the unhealthy drive and competitive spirit of some people allowed to run free. (Are they actually a threat to society? Probably.) On the work ethic: why is it OK to play organized sports but not OK to have undirected leisure? Is this a social thing? "Only where I can see you, mister." (I like to read and learn stuff, I like to hike the woods by myself. Learning stuff often pays off somewhere down the road, and not always directly; sometimes I help others with what I’ve learned and the pay-off is theirs.) On the drive issue, I am reminded of Mark Twain's observation that your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose. Shouldn't this apply to my finacial secirity to? Do you remember when greed was a vice?
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Getting back to the robots. In a Great Society (loaded term?) like we imagine ours to be, why is sharing such a distasteful concept? If I can, Gates-like, invent something that will make people’s lives easier (even if it only lets them keep more of what they make, like Linux could have had it not been viciously capitalized) what’s wrong with selling it cheaply, or even giving it away as a public service? (What’s wrong with the concept of Public Service altogether? "What are you, some kind of commie?") We do build robots that put people out of work. They also decrease errors and speed up production, making greater production (read:) "profits (irony)" for the capitalists that "own (possibly irony, I’m not sure yet)" the company whose manager decided to replace workers with robots. The question, then, becomes this: who pays for the displacement of the workers? The capitalists see this as society’s problem (read: the government’s problem, you remember the government, those guys who try to steal all our money/new-capital through taxation, taxes to pay for programs like, well, like helping displaced workers!). The government, however, would have to be pretty socialist to take on this responsibility, which would entail something like welfare for the displaced workers while they were found new jobs, retrained if their skills were obsolete (which happens fast these days), or permanently if retired as either old or un-retrainable. The other option, of course, is to have the corporations that install robots take responsibility for the displaced workers, although I cannot see the needs or costs of the program being any different. So I’m all for robots. I’m all for fast, efficient, error-free production. But what about the people, what do we do with the people? Perhaps a society that values handcrafts could put these people to work making things which robots can’t. Perhaps the inevitable retirement of fossil fuels will bring back hand labor (and, hopefully, the respect for it), not that hard labor is something you can just start doing after a life of only light activity (and this is not just muscle growth, bones must be developed as a child that can support the work).

Respect is a big piece of this problem actually. Anthropologists understand how important prestige is to humans. Leadership always had prestige attached because others look to the leaders for direction. They earn respect by making good decisions. Skills have always garnered prestige. The "good" or "the best" at something is always prestigious (even if anti-social as in the case of, for example, Jesse James). In competitive capitalism, however all other prestige is trumped by a larger dollar amount. In a healthy society, it would be enough to be a great baseball pitcher. In competitive capitalism the only real hierarchy is in paycheck ("If you’re so great, how come he makes more money?") It’s a stupid and self-defeating competition that by design eventually inflates everything it touches. As a society we need to respect other things than wealth. Most societies do. When I travel overseas, being a college professor means something special. Here, however we are graded by our paychecks (and only the school of business even pretends to pay commercial scale, and then it is not for the higher education, but because the skillset is worth more in industry). Learning is not respected ("If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?") Indeed, in a society where possessions are not particularly relevant prestige and respect are of utmost value (!Kung bushmen, for example, a totally mobile lifestyle that allows for very little collecting of objects – consumption beyond one’s needs is not remotely sustainable, and there is no obesity).
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Amongst the perils of bifurcative thought...

Seeing the world in terms of black or white is a survival positive. When a snap judgment must be made exaggerating the threat may prompt the gazelle response, successfully leaving the threat somewhere well behind. In interpersonal relationships meant to last more that a few fleeting seconds, however, bifurcative perceptions are usually a mistake.

"I believe..." and "I don’t believe..."
If I make a statement like, "I believe in God," the typical assumption is that the opposite perspective is "I don’t believe in God." Semantically this may be true, but while the statement, "I believe in God," states a definitive position, that I personally do believe that God exists, the reverse statement, "I don’t believe in God," can mean two very distinctly different things: that I personally believe that God does not exist (atheistic) (the common assumption derived from hearing that statement), or that I have no belief one way or the other (agnostic). Empiricism would, from the lack of direct, measurable evidence, imply only the latter, that belief (theory) should be withheld (no judgment made) until there was more definitive evidence, or a new way of measuring something previously untestable. Someone who practiced an empiricist world-view would be agnostic about anything as yet unproven. An agnostic, one whose belief is suspended, is not an atheist, one who believes in the negative. Yet when I say, "I don’t believe in (fill in the blank)," I am presumed to be atheistic about the subject, whether it be the existence of God, the existence of witches or the evil eye, or the positive effect of low interest rates (but only for major corporations) on the global economy.

"The jury is still out."
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"I believe, I believe, I believe I’ll have another beer!"

2 economic perspectives:

1. Cost + Profit = Price
2. Price = All the Market will Bear

#2 is Vampire (Skim as much as possible - bleeds the turnip)

#1 creates growth (True trickle down, up, and sideways)

More on this later...

Its only fair to invite comments and I will post here what I feel is relevant and honest. If you make a comment and I don't post it I suggest that you start your own blog. There are people that do want to hear what you have to say no matter what it is and I support your right to say it. That, for me, is one of the reasons we have government, to protect our right of free speech.

To comment email me at joel@blackhawk-studios.org

I'd especially like to hear your reasons for having a government at all, and your definition of what "freedom" is, what it is worth, and why we deserve it.