ECONOMICS

MONOPLOLY AND ANTI-MONOPOLY

People around the world, and Americans in particular, have enjoyed playing the board game called Monopoly for almost a century. Maps and money were even smuggled to American POWs in Germany during World War Two inside Monopoly boards to help them escape. The game is based on cutthroat competition. Players can buy the unpurchased properties on which they land and charge others rent when they land on the same spot later. By making improvements to the spots (buying hotels, etc.), owners can charge higher rent. Over time, some get the choicest properties and can charge outlandish rents. Others fall behind and begin to run out of cash. The goal of the game is to drive all the other players bankrupt. It sounds cruel, but it’s only a game, right? Of course most people think of it that way, but the fact that business owners over the years have used this game to teach others how capitalism works shows that it is much more than that.

The history of the game is complicated. It actually begins with anti-Monopoly. Henry George was a political economist in the late 1800s who believed that land should be owned in common by all. A follower of George’s named Elizabeth Magie created The Landlord’s Game in 1902 to show how systems of land ownership enrich landlords and impoverish tenants. The game had two sets of rules: one for monopolists and one for anti-monopolists. The anti-monopolist version of the rules was called “Prosperity.” Players paid their rents in the form of a single tax into the public treasury, which was used to make university education free to everyone and raise wages across the board. When a building is constructed, it benefitted everyone, since the land was owned in common. All players won the game when the person with the least assets doubled their wealth. The idea was that by rejecting individual ownership of land, all the players of the game would win together. The game taught people to share selflessly, collaborate, and think about the greater good. The game circulated on the East Coast, especially in colleges, and especially among economics students. Different versions of the game appeared under various titles.

During the Great Depression, Charles Darrow took the game that others invented and called it Monopoly. He falsely claimed it was his own invention and sold it to Parker Brothers. They only produced the monopolist version, not the anti-monopolist version. The main effect of this purchase was the popularization of this one version. People liked this version of the game because it was more exciting than the anti-monopoly version. There is a thrill involved in the ups and downs of the game because, like musical chairs, there can only be one winner in the end. How much adrenaline is generated when you know everyone will be a winner in the end, and the only question is how many rounds it will take? Monopoly teaches people to be ruthless landlords who have no pity for their tenants. This may make for a more lively game night, but what about the lessons from the game that people have been internalizing all these years? Out of interest for a more exciting game, are we normalizing greed and bloodthirstiness? Perhaps we need to redesign our games so that they reflect desirable values and have only one brass ring at the end, so people can experience suspense and excitement as they compete to be the most cooperative and helpful.

Real life is not a board game. The same qualities that make a game or an action movie enjoyable do not make real life enjoyable. No one wants to be overcharged for rent, impoverished, and forced into bankruptcy. We want our real lives to be stable, secure, and low-stress. It would be nice if we could all be winners, and a rising tide really did raise all boats, as Henry George intended. These would make people’s lives better if implemented, but they don’t instantly translate into the most addictive board game of all time. Americans have long been good at missing the point: letting important, life-altering messages sail right past them and seizing instead on trivialities that can be turned into comic strips, jokes, fads, or other mainstays of superficial popular culture – anything to kill time or make a buck. Monopoly achieves both these goals. Instead of accepting a revolutionary idea and making the appropriate reforms, we wound up with a way to kill time that ironically focused our minds in the opposite direction. The progressive reforms of the early 1900s were partially inspired by George. It’s a shame that we never embraced his profound ideas the way we embraced the banal game that was spun-off from them. Although we’ve lost a century, it is still not too late to change. If we play our cards right, prosperity for all can be a reality. It's your move.

hands of different colors touching in the center

A WORLD BASED ON COMPETITION OR COOPERATION?

We live in a modern world where competition is cutthroat, and the losers in the game wind up in poverty or homelessness. Travel to any American city today and you will see homeless encampments to rival those of the Great Depression. Why is it that in the richest, most powerful country on earth, there is such an abundance of poverty and so many people living in tents? All corporations are interested in cutting costs to maximize profits, so they have engaged in a race to the bottom for decades, sending manufacturing jobs wherever the pay is lowest. The jobs we have left are not always enough to go around, and with skyrocketing rents and interest rates, unaffordable housing is the main reason for homelessness.

In the world of today, each person or household is an island unto themselves. If you meet with misfortune, your income or savings could disappear overnight. Your neighbors may feel sad when you have to move out, but there is little they can do to help. This creates a world of stress and worry, with no safety net and little sense of community. It creates a world where the children of those who somehow lost out in the economic competition have to go through life handicapped with fewer resources and opportunities. This creates a self-perpetuating class system where some are born with silver spoons in their mouths and others are born with no roof over their heads. From the perspective of those on top of the economic heap, the system works just fine, but the truth is that the costs are unbelievably high.

While some competition is healthy and necessary for any economy, more cooperation is what we need to improve our lives and our neighborhoods. In a cooperative economic system, as described in Utopia Found, co-op communities would be owned by the people who lived in the community themselves. They would also be full or part owners of the businesses that employed them. People would not lose their jobs over light and transient reasons, and if one particular job or project didn’t work out, they could find another one and still remain fully involved and productive. Even in case of a disaster like COVID, if businesses did have to shut down for a period, it would not lead to people being evicted from their homes. The members of each community, as joint owners of the entire neighborhood, would continue living in their houses with full peace of mind. As members of one big co-op team, they would be like a big family, working together and sharing to provide for the needs of all members.

This sort of cooperative economic milieu would have countless obvious benefits on both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels. Modern communities aren’t really communities at all; they are just collections of people who happen to live near one another but have nothing in common. Communities would be strengthened (created, actually) and made into safe, encouraging places where everyone was given support and an opportunity to contribute to the best of their abilities. Among other things, this would give everyone peace of mind, which would mean less stress, which would translate into better health. On the larger, societal scale, the cooperative economic system means equitable teamwork. It means a world with zero unemployment, zero poverty, zero homelessness, and zero people without access to health care. Health and prosperity like this will translate into education levels rising dramatically, which will lead to a commensurate rise in knowledge, skills, productivity, and new inventions. The economy of the entire world would become more high-tech, more efficient, more equitable, and more focused in positive directions (less drinking, smoking, and gambling; more reading, learning, and creativity). All in all, an economy focused more on cooperation and less on competition would be better for everyone.

