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Written by Bob Guyer
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Capital is really a function of how much human time can be aggregated and how that time can be amplified through the use of extra-biological power. The number of people and the time they are able to spend in either individual or group pursuits is the foundation of human capital formation. The degree to which that can be magnified by expanded human consciousness/knowledge and extra-biological power is what generates capital accumulation. There is no necessity to any particular form of accumulation but at base it is all human time + social alignment.
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The expressed purpose of capitalism is the aggregation of capital for the owners of capital assets. This goal is not connected to a larger purpose or to biological imperitives but is left to the individual capital accumulator to determine. The level of human extra-biological power being directed via our economic system driven by a non specified purpose is stagering. I believe that the underlying purpose of capital accumulation is directed toward achieving elevated social rank and the exploitation of that rank for power within an individuals social milieu.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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The current U.S. culture, economic, and political system produces an astounding amount of violence. At the local domestic level there is an epidemic of armed robbery, rape, and murder. At the national level we are engaging in offensive wars of choice and spending a tremendous amount of money on increases in military resources despite the fact that soon the U.S. will spend more on military resources than the rest of the world combined. The current U.S. culture, economic, and political system produces an astounding amount of violence. At the local domestic level there is an epidemic of armed robbery, rape, and murder. At the national level we are engaging in offensive wars of choice and spending a tremendous amount of money on increases in military resources despite the fact that soon the U.S. will spend more on military resources than the rest of the world combined.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Human boundaries that form the definition of any collective social structure are dependent on the humans who create them. These entities can have any attributes humans can imagine and assign to those entities. The idea that economic entities should have similar rights as individual human economic actors is absurd. All group boundary formation is subservient to, and never equivalent with, the full status of an individual. In a new economic model the defintition of collective economic entities must reflect the fact that those entities are social structures created by human imagination and they must be structured to serve the whole (separate and non-separate) human identity.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Discussion of efficiency and profitability are based on the assumptions of current accounting methods. These methods are based on the point of view of the irreducibly separate individual. The only way that profit can accrue is for the minus on the side of where the resources are taken (outside the self, in the externalities) is ignored and attributed to the seller/producer of the good or service. Discussion of efficiency and profitability are based on the assumptions of current accounting methods. These methods are based on the point of view of the irreducibly separate individual. The only way that profit can accrue is for the minus on the side of where the resources are taken (outside the self, in the externalities) is ignored and attributed to the seller/producer of the good or service. If this is not done there is no profit to be had. Moving resources from one side of the self boundary to the other always requires energy to create motion and overcome the friction in the boundary crossing and it is only energy (mostly in the form of matter and human time/energy) that is moved from one place to another. Where is the profit?
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Self-interest remains the driving engine of the system but self is redefined to the view of self as the whole person, both separate and non-separate, with the world around them are figured into the system. This simultaneously relieves the payers of negative externalities from the un-chosen cost of the negative externality (increasing their wealth) and relieves the business environment of the perverse incentive to create products and services that have high profit potential due in large part to high negative externalities.
