Our economy 2006.

After considerable driving around looking at the situation, it has become apparent that our society has not progressed much since the onset of modern technology, and it seems we’re just as vulnerable to the capriciousness of our own making as ever.

It’s true we have better transportation and easier lives today but somehow along the way we have sold everybody an economic system that, well, has some pretty big questions looming. And there are two important things to look at when assessing our future potential: First is our total reliance on the combustion engine, and second is the over-valuing of otherwise useless property that is being sold to people as home sites.

First things first. Let’s look at the combustion engine, which is by far the most prolific economic asset ever invented, but, through no fault of its own, is also the single foundation on which all modern economic and social activity is built. In other words we have put all our ‘eggs in one basket,’ and by doing so have hamstrung ourselves when everything depends on a single thing: fuel for the combustion engine.

Take food for example. Aside from the few people who live on self-sufficient farms, all the food that arrives on tonight’s dinner table across America was planted and harvested via the combustion engine. Nobody is yoking horses to plant eighty thousand acres of wheat in Canada. All the food we eat has been processed and transported to our cities via the combustion engine and everybody who stocked the store shelves arrived at work via their motor vehicle … and so on, etc … you get the idea. Our food supply is completely dependent on gasoline powered technology.

But there’s more. Take a drive down any city boulevard and cite the one business that isn’t wholly dependent on this same combustion engine. Of course in theory it is possible to find a computer software company where employees arrive by bicycle, but how will they get the roof fixed after the next big storm? Nope, every business in America is totally dependent on the combustion engine. Every school, church, business, newspaper, science lab, power plant and courthouse … they all exists as separate gearwheels in the economy, but each spins off a common axle powered by [you guessed it] the combustion engine.

And there’s more. How about law enforcement? And how about our highly touted ‘rights for women?’ These things too are a dependency of the combustion engine. And to prove this, ask how many store owners could leave their stores unattended overnight if law enforcement could not quickly marshal forces and race to the scene in their motorized vehicles? And ask yourself, if law enforcement was unable to do their job, how could women safely go to work if they had to trek unprotected without an enclosed vehicular capsule? What would happen to ‘freedom’ if women leaving the home had to be accompanied by a male protector?

Looking at it logically; the very laws that govern our society are dependent on the combustion engine. (which explains why cultures without motor vehicles have different types of social rules, and too explains why our great-grandparents were horrified by women working outside the home).

To be a responsible citizen in today’s world, we should recognize that our American structure of law and freedom have evolved hand in hand with the use of combustible energy. And we owe ourselves this honest perspective as each day we grind down the freeway toward a job that increasingly offers little more than a grubstake for paying last month’s bills.

This gloomy perspective invariably leads to the second economic insight about America today, and perhaps our greatest delusion as a nation: principally that we are being sold property and homes that are not worth the value we are being asked to pay. Supply and demand is the rule of order for property sales, but have you really looked at what you’re getting?

Lets face it, most property in America would be worthless without the combustion engine. After all if you couldn’t walk thirty or forty miles a day, how could you get to work and the grocery store, etc?

Come on, do you really believe anyone would live atop a mountain with no motorized transportation to haul their goods and services up the hill? People traditionally haven’t lived on the sides of mountains unless there were warring factions running about bushwhacking each other. Mountains were used as natural barricades, and never as convenient places to build homes. So do you believe mountain-top living today is anything more than a luxury? And what happens to that pricy living arrangement without high-powered motor vehicles scampering uphill, effortlessly pulling the family’s two ton mobile camper?

There are more issues than transportation that need to be weighed when looking at property values. What about the productivity of the land your house sits on? Can you convert that land to a use that would pay for the mortgage and insurance and taxes due on the house that sits there?  Maybe someone ideally located on fertile ground that was also blessed with a natural oasis could possibly raise enough crops and goats to feed themselves, but could they convert their land into a pay-as-you-go farm? Likely not. Self-sufficient family farms in America largely died away as people were forced out by corporate-sized planting and harvesting.

Maybe instead of farming, you could cover your property in solar panels or wind turbines or create a giant methane-producing dung pit and recoup some of the money you owe to the bank and insurance company. Or maybe the mountaintop dwellers could capitalize on their vantage point and install telescopes, and charge their neighbors to look at the moon.

But don’t forget that you also owe the government a yearly tax levy for the privilege of property ownership … which means that the land you proudly purchased will never belong to you, and therefore you can be removed bodily from your land just as surely as the family farms were taken away years ago. And let’s be truthful about it: the beneficiaries of this ‘economic consolidation for the sake of efficiency’ are the corporations who are largely shipping your job overseas because you need too much money to pay for your house and car [because your house and car are generally overpriced luxury items that are void of practicality].
 
So why have we sheep-like Americans been talked into building and buying giant monstrosity houses that are not suitable as an abode if nobody can pay for the tax and air conditioning? And why in the world did we build all these things out of gypsum and waferboard?

Why have Americans abandoned our common sense to the free market when it has driven us like sugar junkies into an economic corner that’s potentially ruinous to our national system of law and freedom? Have we really traded in our freedom for indebted servitude to a corporate-based market that will run overseas at the first hint of trouble at home?

Here most of us sit on our medieval fiefdoms, overlords to all the grass and bills that come with a property that will be useless at the slightest interruption of fossil fuel. And were sitting here cleaning a stockpile of guns with hare-triggers aimed at Venezuela and the middle-east while vast tracts of American soil are covered with slabs of concrete that reduce the rainfall and productivity of our soil … and no government official is talking about an optional plan because that would carry the suicidal risk of angering corporations, whose owners are driving the housing market with their demand for second homes, which are coincidently being built further and further from urban work centers.

Obviously the whole place is going to you-know-where in a handbasket, but the fact that so many people are talking about the problem may inoculate us from certain doom, and the same foolish market that made the whole mess will probably prove flexible enough to undo itself as well.

It’s interesting how the free market allows everything to flow like a bicycle race where no single team leads for very long before a new team vigorously pushes forward a different leader. But quietly I wonder how many of us will be swapping-out the family auto and riding one of those bikes before it’s over? Which could be a good thing when you look at the average size of Americans drivers today.


Gene Haynes