A WORLD WITHOUT DEBT, INTEREST RATES, OR INFLATION

If we considered ownership of land to be a human right held in common by all members of a community, everyone would automatically have a place to live. With a more or less guaranteed shelter as part of your position in a cooperative community, you would no longer have to worry about unaffordable rent, buying a home, or getting a mortgage to be paid back with interest over decades. Of course, this is not a promise that you could sit back and enjoy life without work or worry – we will always have jobs to do and responsibilities to take care of – but overall, the stress level would be brought down by more than 50% if we were all part owners of our neighborhood community, and every member considered every other member as part of the same team. Not only would you no longer have to worry about becoming homeless, but you would also be covered by the community, Amish-style, in the area of repair and reconstruction. You would not need individual homeowner’s insurance, and you would not have to constantly worry about rising costs or the fine print of what disasters were and weren’t covered under your policy.

After a home, the second biggest purchase we make is usually for an automobile (or two, or three). This procurement for a conveyance of the future can also best be handled as part of an economic package made by the community, relieving individuals from the headache of having to get a loan to buy a car, buy insurance, pay for fuel, and maintain the car on their own. Imagine having the heavy lifting in all these areas done for you, including on-site mechanics and experts to help at no extra cost (but just as part of their job).

The next major reason people borrow large amounts of money is to get a college education. Once again, in a cooperative economic program, this would be included as part of the entire system, and there would be no extra fee for the students. We get too hung up on the word “free,” and when told something is free, we feel there must be a trick involved. Actually, there is no such thing as free in economics. The support for a service, product, or institution must always come from somewhere. It does not have to be a fee-based system, however. The community, the network of other similar communities, and society in general should recognize the importance of education above all, and everyone should pitch in to create universities and colleges that are as inclusive as possible. Without tuition, students would no longer need to borrow money and pay it back later with interest. Everyone would benefit directly from having access to a complimentary education in their youth (full opportunities without cost or limit), and then they would spend their careers paying it forward to the next generation, by supporting the systems that would keep those universities operating. Everyone would gain an advantage under such a plan because the entire citizenry would be better educated, more productive, more creative, and have their standard of living improved in countless ways.

Another type of loan we currently deal with is a business loan. Today you need to convince a bank that you are worth the risk of a loan in order to start a business, improve a business, or just keep a business afloat. In a cooperative economic system, these loans also would become passé. Instead of persuading a lending institution to trust you, you would need to convince other people or groups to work with you. The good part about this is that you would all be in it together, and if the project or business did not go as planned, you would not be trapped by crushing debt, and perhaps go bankrupt.

We are talking about a whole new economic regime: a complete end to home loans, car loans, school loans, and business loans. If there is no further need for loans, we would basically be free from the tyranny of interest rates. There would be no further need to pay interest for 30 or 40 years (or more) and no way the growth of an economy could be hijacked by rising interest rates. When an economy is doing well and people have near full employment, like in 2022-2023, people are able to afford more, and prices go up. This inflation means purchasing power per dollar is diluted, and people panic. The primary way to curb inflation has typically been to raise interest rates, which the Fed has been doing in spades. This makes it harder for people to borrow money for homes, cars, businesses, or college and generally slows down the economy. It is a bit like chemotherapy. It causes suffering, yes, but it is deemed worth it because it also kills inflation. It is an almost medieval notion, like bleeding a sick person to make them get well. If we lived in a cooperative economic system, where workers owned their own homes and their own businesses, and trades were mostly done not in terms of units of credit, but as goods and services provided in systems of complex circular exchange, tracked and regulated by computer, there would be an end to debt, an end to loans, and an end to interest rates and all the trouble they cause. Inflation would also be at an end, since trading would mostly be a matter of reciprocal expectations, not money changing hands. The unit of trade would be the goods and services themselves, whose value would fluctuate according to relative supply and demand, but not in relation to an all-encompassing currency, whose abstract value can crash at any time with catastrophic consequences for all involved. We would no longer be burdened by rent, debt, interest rates, or inflation. The economy would be allowed to grow without these built-in limitations, and people would be able to live their lives with much greater peace of mind.

THE ROSETO EFFECT

In the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, researchers in the mid-1900s discovered a surprising lack of heart disease in the town. They looked for an explanation in the town’s unique diet, exercise habits, or heredity, but they could find no evidence to support any of these things. Finally, researchers did find some unusual characteristics of the community that appeared to lower stress for the residents. The factors that appeared to be contributing to their good health were all scientific intangibles: many families with multiple generations living together under the same roof, shared culture, lack of crime, and strong community involvement by citizens. This apparently led to an overall sense of well-being. This combination of factors lowering the risk of heart disease became known as the “Roseto effect.”

People living in the type of cooperative community environment I describe will benefit tremendously from the so-called “Roseto effect.” Imagine how nice it would be to own the land on which you live and not need to pay mortgage, rent, or even taxes for the right to remain there. Imagine how secure you would feel if you were a part owner of the place where you worked, and could not be let go for light and transient reasons. Instead of having bosses who thought about firing people for every small error, imagine working as part of a team of equals who had each other’s backs. Just think of what it would be like if all your neighbors were also friends with whom you had a lot in common. Consider how different your life would be if there were no more worry about crime, the ability to leave your doors unlocked at night, no possibility of being fired, no concern about loss of income, no concern over a loss of medical insurance, and no serious conflict with the people living around you. What would that sort of peace of mind mean to you over the long term?

