----- 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