Investors can also see that the externality balance of a company has a direct effect on the bottom line of that company and also the areas where those positive and negative externalities occur so the can invest in the areas of wealth creation (positive balance of externality cost) that please them and profit them at the same time. Self interest and choice can work both for the individual and the non individual self if the wholeness of the interconnected individual is factored into the equation.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Corporations would not have the rights of an individual, but individuals would have the right to organize around the purpose of creating economic goods and services. Corporations serve as a fig leaf that is designed to obscure the fact that the economic system currently serves the function of moving and concentrating financial resources in the hands of a few individuals. Investment in the economic entities that follow the elimination of corporations, as we know them today, could continue as long as the market calculated the positive and negative externalities generated by the economic activity of the new economic entity.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Funding and management of energy, water, will be excluded from the second floor economy and will be funded through the conversion of NASA and military funding described previously. The administration of this agency through the action of the federal legislature would have the ability to tax local labor and second floor economic activity if necessary secondary to the pursuit of developing clean environmentally sustainable energy and adequate supplies of water.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Continuing with the metaphor of building an economic system like it was a two-story house we will start with the most important element of the house, the foundation and first floor. The building blocks of this level of the economy are the ability to transform and deliver food, housing, water and sanitation to every person in the country. A non-polluting renewable energy infrastructure, transportation, and communication system will be required to both produce and distribute these goods. The medium of exchange for applying resources in this level of the economy should not be money, as we know it today. The resources required for the foundation and first floor of the economy, if it is to be designed as a self-replenishing system, must not be transferable to the production of goods and services transformed for the purposes of second floor economic development.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Our current economic model is a circular self-exhausting model. Any model based on the absolutely separate self will self exhaust because it is, at inception, operating from the false premise that it is disconnected from it’s sustaining medium. Capitalism is based on the separate-self model and projects that structure onto all other processes and entities. The material aspect of all economic models is ultimately circular because energy/matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Matter and energy are simply transformed through economic activity. These material transformations are consciously valued in an economic system.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Culture is the set of shared assumptions and agreements that form the operating environment for groups of people to participate cooperatively with each other in the pursuit of their individual and collective needs. Culture is the set of shared assumptions and agreements that form the operating environment for groups of people to participate cooperatively with each other in the pursuit of their individual and collective needs. Culture existed before civilization and it will exist after civilization. In fact culture is not an exclusively human attribute. Primates have been shown to create culture that persists across generations and become the governing set of assumptions in a primate troop after the originators of the culture and their immediate relations have all died.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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It’s not that you can’t build a second floor on a house, it’s that you can’t sacrifice the foundation to do it. A new economic model that is sustainable within the parameters of the natural world would build an economic house that continually replenished the foundation and the first floor and then built a reasonably sized second floor that stayed connected with it’s foundation through it’s connection to the first floor.
The foundation of all economic activity is the health of the soil and the water used to produce food for human consumption. So the first principal of all economic activity should preserve and support this base capacity of our environment.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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The mother of all economic systems is food production in excess of requirements to support the present population and it’s projected growth rate. In the face of climate change the most resilient food production system would be a complex web of small local production, large scale regional production, and minimal large scale trans regional production. Climate, water, and soil quantity and quality are the bedrock of this productive capacity. Externalities that impact this part of the economy must be properly valued and the costs paid by the producer of the externality. The cost of eroding the foundation of our economic house should be high enough that further erosion is prevented. Restoring erosion that has already occurred must be accomplished through an investment of social and technical capital over a period, as short as possible, so that further development of sustainable civilization can proceed.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Building an Economy is like Building a Two Story House
Our current economy is a suck up economy, it sucks resources up and concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands while depleting the generating capacity of the resources from which the resources are sucked up from in the first place. The global economic model of the developed world can be compared to the process of building a house. The current model tries to build a house that continually remodels and expands it’s self. The construction method is centered around taking materials out of the foundation and the first floor and using them to build a second story. The design of the house further specifies that the second story would always be moving away from the first story and becoming more massive as it gets farther away from the first story.
Eventually this house is bound to collapse by it’s own top heavy structure and the ever growing distance between the first and second floor and the continual weakening of the foundation and first floor that are used to built the second story and propel it further and further above the first floor.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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The planet and everything living on it needs humans to develop an economic system that is aligned with nature and a more complete view of humanity. Since we are fully separate individuals, and non-separate individuals as well, our economic system needs to accommodate both of these seeming opposite facts. Pure self interest versus pure commonality have battled for supremacy in our post industrial revolution economic systems and thinking. Make no mistake, both systems have a philosophical stance and reflect that stance through their design. Therefore establishing a new philosophical framework for a new economic system to inhere in must be part of the equation that creates a sustainable human future.
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Economic System
