Nanotopia

Folks who are from very flat climes will come here to the mountains and break into a jittery sweat, loosen their collars, and glance about nervously. "Can't ... see ... out!" Always being able to see 35 miles to where the earth meets the sky gives them some sort of geographic claustrophobia when they are in the crags and hollows of mountain land. Not that we can't see that far and farther from our mountain tops, but everyday life is a bit more limited on the scenery. For example, in the photo above as one approaches the entrance to the Center of the Universe garden, the view is the high ridge across the county road, a line of sight of not more than 2000'.

So I suppose that what I have to say here would more readily occur to someone who lives in terrain isolated by geographic features much as the bayous and fjords isolated one community from another although they were only a few miles apart as the crow flies. The habitable land around here is a narrow valley and the hollows that radiate from it with such picturesque names as Dollar Hollow (the two words rhyme), Outlaw Hollow, Troublesome Hollow, Crooked Branch Hollow, and Snowball Hollow. This last one so named because it is so deep a notch between mountains that you'd sometimes find snow there in June that had not yet melted. Not so many miles from here and not so high in the mountains the ridges between hollows are also named because they are habitable. Here the ridges are not named because no one has the audacity to try to live on one. Our house is located on the ridge between two hollows and our most productive land is in the bottom of those hollows. We are audacious even by mountaineer standards.

This sense of isolation tends to shape one's thinking. When we were discussing world events and the very partisan patriarch of this community saw that we libertarians were not of the same mind as he was, he dismissed the point by gesturing to the great ridge of the Eastern Continental Divide just to the east of us and then in the direction of the TVA lake less than a mile to the west of us (you can't actually see it because of yet another ridge) and said, "Well, I'll tell you. It doesn't really matter to me because I'm not interested in anything that goes on in the world except between that ridge and that lake!"

Being then as I am used to communities whose boundaries are clearly demarcated by natural obstacles, it was easy to visualize the source of the current recession/depression debacle the world faces. Imagine, if you will, 100 families (although here there are not nearly so many as that) isolated back in this hollow and leading a self sufficient existence as a community. We must imagine that they have little interest in trafficking with the outside world because I want this community to serve as a microcosm of the larger world.

Each individual family would normally budget to take care of its own young and its own elderly, but in the community as a whole there are bound to be instances where someone cannot do for themselves. As long as this number is small, it's no problem. Each family could contribute a percent of two of its production for those who due to illness, accident, disability or whatever cannot well do for themselves. At the core of it people everywhere and in all times have been decent and the genuinely destitute have always been taken care of. Our community, our world in the microcosm goes on unabated.

Let's suppose times are good in this hollow. Good harvests, able craftsmen, diligent workers, and a modest frugal standard of living. There's half again as many goods as are really needed so as people age, the community decides that there is no point producing more and more food and goods, rather they let the oldest people quit working and vouchsafe a portion of the community's goods for their support. As a motivation for this, for there to be something to look forward to, each person contributing to the support of these former workers accumulates credits toward their own time of common support to be redeemed when they reach a certain age and decide to put away the plow or hammer. About ten of the families in this hollow of 100 families goes into this pension system leaving 90 families to produce all the goods.

Still the hollow has a surplus, so in addition to pensioners who have left the workforce early, some people take up thinking and advising as full time occupations. The rest of the hollow gives them a portion of surplus goods as way of stipend and like everybody else the thinkers and advisers contribute a portion of that stipend to the pensioners against their plans to one day quit the workforce altogether and be pensioners themselves. Let's say ten families take up the advisement business. Now 80 families produce all the goods and services for this 100 family hollow.

Some families notice that people get nervous about whether they will have enough corn, potatoes, hay, or firewood for the coming season and others get nervous that they are producing too much of those things. So these families go to the former and agree that at harvest time, they will guarantee to buy the surplus produce at a fixed price expecting to sell it to the latter when they need it. Note that they don’t ever actually take delivery of the goods rather only agree to a guaranteed price. This arrangement works for them and soon they don’t have to produce goods themselves but can live from the difference in the guaranteed buying price and that actual sell price.