Stress is a killer. Stress hormones cause high blood pressure, inflammation, lack of sleep, indigestion, depression, lowered immune response, psychological problems, and of course, heart disease. A study published in the Dec. 15, 2021 issue of JAMA included over 118,000 people and concluded that increased stress significantly added to the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. Other key indicators that increase the risk of heart disease are loneliness and depression, which are often connected. Johann Hari’s recent groundbreaking book, Lost Connections, examines the depression epidemic, and six of the nine causes of depression the author lists would all be alleviated by the sort of spiritual cooperative lifestyle I advocate. The factors are disconnection from: (1) meaningful work, (2) other people, (3) meaningful values, (4) respect, in terms of the systemic, daily disrespect we face living as commoners in a world run by billionaires, (5) the natural world, and (6) a hopeful or secure future. The book concludes that the problem of depression is largely a matter of how decisions are made at a person’s place of work. He cites a 2011-2012 Gallup Poll’s findings that only 13% of people enjoy their work most of the time, 63% feel neutral about it, and 24% hate their jobs. He notes that when people feel little or no control at work, they have a greater chance of depression and heart attack. The book brings to light the interesting example of Meredith Mitchell and her husband Josh, who worked as employees in a bicycle store for years and hated it. Then they formed a democratic co-op bike store where all work, decisions, and profits were shared equally. Although they still worked in a bicycle shop doing the same sort of labor as before, their depression disappeared. They had a newfound sense of empowerment, equality, and teamwork. Everyone at the Baltimore Bicycle Works reported that they were dramatically happier than they had been as employees in regular bicycle shops. To work in a place where you have no part in the decision-making process is a soul-killing experience, where you die a little every day instead of feeling more confident and respected. The disempowerment felt by the ordinary peon in the average workplace hierarchy leads to poor mental, physical, and emotional health.

Some people are probably reading this and thinking this all sounds very nice, but it isn’t economically practical to run all businesses as co-ops just to make people feel better. These companies would get crushed by the regular business model, right? Wrong. Hari cites a study by Cornell University that examined 320 small businesses, half of which had ordinary top-down command structures, and half of which had worker autonomy. The study revealed that businesses with worker autonomy grew four times faster than the ordinary type and had only one-third the turnover rate. Not only is cooperative economics and intentional co-op community life better for your health in every way, it is also the best way to grow an economy.

THE PEACE DIVIDEND

Think about all the investment we make each year in defense spending. U.S. military spending officially accounts for over a third of all such spending on earth. Although few countries invest in defense to the extent we do, almost every country invests their children's future in a somewhat similar manner, no matter how poor. Developing countries like Pakistan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia have spent more on military upgrades than it would have taken to fix major problems in their country. In the U.S., bridges collapse, infrastructure is crumbling, the electrical grid is nearing its limit, we don't have a single high-speed train, many rural areas are still without internet service, and in many places, public transportations systems are worse than they were in the 1930s. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Hunger and homelessness in the U.S. are major problems. Both the infant mortality rate and the mortality rate for pregnant women are shockingly high. Many parts of the U.S. resemble the Third World. Roads are falling apart. Schools are underfunded. People live in economically-depressed "food deserts." Meanwhile, the lion's share of the federal budget each year goes to the Pentagon. This disparity isn't new. President Eisenhower complained about this in his famous "Cross of Iron" speech way back in 1953, saying:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Now we are in the 2020s, and not much has changed besides the increased cost of the military hardware relative to other, more beneficial items we could have produced. In 2023, defense spending is estimated to make up 37% of the federal budget, but the true amount could be greater depending on how it is calculated. Defense spending always takes precedence over all else because, the logic goes, if we can't defend ourselves from our enemies, we won't even have a country anymore. If we remember Eisenhower's final speech about the influence of the military-industrial complex, it leads us to seriously question the standard narrative. If we believe that all the bad guys are coming to get us, this guarantees endless funding for the military contractors' Doomsday projects. This may make the CEOs and engineers of some companies very wealthy, but what good does it do for the rest of us, or for the economy as a whole? It has been accurately said that war is a zero-sum game, but the same is true for a war-based economy, even if none of the weapons are used. As one acute observer once stated while watching an impressive military parade in China: "So what? All those weapons don't do anybody any good!" What if there were a way to stop this unending walk off the plank we all feel compelled to perform? What if we could demilitarize the entire world and integrate so that there were no more hostile nations facing other hostile nations across rows of missiles? There is a way to do this, as I describe in in my book. Let's imagine what the net improvement would be to the economy if there were no further need for military spending.

When war becomes an impossibility, the economy will tremendously increase its productive output. When everyone in the economy is focused on peacetime production, everything we collectively do or make will do someone some good. We can finally cease the craziness of pouring 30-50% of our resources into the military, and instead make needed improvements that will themselves lead to more improvements. We would be able to build more homes, infrastructure, schools, and universities. The homeless could be sheltered and the jobless given training and employment. We could take what is known about safe and non-toxic home construction and make structures that could withstand fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes. We could take what is known about health and nutrition and apply it without regard for profit in order to make the next generation healthier than any in history. We could build new systems of mass transportation that employed the safest, cleanest technologies available. We could finally focus 100% of our energies on research and development to benefit people, not kill people. Technologies that have barely progressed in decades will get a turbo-boost. We could achieve a carbon-neutral world in short order and rapidly sequester the excess carbon in the air to get back to the safe 350 ppm level the planet has experienced for the past few thousand years. We would be able to make clean energy solutions that provided everyone with cheap electricity and drinkable water. We would be able to develop technologies to begin cleaning up our pollution-saturated environment to rid it of plastics, heavy metals, and forever chemicals that threaten all life on earth.

When people live in integrated co-op communities, work as teams, and share new inventions with open-source networking, it will not only be a matter of getting back the 30-50% of the economic pie we lose to non-useful military spending; it will be a whole new ball game, with increased productivity, more generosity and mutual assistance, increased cross-pollination of ideas, and more innovations of a strictly beneficial nature that led to more innovation. When we shift to a peaceful, mixed, equitable, and, fully-participatory socio-economic format, the paradigm of our economy will be 100% creative, not 50% destructive, as it is now. People will have a better education and upbringing, and will have more positive interests and abilities as a result. Things like books, tutors, teachers, professors, and classes of all kinds will be in greater demand. People will spend more time meditating and less time binge-buying things they don't really need on the internet. This will lead to a shift from people trying to make a buck doing something that harms the planet (and may harm our spirits as well) to people studying and teaching some form of Yoga. The economy will not only be more productive; it will be more efficient, more benign, and, reflecting the coming cosmic shift in human consciousness, more conducive to human wisdom across the board.

