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| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
| Location: | California USA |
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Whenever I begin to view and digest economic reports, such as this one, I measure the data offered from a standard understood.
My standard, that I understand, is best communicated as a term and a few works published whereby the term is unambiguously defined.
The term is:
Equitable Commerce
The understanding is such that credit flows to those who earn it, and other things. From that understanding, the opposite is clear, whereby credit can flow to those who steal it - through deception, and violence.
From that understanding it can be known that people cooperating, and people avoiding crime (as victims or as criminals), are capable of creating something called: surplus wealth.
Surplus wealth is any measure of productive activity that exceeds consumption; whereby more things are stored somewhere, because more things now exist, because the ability to produce more than anyone can consume is now real.
We really can, now, produce more things than anyone can ever consume.
That is understandable, and that is in stark contrast to those who will have you believe that mass starvation is due to overpopulation and a lack of resources.
Remove the cost of crime, by deception, and by violence, and what do you see?
Do you see "overpopulation", starvation, mass suicide, chaos, and anarchy?
Think about it, please. Those people who have power over your thoughts, through mass marketing, propaganda, and other means, may have you thinking that war is the thing that keeps the human species from becoming self-destructive by "overpopulation".
If you think that, if you think that "war is good for the economy", and you think that human beings will breed like rats without war, without crime, and if you think that human beings are designed to kill each other off so as to keep our numbers down, then you may want to rethink such things, and find out where you got such thoughts in the first place.
Human beings can now produce much more than any human being alive can ever consume, and once a human being lives in this condition of surplus the desire, the need, to reproduce becomes less powerful - perhaps.
Everyone is not the same as everyone else. The trend in affluent social connections is measurable and contrasting to the trend in social connections where the people connected do without the least bit of wealth.
Surplus wealth is the point here, the thing that must be understood before any economic understanding will be realized.
Surplus wealth is created through voluntary cooperation; because three things (at least) occur during voluntary cooperation. 3 things are possible when people avoid the costs of being victims and/or being criminals.
1. Division of labor
2. Specialization
3. Economies of scale
One person working alone is an economic power that is severely limited. Try building a car while you, alone, feed, cloth, and shelter yourself.
The addition of one criminal connected to the one economic power, the single productive person, and then try to build a car, while you are defending against actions perpetrated against you by the criminal.
Now add a volunteer to your efforts to survive and know that the power to produce is increased by that social connection to that other person.
You can spend time defending against the criminal, while your buddy makes dinner.
That is both division of labor and specialization. You specialize in defense against the criminal. Your buddy specializes in making dinner, and the necessary labor is divided among two of you.
If you decide that your labor is worth twice the value of the labor done by your buddy, then your buddy can find another buddy, since you become no different than the criminal to him - perhaps.
Now that we may have a more basic understanding of economy and an understanding of the concept of surplus wealth - we can move onto a concept called investment.
Suppose you and your buddies, all the people connected to a voluntary productive economic society, have managed to produce a large store of excess wealth. You guys now have "money in the bank". You successfully avoid injuring each other, and thereby free each other up and allow for more economic power to be focused on producing more and more wealth, more and more efficiently, and now you are in a position to focus that productive activity toward something that will store value better.
Do you now produce something that will store value for a short time or a long time?
Short terms stuff can be exemplified by such things as entertainment. You decide to play a game of cards. You worked enough so as to earn time off and you use that time off to entertain yourself, and you can even play a game of solitary, while everyone else works or invests their share of excess wealth playing another game, or they may invest in something less short term, something long term.
Long term stuff can be exemplified by such things as building a better mouse trap. Excess wealth can be spent hiring someone to specialize in the work of building a better mouse trap, rather than playing cards, or in addition to playing cards, assuming that production of surplus wealth is of sufficient quantity to afford doing both: hiring a new specialist, and playing cards.
And then there is the concept of creating a thing called debt.
I have to go to work now, so I'll have to return to this if I am inspired to do so later.