Eventually twenty families are earning their living this way. They also contribute to the pension system and expect to receive pensions from it one day themselves but they also enter into long term contracts with the produces of the goods in the hopes that these contracts themselves will be even more valuable in the future and they will prosper materially all the more. Now there are 60 families that produce all the goods for the hollow and 40 families that share in the consumption of those goods but don’t produce any themselves.

Some more families eye those long term contracts and realize that they may or may not be valuable in the future. So just as our latest twenty families set up a system to guarantee the delivery and price of real goods, ten more families begin likewise trading in the long term contracts themselves. For a portion of the goods involved, they agree to guarantee the value of the contracts over time.

Fully half of the hollow is now engaged in some sort of activity not directly involved in producing goods and services and yet they receive their portion of those goods and services for those activities. They also pay into a pension system that promises them more goods and services when they reach a certain age or become disabled.

This half of our hollow’s population that no longer lives by direct production of goods finds itself put upon to deal with other aspects of daily life as well. So they offer to some of the producers, who by now are working longer, harder hours to keep up production, a portion of their ample goods to take care of such things as cooking their food, washing their clothes, and taking care of their children and elderly. Twenty people drop out of the workforce to attend to these things and they remain in the pension system and contribute a portion of what they receive to the upkeep of the wards of the hollow and expecting the same for themselves in time.

With less than one third of the people occupied with producing all the goods for themselves and everyone else, the land remaining as woodlots has been over harvested, the pastures over grazed, the farmland over cropped and so finally production begins to wane.

But this is no problem. This hollow has great wealth in the form of its pension system and the amount of goods promised by futures contracts and guarantees. When the people realize that they have set themselves up quite well (on paper), they begin to apply for the pensions and profits they have due them and this includes half of the remaining people who are actually producing the goods.

So now 85 families show up at the gates of the remaining 15 families and demand their portion of the goods available. Their portion is small. Quite small.

What happened to all the prosperity that the people thought they had? Why, the total amount of the pensions, contracts, guarantees, and stipends amounted to years and years of goods for every family there. Where did it go?

Do you live in Microtopia Hollow? Well, for today (or this week or this month) take note of what you consume. You get up in the morning and use water and energy to shower and put on clothes. Then you have breakfast. Then you use motor fuel to go to work. Etc. Pay close attention for the day what it is that you consume. Likewise glance at what those around you consume on a daily basis: food, clothes, water, fuel, housing, machinery, all the things that make up the verities and realities of our material existence.

Then look at what you and those around you produce. Do you know even one person materially and directly involved in producing the things you consume on a daily basis?

I can think back on the street where I grew up and catalog every house (it was a short dead-end street) and tell you what the head of the household did for a living. Next door the man was a welder at a metal fabricating plan. On the other side the man was a bus mechanic, next house was an appliance repairman, next one a glass cutter. Across the street the woman worked in a thread factory, next was a saw sharpener at a wood milling plant, and the next worked at a local weaving mill. And so it went. It was rare then to know anyone NOT involved in the direct production of some tangible good or service. But now of days consider the people you know and what they “do” for a living. How many of them are involved in the direct production of any of the things that makes up what you all consume on a daily basis?

One of the cheesy advertisements that continually appears on the freebie internet services reflects this. It is a (useless) outfit that wants to glean and refer people for online degrees from various sources. It has a dozen icons for you to choose among and click. Want to move up in the world? How do I become a: medical billing specialist, social worker, criminal investigator, health care manager, graphic designer, project manager, public relations specialist, counselor, author, accountant…? Glance over this list once again and recall the last time you had need of the services of any of them. If we based such solicitations on what we consumed rather than how we hoped to idle away our lives, the list would read: How can I become involved in: supplying cloth, growing food, supplying fuel, making tools, making shoes, supplying dish washing detergent, milling lumber, etc.