Of course, there are those today who see any future decrease in military spending as a detriment to the economy, as if things can and must continue on in the same war-footing paradigm as we have known for centuries. This is as backward a way of thinking as decrying the invention of electricity because it meant fewer jobs for lighters of oil-lamps and reduced the demand for whale-oil, forcing whalers to look for new work. Don't worry: if whalers could learn new tricks over 100 years ago, bomb-makers can also be re-trained to find new jobs in a peace-based economy. For those who think world peace is impossible, just consider the alternative. As technology develops, doesn't it become less and less likely that humanity will survive future wars? We are no longer talking about fighting with muskets and cannons. Today any country with a few laboratories and factories can manufacture nuclear weapons if they really want to. Imagine what the world would be like in another 50 years if each country that could make nuclear weapons did so full steam ahead (the way North Korea is doing today) and created as many delivery systems as possible? The odds against human survival would be slim to none. Those who think we can freeze time in what they consider the "good old days" of postwar American dominance are about as realistic as the Native Americans in the 1880s who thought the Ghost Dance would magically make all white people disappear back where they came from. The challenges we face are about to make our earth unlivable unless we drop our nostalgic fantasies and awaken to the fact that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Our house is all of humanity, not just our birth nation. We have to make peace with our neighbors. We have to make our distant neighbors our next-door neighbors. We have to work together to save the planet. We have to stop making weapons of war. When we do this, not only will the destruction of war be ended, but the combined innovative genius of humanity will be able to focus exclusively on peaceful, productive enterprises, and thereby economically outperform anything ever seen before on this planet.

THE PANAMA PAPERS

The Panama Papers were the biggest leak to date of secret files regarding how the rich and powerful hide their wealth in offshore accounts. What do these files say about our economy and the people who run it?

Mossack Fonseca is a large offshore law firm that assists wealthy people from all around the world to launder and hide their money so that it is untraceable and untaxable. In 2015, over 11 million documents from this firm were leaked to a German newspaper, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which proceeded to check the veracity of all the documents. The documents all appeared to be authentic. They described the secret offshore bank accounts of 143 politicians from around the world (and their family members), including 12 leaders. The individuals implicated in this leak came from all over the world: Ukraine, Russia, Pakistan, Iraq, France, the UK, Iceland, China, and Egypt.

How does it work? Certain small countries are technically sovereign states according to international law, but are obviously controlled by big money from larger countries. These puppet countries are independent according to the UN and can pass any law they want. These rinky-dink nations pass strict secrecy laws about banking and finance that make it impossible to force disclosure as to who owns what despite possible connections with organized crime, government corruption, insider trading, theft from the people, etc. This includes little places like Cyprus, the Bahamas, Panama, Belize, the Cayman Islands, the Seychelles, and Mauritius. Other countries that are not literally “offshore” also offer competitive advantages in terms of secrecy laws and other perks, including Hong Kong, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and Singapore. The trick then is to find someone with whom you can enter into an extralegal relationship (someone you can trust or over whom you have power) to create a shell company to hide your money. This is a company that exists on paper only, has no physical location or employees, but has a secret bank account attached to it. To legally create such a company (and breathe legal “personhood” into a fictitious entity), the services of a law firm like Mossack Fonseca are employed. Through the magic sleight of hand of offshore investments, you now have millions or billions of dollars in a piggy bank that is invisible to the public and to governments. You do not have to pay any taxes on it. No one can ever prove where it came from or who it really belongs to. To an outside observer, your hidden money might as well be in another dimension. Putin, for example, is suspected to have as much as 200 billion dollars hidden away in such offshore accounts. No one knows the amount of money in the bogus entity except you (via your agent). These bogus shell companies can then “loan” money to any entity on the planet (person or corporation) according to the wishes of the board of directors (your friend). The make-believe (but legally existent) corporation where your money lives may wish to open a ski resort, buy a megayacht, build a nice chateau, or invest in amazing properties in upscale areas all around the world. By amazing coincidence, you (technically the rich and powerful friend of the person who supposedly invested the money – with no questions asked) winds up the sole beneficiary of all these “investments.”

The rich and their financial advisors would no doubt laugh at my simplistic narrative, as the true complexity of their shell game and convoluted legal and financial maneuverings must be far more involved than this, but you get the idea. While the average joe is nickel and dimed for every possible tax from cradle to grave to keep the government coffers full, the people most able to pay – the people who should be in the highest tax bracket – pay little or nothing in taxes. The same is true of the companies they own. They pass costs on to us in the form of higher prices, just as they pass on the harm they do to the environment. The elite, meanwhile, make the planet their personal playground, as in the last scene of Trading Places. To them, the world is their oyster, and they live inside the pearl. The rest of us (the 99.99% who are not in the elite class) are seen by them as inferior beings: annoying but still necessary servants and custodians.

The Panama Papers are the largest single release of private data about the semi-legal and highly objectionable practice of stashing wealth in such a way that it cannot be taxed or traced by governments, including representative governments that are supposed to hold their citizens accountable and tax their wealth fairly. Mossack Fonseca is the agent for over 200,000 corporations. Fonseca is just one company among many in one country among many that engages in this practice. For a slight fee, the rich and powerful avoid scrutiny and taxation. These places benefit from the fees generated, and from just having the rich and powerful coming and going: spending money in the local economy, buying real estate, setting up businesses to cater to other wealthy people, etc. As a remora gets the dregs the shark misses, these scavenger economies feed on the crumbs dropped by the rich and powerful. The ever-present rationale for allowing these distasteful banking practices to continue is: “If we don’t do it, someone else will.”

Isn’t it funny how the mainstream media barely covered the Panama Papers? Maybe that’s because a lot of their corporate board members have large offshore bank accounts that they prefer to keep out of the public eye. Don’t you just love the way our free press watches out for the little guy? The tax haven system is not a secret to governments around the world nor the elites who pull the strings to run them. Governments could put a stop to it with ease if they wanted, but why would they want to? Governments are not monolithic entities whose only intent is to serve the people; they are conglomerates, operated by ambitious elites intent on serving themselves at the expense of the public. The countless billions they want to hide come from tax evasion, insider trading, embezzlement, or links to organized crime. In one way or another it is either stolen money or blood money. It is the wealth of all the people, reapportioned and concentrated into the hands of a few by a crooked system.

The revelations of the Panama Papers are no doubt only the tip of the iceberg. These leaked documents are not just saying that the rich hide their money and do not pay their taxes. They prove that our leaders are corrupt, the governments they run are corrupt, and the taxes that all law-abiding citizens pay are being sucked away into illegal tax havens of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite. In fact, the whole world seems to be run for the benefit of the wealthiest but maintained by the toil of the non-elite, with hidden financial mechanisms to make our public money disappear as if by magic and reappear in the secret stashes of insiders in little-known banks that are legally incorporated in out-of-the-way locales. The upper class have special accountants with magic wands who know how to navigate this landscape, but for the rest of us muggles, it remains an invisible realm. The Panama Papers suggest that anything is for sale and that most of those “leaders” claiming to represent the ordinary people are already bought and paid for. Is this the kind of world you want your kids to live in? If so, then by all means let’s keep our political and financial systems just the way they are at present and not change a thing.

