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No Scarcity before/after In this season of elections, I think its helpful to remember Plato's allegory of the cave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave Lets say on one side is modern life, for the most part, and exiting the cave we'd see life as it truly is. I'd go with infinite love. [On a scale of Joe Biden to John Wayne Gacy...how crazy does it sound] In economics they tell us that the economy is driven by scarcity. Scarcity of resources and competition for those resources drive economic systems and thereby markets that come to rest at equilibrium points in terms of Supply and Demand. Oh yes. But what they *don't* tell us... What if that scarcity is all manufactured, man-made, made up? Like the Debeers diamond bund writ large across the global economic sky. I just don't believe, in this day and age and with the technology that we have available to us, and imminently available to us, that there is a real scarcity for certain things, like food. Crop yields are up, incredibly. More food is being grown now than ever before, with less people producing it. Maybe there is some sort of scarcity in some things, but shit...even this fucking computer is plastic. How tough is it to make a billion of these things, really? I struggle with it, this scarcity thing. Something you're just taught to accept from an early age, really. It gets me up at night and tapping on my keyboard. Sometimes I just have trouble accepting scarcity. What if its not real, and its all a lie? On some level, I'm nearly positive it is. It depends how you categorize things, I guess. For example: we could probably provide some sort of transportation for nearly everyone. We cannot provide a maclaren f-1 super car for everyone. Which is to say, I'm not abandoning the economic idea of scarcity, but at a macro economic level cross-referenced with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I'm saying we could get a a lot of those needs met. Given time, all. I'm saying for the average person on the planet, a lot of those needs, where that person is wanting because scarcity of resources theoretically suggests he can't get those needs met, actually can be met. That a lot of physiological needs can be met, and scarcity at that level is manufactured or otherwise made-up for the profit of the few. We could probably meet a large amount of the world's physiological needs and not upset the apple-cart too harshly. They're burying dried milk to support the diary market. Maybe they could give that stuff away. Maybe some people could do without 8 homes and settle for seven, or six. Maybe I want to believe we'll end up in a Star Trek world, where everyone beams everywhere and we wind up like the Ship of Theseus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus Or perhaps like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, but we do it to ourselves in this utopian world of no scarcity.
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