Does it not strike you as significant that the list of things we aspire to do for a living and the list of things we consume and depend on daily have so little common ground?

The things that actually sustain us and make our lives comfortable are supply by a tiny percent of the workforce, less than 5% I’d say.

The microcosm of this allegorical Micotopia Hollow demonstrates why the world is now facing a deep economic depression. For years now the number of people involved in actually producing goods and services, the real goods and services we need day to day, has been dwindling while the number of people who base their personal economy and personal fortune on activities that produce no real goods has multiplied. Moreover, all those people have come to rely on investments, savings, stipends, pensions, and entitlements as if those things somehow magically caused goods to spring into existence.

Students of Eleuthronomics will instantly see the etiology of the problem. It is viewing money, no matter what the source, as a sort of magic talisman that can cause goods to come into existence. Alas, this hallucination is the basis of the entire current handling of the looming depression. If we just create a lot of money into existence and then initiate a lot of government spending, then the creation of goods will follow the newly minted money. But it has never happened that way. Did you know that there was a “Great Depression” in 1920 - 1921? The government did nothing or interfere with its course and it was over in a few months and led to very prosperous times for the rest of the decade. When conditions for the next depression appeared at the end of that decade, the solution was to stimulate the economy by massive creation of money and government spending programs. The result was that the Great Depression lasted for longer than a decade.

This all came from ignoring the fact that in a healthy economy people produce things and money is created to represent those things that are produced. In a dying economy money is created as a sort of promise for the future in hopes that people will produce things in pursuit of it. Yet the belief that money is a magic wand that can bring food and clothes and medicine into existence is very strong and pervasive. I read a blog recently where an award winning essay concerning the homeless was quoted and contained the lines:

“The sad thing is that we have enough money to go around, we just want to have some luxuries, even though homeless people can’t even fulfill their needs.”

It gave me a feeling neigh onto despair to realize how wrong headed are the efforts to deal with the rising economic crisis. True enough if you had a rare $1000 bottle of wine, you could sell it and buy ten pairs of boots for the homeless. But only if you did it in isolation. If every expensive bottle of wine were put up for sale all at once, the price of it would drop to nothing. And if everyone wanted to buy boots for the homeless all at once, the price of a pair of boots would soar. That is, there is no way to translate a bottle of wine into several pairs of boots, you cannot on a wholesale level trade luxuries of the few for the necessities of the many.

The way to provide the homeless with more of the necessary goods is for as many people as is possible to be engaged in producing them because in the end it matters not a wit whether the person is homeless, disabled, a retiree, a pensioner, has savings, has stock investments, or is independently wealthy. The hard mechanics of the economy doesn’t care whether the person has a sense of having earned what they feel they have coming or whether they are standing hat in hand, eyes downcast, shuffling their feet and asking for a handout. They are all alike coming to the few producers of the necessities of our daily existence and asking for their share of the goods while they produce none themselves.

This is what the world in general is facing. It is full now of internet entrepreneurs, executives, bankers, coordinators, pontificators, graphic designers and project managers. Like Microtopia Hollow, their numbers have risen to the vast majority of the population while those that produce what is actually consumed on a continual basis has shrunk. Yet in all the economic blather you hear now of days, note how many times you hear the phrase “consumer spending” and how few times you hear “producer creating.”

My solution? I don’t have one. Not for you anyway. Each of us is in our own Nanotopia, our own very small world, our own households. If we are producing some real goods and services that are of direct benefit to the folk in proportion to what we are consuming, we will prosper. But if we are consuming the goods and services but providing none of it ourselves, we will quickly find ourselves at the gates of the few producers with our hand out expecting our share. And it will be meager indeed!

This is the freeman’s bailout plan. Make sure that in your own Nanotopia, your own circle of endeavor, that some real, tangible good or service useful to the folk has been produced by your efforts and by your encumbering the Earth.