RED HERRING

Karl Marx developed the theory of communist economics in the mid-1800s. It is debatable exactly what was in his mind, how seriously he took his own stated philosophy, and what he actually believed the final result would be. What is clear is the horrific way his economic ideas played out on the world stage. The suffering that Marxism brought to people all around the world was on such an immense scale that it can hardly be conceived. The pain is still being felt, to differing degrees, in places like China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos. The repercussions of the Cold War and communism are still affecting billions. One unfortunate lingering effect of communism has been to make people see the world in black and white terms so that any criticism of the status quo makes people compare any alternative economic ideas with communism.

The wisdom-based cooperative economic system I propose might similarly be criticized by proponents of laissez faire capitalism, who think that any limits to personal wealth or attempts to share anything are evidence of full-blown Marxism. This would be as silly as calling the Danish people Nazis simply because today’s democratic socialist state of Denmark has some things in common with Hitler’s National Socialist Party (the Nazis). People who suggest that we can change our system so that there is a more even distribution of wealth are usually called communists by the defenders of gross inequality. People who suggest that we assist the poor and homeless are called communists. People who argue that we should tax the wealthy much more are accused of being communists. Actually, the only people who can be legitimately called communists are those who agree with the teachings of Marxism. Unfortunately, to our irresponsible media and generally uneducated public, this unfair moniker often sticks. The specter of communism forces people into thinking there is a choice between only two options, one of which is obviously inferior. In truth, we have an infinite number of options in redesigning our social, economic, and political systems to give our descendants the future they deserve. Let’s analyze the errors of communism and the stark differences between it and the system I propose.

First, communism is anti-democratic. The system only took over in Russia because of the willingness of a small minority to use any ruthless means to terrorize the population. The majority was afraid to get involved, and the government was seized by people who cared nothing for the will of the people. A self-perpetuating party was created that patted itself on the back and believed it could do no wrong. When a one-party dictatorship rules a nation, the end they have in mind always justifies the means (so far as they are concerned). This inevitably results in a society that is closed, controlled, manipulated, surveilled, and where people are threatened with prison or execution if they so much as suggest a democratic system. Cooperative economics is the opposite. In order for cooperative economics to work, direct democracies must be established in all communities. This requires freedom of speech, travel, communication, and education.

Second, communism is atheistic and opposed to all forms of religion. In Russia, churches were destroyed and the church outlawed for a long time, until Stalin felt he needed their support in World War Two. In China and Tibet, thousands of monks were taken out and shot. In the Cultural Revolution, most of the temples were razed. I believe our best hopes for world peace lie in a system of intentional multifaith and multiracial communities wherein the core principles and practices of the major religions are recognized and encouraged. This means that spiritual improvement must be recognized as the main goal of life, and that people should follow in the footsteps of the sages to develop wisdom. This would lead to the serious cultivation of inner virtues like compassion, patience, calm, generosity, empathy, and stability. These qualities come from meditation and introspection, not ranting and raving about the supposed correctness of theories written on paper.

Third, communism creates highly-centralized governments. This partly stems from the fact that it is dictatorial and non-democratic, but even in a system that claims to be democratic, when decisions are made by a political elite, located in a central capital, and controlling an overly-strong federal government, it creates a hierarchical system where the people with power become a class apart, removed from the real world. The leaders come to think they know what is best for others but do not fully understand what the full impact of their decisions will be. In order for direct democracy to work, power must be decentralized as much as reasonably possible. At the same time, checks and balances must be created to prevent fragmentation, ensure that conflicts are peacefully resolved, and ensure that the larger system can function in an efficient manner.

Fourth, communism is, from its very inception, a philosophy that plans to overthrow the governments of the world by violent revolution. Revolutions can in some cases be justified (as with the American Revolution). Communism, however, did not consider the need for revolution against the world’s governments on a case by case basis; it demanded that all governments be overthrown. In the eyes of communists, the end of world revolution always justified the means, no matter how horrific. Cooperative economics, on the other hand, believes that peaceful compromise is always possible and that violence is never a good way to settle disputes. This does not mean that we should be pacifists to the degree that we allow those who are willing to use violence to lord it over us. It means that with the right education and the right system of checks and balances, we can create a culture of peace where violence is unnecessary and war is a thing of the past. While it is true that some things are worth fighting for, if we follow the principles of cooperative socio-economic organization, we should all agree that no disagreements are worth fighting over.

Fifth, communism believes in a command economy. Cooperative economics is a kind of free enterprise, only with communities making decisions instead of relegating this power to billionaires as we see in the capitalist model. Cooperative economics creates a bottom-up, democratized economic system where choices can be made with the greater good in mind. Reality checks could be done in real time and adjustments could be made with alacrity. Each co-op, co-op network, and region can make decisions that will provide for their present and future well-being of all their members.

Sixth, communism does not work according to economic forces of supply and demand. In the Soviet Union, factory output was only tangentially related to what people wanted. Department store employees had little interest in serving customers. Cooperative economics puts decision-making in the hands of small groups of worker/owners, so it is in their personal interest to pay close attention to changing needs of clients, trends among competitors, and so on. This element of self-interest is similar to that of a for-profit corporation, but decisions made by co-op members will not be as heartless as those made by today's CEOs, who are becoming more and more like John Carlyle from the movie Elysium. The members of a co-op will live next to (and work in) the fields and factories of the enterprise, so there will be a strong incentive not to implement policies that damage the environment or threaten worker safety.

Seventh, communism makes science the new religion, and views the mechanist theory as sacrosanct. The mechanist theory claims that all things have a complete physical or chemical explanation. This implies an independent existence and essentially repudiates the discoveries of quantum mechanics. It makes the existence of a spirit impossible and therefore views spiritual practices as nonsensical. If science is deified, humans become the servants of science. In the cooperative economic view I propose, science is a tool that serves humanity. It can be used for good, but only if we ourselves develop the wisdom to use it properly. The mechanist theory is a necessary assumption for scientific models, but reality is more properly understood as a consciousness-based field created by the minds of all sentient beings, in accordance with the results of scientific experiments.

The communist world had an interesting effect on the West. The corporate elite benefitted from the strength of the communist world because it led to the growth of the military-industrial complex, and the subsequent flow of public funds into corporate hands. Simply put: communism was good for business. Ironically, this meant the wealthy power-brokers of Europe and the U.S. had a vested interest in seeing the communist boogeyman succeed up to a point. Communism was bad for unions because as long as the Marxist threat seemed real, a large segment of the population saw union members as pinkos or traitors for going on strike, or even for having a union. This also gave the rich elite an incentive to root for communist expansion as a means to keep anti-union sentiment strong. Among intellectuals, communism was seen as a tantalizing alternative to the world of robber-barons and the abuses of mega-corporations. This flirtation with communism by people like Oppenheimer backfired. It fanned the flames of the Red Scare and exacerbated the black and white narrative that anyone not 100% thrilled with all aspects of the “The American Way” had to be a commie infiltrator. This “love it or leave it” mentality leads us into a false menu of only two choices: communism or plutocracy. Recognizing that the quaint Victorian house you have inherited is dilapidated and antiquated means we can refurbish and repair it; making valid and constructive criticisms of the status quo does not automatically mean a person is in favor of going back to living in caves. We can call a person a “cavist” every time they suggest a structural change to the crumbling architecture in which we live, but the term would have no real meaning unless the person in question actually advocated a return to an underground existence. We need to step out of this archaic, knee-jerk way of thinking and reimagine the entire question of what an economy should look like, free from assumptions, insinuations, or propaganda.

The belief that communism could ever solve human problems was insane. I tend to doubt that Marx himself even believed the words he wrote. It is a comic book joke that does not take into account human nature, economic realities, or spiritual wisdom. Unfortunately, it convinced generations of Western intellectuals that it would be the salvation of all. For example, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) was a lifelong socialist who believed in the coming revolution. He said that the solution was for the people to ultimately think of themselves as indistinguishable from the state. His thinking mirrors that of Marx, who suggested that after the people’s revolution, the workers would own the means of production, a worker’s paradise would follow, and that this would culminate in the withering away of the state. None of this happened. The workers were dominated from above by distant party leaders and forced to toil in slave-labor conditions. The common people, far from having a utopia, were barred from forming their own unions, since the “union” of the U.S.S.R. claimed a monopoly in this department. Far from withering away, the state became a monstrous totalitarian dictatorship that eviscerated all human rights. Orwell’s idea that the people would become the state shows that he failed to learn the lesson of the Russian Revolution: that the leaders of a centralized revolution would be the absolute bosses, not the people. The people would not become the state, nor would they have anything to do with the running of the country, nor would they feel anything but alienation from their own country and its distant leaders. Those who disagreed with their rulers were either killed or sent to the gulags.

The only way to make people feel that they themselves are the government is to put everything into a human scale. We have to create direct democracy in every small community, within autonomous regions, and within larger areas the size of states or nations. When every cooperative community is like a union unto itself and all communities have a good-neighbor policy toward one another, then and only then can we reach the sensible outcome, as stated by Marx, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” This isn’t communism or capitalism; it’s just common sense sharing and caring. The way to accomplish this rosy picture definitely isn’t Marxism. Our current version of corporate capitalism isn’t fully reaching this goal either, as a visit to an average downtown area demonstrates. The scores of homeless encampments, the drug addicts, and department stores under siege by looters show that we have plenty of work to do. There are other options besides (A) just continuing to let the super-rich make all the rules and scoop all the chips off the board to fill their own pockets or (B) becoming like North Korea. Cooperative economics based on intentional communities is the only way to solve our problems. Cooperative economics is the opposite of communism in all important ways: it is reality-based, democratic, decentralized, spiritual in orientation, and peaceful in its aims and methods. It guarantees basic human freedoms – including freedom of education, which we are sorely lacking – and provides a means for people to provide human rights to all members of their communities because it prevents them from being compartmentalized from one another, as has been the case in every other form of political and economic system so far.

THE ECONOMIC REALITIES OF SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT

Since Earth Day began in 1970, we have been increasingly aware that our modern way of life is not sustainable. Anyone who looks at the world objectively must realize that pollution, climate change, and the loss of habitats are such serious problems that they threaten to virtually end human civilization as we know it. The unanswered question is: what can we do about it? I assert that all the solutions put forth thus far are partial solutions at best, because all of them miss the real point. If we are to become serious about saving the planet (and ourselves with it), we must fundamentally alter ourselves, our societies, and our cultures in ways far more profound than we have yet dared to imagine.

What am I talking about? To begin to understand, we must engage in a thought experiment. Imagine you are a completely open-minded traveler venturing across time and space. Imagine that you pay a visit to the Victorian mansion of a wealthy British industrialist in the year 1923. As intelligent and logical as the man might be, his view would be warped by the following rock-solid convictions: (1) the British Empire was a good thing that would last forever, (2) the British monarchy was a good thing that would last forever, (3) the British class system was a good thing that would last forever, and (4) the laws of supply and demand required that rich industrialists and poor laborers continue to interact in exactly the same way forever, in order to maintain profit and national prosperity. If you pointed out the suffering of the poor workers who labored in his factories, this would have angered him. He would have asked if you were a communist and argued that if the workers were given more wages, the company would no longer be profitable, which would lead to the collapse of the entire capitalist system. To point out the fact that fossil fuel use was on track to cause global warming would have made him confused and dismissive. The threat of global warming, despite being a scientific certainty, was too far off on the horizon for anyone to take such claims seriously.

Continuing this experiment, imagine that you are traveling forward in time to the present, where you interview a contemporary Western citizen and see if they are any more reasonable than the man from the 1920s. The person from the 2020s would disagree with the 1920s-era industrialist on most issues, and when it came to the question of global warming, they would be fully informed and concerned about the problem. The strange part of the conversation would come when you asked them what they were doing to stop the triple-whammy existential threats of climate change, chemical pollution, and loss of habitat. They would meekly describe how they try to recycle most of their bottles and cans, turn off lights when they leave a room, or bring reusable bags to the market. If you asked them about what they were doing about the increasing use of fossil fuels worldwide, they would blink and ask pathetically what they could do about it. If you asked them about their part in the larger socio-economic system that perpetuates this environmental devastation, they would be puzzled. Just as the 1920s industrialist had his rock-solid convictions about the way things were meant to be (which seem silly to most of us now), so the man of the 2020s has rock-solid, unquestioned assumptions. He imagines that government-taxed, individual ownership of plots of land is the only way to interact with the earth, that each family must make deals to trade time for money, and that as a consumer, we can only spend that money for items like cars, food, and airplane tickets. It only seems right that things should be this way, as this is the only way they have ever been. Private corporations with the same rights as people can then expand without limit in order to provide these consumers with the things they want and need. These companies may make pollution, yes, but that was part of the price of keeping the economy going. It seems only natural that the consumers live in families that are disconnected from the community around them, and make economic decisions in an individual, self-serving way. The man from the 2020s wonders what more can possibly be done. He knows he and others could get together and vote to pressure government officials to regulate corporations more closely, but he knows also that the corporations would fight back with vast sums of money to influence public opinion and pay off politicians. The modern man becomes depressed because he understands the grave nature of the threat in an abstract way, yet he can find no concrete means of grappling with the problem. Finally, he becomes distracted with an app on his phone and wanders off, having forgotten all about the strange traveler from across time and space.

There was one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, (“The Neutral Zone,” season one, episode 26) where some Americans were revived after having been cryogenically frozen for almost 400 years. One of them was a wealthy investor. He was anxious to find out how his investment portfolio was doing, and he asked the captain what kind of salary he made. The captain had to explain to the man that the economics of the 24th century are different, but no further explanation was given. This is only science fiction, but it brings up a good question: what will the economic system of the future look like? If we know that our current socio-economic systems are completely failing to create environmental sustainability (and are essentially making sustainability impossible), then what will we do over the next few years to correct the problem before it is too late? Hundreds of years from now, a whole new reality will have emerged. Assuming we save ourselves and create something sustainable, what will it look like?

How do we begin to make the right changes? How can we even know what they are? How can we break free from our habitual thinking patterns about interactions with the land, with one another, with systems of production and consumption, and with our governments – and create something brand new that works for everyone and saves the planet? As it is, we are insisting on continuing a way of life that, in many ways, is a nostalgic, illogical continuation of the unsustainable 1920s pattern, even as we hurtle towards environmental collapse on an epic scale. Unlike the people from 100 years ago, we can no longer pretend we do not know this is happening. For those who are not too stubbornly entrenched in maintaining every aspect of their life in the old, unsustainable manner to even consider change, the question remains: what should we do differently? The answer: almost everything. Direct democracy is part of the solution, as is cooperative economics, as is the creation of intentional cooperative communities that share a common purpose and prioritize a small carbon footprint. Investment in new carbon-neutral or carbon-negative technologies is part of the solution (including carbon sequestration), but this must be done on a scale so large it has to be part and parcel of a whole new way of life, at least for the foreseeable future.

All these necessary social and technical shifts can only succeed if we first change our way of thinking. We need to align our mindset (our way of thinking of ourselves, the world around us, and the purpose of life) with the spiritual wisdom of the sages from around the world. We cannot progress as a species if each individual continues to think of themselves before others, to selfishly accumulate property, and to pursue all the comforts that we collectively agree to constitute a “high standard of living.” If we are not serious about saving the environment and ourselves, we are essentially saying we would rather commit suicide than stop prioritizing comfort and convenience above all. If we are serious about giving our grandchildren a world as beautiful as the one our ancestors knew, we must make immediate changes – in ourselves, our daily culture, our communities, our societies, and of course in our economies and governments. The change must be complete and must radiate outwards from our hearts. It cannot come from political leaders or from a few cosmetic alterations in laws, habits, or buying practices. It will not be easy, but it must be done.

SASSY CO-OPS

The SAS corporation of North Carolina is famous for treating its workers well. Most companies tend to treat workers as poorly as possible so they can save more of their profit for the company and its top executives. Every dollar skimped on employee pay can be funneled toward the all important goal of further enriching Musk, Zuckerberg, or whichever egotistical billionaire happens to own the company. SAS looks at things differently, and attempts to make workers so happy that they will stay with the company, devote themselves to its well-being, and refine their expertise. This means the company has a low turnover rate. This translates into an efficient, highly-skilled workforce and little need to interview for replacements. Since there are fewer replacements (an annual 3% turnover rate instead of 20%), less time and money is needed to train new hires. This saves the company a lot of money and guarantees that worker output will be maximized, which in turn maximizes company performance and leads to more profit.

What are the benefits of working for SAS? SAS encourages employees to get their work accomplished in 35 hours per week, not the usual 40-60 that many companies expect. Work hours are flexible. Subsidized child care services are available, as are free medical exams and subsidized medical care. Free restaurants are on site for employees during working hours. A fitness center with a large swimming pool and billiard tables are available for free use. There is a free putting green. Free, on-site car detailing, tire rotation, and oil change services are available. A work/life center helps employees with issues like caring for their parents or finding a good college for their kids. Free massage therapists are on hand and a meditation garden is available for employees to de-stress. A 90% discount is available to employees who want to join a local country club (owned by the owner of SAS). Artists and musicians are on staff to make the working environment as pleasing as possible.

How could a place like SAS be any better? Imagine that the billionaire owner of SAS were to transfer ownership of the company to the employees themselves. Imagine that the company was a worker-owned cooperative, that all decisions were made by these owners in democratic fashion, and that all company earnings were dispersed according to their wishes. Imagine if the company campus also included idyllic, suburban-style housing for the current and retired employees. Now imagine that all businesses everywhere were owned and operated pretty much the same way, according to cooperative principles. Much of what we do at our jobs under such a situation would be the same as what we do now, but – unlike today – we would be full beneficiaries of the fruits of our labor. Also unlike today, we would all have an equal say in how the larger system around us was operated. Now for the most amazing part: if we all decided to change the status quo so our workplaces resembled worker-owned SAS-type co-ops, we could do so in a few short years. If we choose not to act, we have only ourselves to blame for our continued low standard of living.

THE LEGEND OF MONDRAGON

The Basque people of Spain resist easy classification. They are remnants of a surviving culture in the Iberian Peninsula, predating the Aryan invasions that brought the next-oldest group to the region, the Celts. The Basque language is unrelated to any other existing language, and must have formed in prehistoric times. The Basques are clearly survivors. They possess both an amazing tenacity when it comes to maintaining traditions as well as an innovative spirit, as is evidenced from the fact they have somehow managed to keep their identity intact through the Roman era, the Middle Ages, and all the trials of the modern age, including Franco's dictatorship. A legend from medieval times illustrates the unique character of the Basque people. A dragon used to attack the Basque town of Mondragon until the residents made a plan to end the monster’s reign of terror. They negotiated with the beast and promised that if the dragon came only once a year, they would make an annual sacrifice of the most beautiful woman in town. When the dragon returned, it went to eat the woman, only to find that it was a trick: the body was just a wax model. By the time the monster had realized the deception, the ironworkers of the town had rushed forward from their hiding places. Working as a team, they slayed it with their tools. In other parts of Europe, it was St. George who supposedly killed the dragon, but in Mondragon, the townspeople cooperated to solve their problem. The common people didn’t need a hero to save them; they themselves were the heroes.

In 1941, a priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta arrived in Mondragon, in the Basque region of Spain. He saw high unemployment and decided to do something about it by using the Basque culture of cooperation. Using money contributed by the villagers, he opened a polytechnic school in 1943 that later became Mondragon University. In 1956, five of his students formed a cooperative, and it continued to grow from there. Today, Mondragon Corporation is the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world. Mondragon is composed of 95 autonomous co-ops containing over 70,000 worker/owners. Mondragon manufactures industrial machinery and parts for products as diverse as jet aircraft, elevators, ship engines, wind turbines, rockets, bicycles, cars, and coffee makers. Mondragon also operates a co-op retail and grocery chain, a co-op bank, a co-op language school, a co-op university, co-op culinary clubs, a co-op health care system, and a pension system to augment the government's plan. To be a member of the co-op means making a personal investment, but once a person has bought in, they are largely taken care of through the network that they themselves fund and support. The larger community is like a big family of friends, creating a sense of camaraderie and well-being that is hard to replicate with any other economic arrangement.

Decisions in Mondragon are made by a vote among members. This can make governance more complicated than having a single owner or a board of directors, but it gives all worker-owners a sense of empowerment and responsibility. When policies are made, they are made with the insight and foresight of the employees themselves; there is none of the usual tension between the administration and the employees. When errors are made or polices are reversed, there may be plenty of debates and I-told-you-so recriminations as to who voted which way in the past, but there is no longer a hunt for the guilty, a scapegoating of certain employees, and a spate of firings to placate shareholders. All team members sink or swim together.

Jill Bamburg visited Mondragon and reported, "The thing that was so refreshing about Mondragon was its willingness and ability to deal with facts on the ground, to allow practice to modify theory without losing sight of values." She writes: "We heard (and read) many stories of economic crises and how the cooperatives, individually and collectively, weathered them. In all cases, they remained true to their core value — providing long-term employment (and other benefits) to their worker-owners — but they did so with creativity, self-sacrifice, an emphasis on fairness, and an impressive commitment to collaborative decision-making." She observed that economists, whether mainstream or alternative, tend to ignore fact when they do not fit with theory, but Mondragon dealt with problems in a pragmatic way. This appears to be because, unlike in either a plutocracy or in a Soviet-style economy with a five-year plan, there is no separation between the workers and the owners/planners.

The goal of Mondragon is to create rich societies, not rich people. They have a saying: "This isn't paradise and we are no angels, but we don't exploit people." Its principles include democracy, voluntary and open membership, sovereignty of labor, social transformation, and wage solidarity. The highest-paid workers make six times more than the lowest paid, compared to a top executive salary that is about 300 times more than the ordinary employee’s wage in the largest American corporations. This gives members a sense of esprit de corps far beyond what the average peon on the assembly line in a Fortune 500 American corporation can imagine. Highly-skilled professionals who could make more money in a privately-owned corporation on the outside often choose to stay in Mondragon because they prefer the family-like atmosphere they find there. Unlike the European-style, Smaug-like dragon who hoards treasure in his lair, Mondragon is more like a Chinese dragon: an auspicious rainbow dancing in the clouds. One must ask the question: what would the world be like if all businesses changed their modus operandi and became worker-owned cooperatives like Mondragon?

ECONOMICS ACCORDING TO MLK

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was much more than a civil rights leader. He also had a number of revolutionary ideas about economics for the New Age, especially regarding how this subject was related to racial inequity, poverty, human rights, and morality. Here are some of his thoughts on the subject:

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.

Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children.

A host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives, and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated.

Capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity – thus capitalism can lead to a practical materialism that is as pernicious as the materialism taught by communism.

The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together. And you can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the other.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it . . . Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know‐how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? . . . There is no deficit in human resources, the deficit is in human will. . . The time has come for an all‐out world war against poverty.

I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic . . . [Capitalism] started out with a noble and high motive . . . but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness.

And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society . . .

Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. If you are to be a truly Christian nation you must solve this problem. . . You can work within the framework of democracy to bring about a better distribution of wealth. You can use your powerful economic resources to wipe poverty from the face of the earth. God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.

There are some things in our society and some things in our world for which I am proud to be maladjusted. And I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized. I must honestly say to you that I never intend to adjust myself to racial segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few, leave millions of God’s children smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

The edifice that produces robbers is also in need of restructuring, which is why the shift to cooperative economics is so necessary. MLK lived in a time of -isms and had difficulty outlining a detailed plan for how a more perfect economic system should work, since there was no such model up and running. The assumption was that a centralized model would always prevail, and this led him to speak repeatedly about the need for a guaranteed income (from the federal government), what politicians today call a universal basic income. This was conceived as a state-mandated payment system for those in need, like an inflated welfare system. The wisdom of such a system is highly questionable, especially if we consider the problems of dependency it would create, the disincentive to work or get an education, coupled with the tax burden it would place on the average citizen. If we instead consider an end to poverty through the formation of independent land-owning co-ops, where each member has a right to a fair portion of the fruits of their labor, then (so long as they maintain their position), they would receive a guaranteed income and not be either homeless or in poverty. People who failed to maintain their part of the bargain and lost their membership in a co-op would go elsewhere, and in the worst case scenario would become a member of a no-frills co-op that perhaps relied in part on donations and had a policy of easy acceptance. This would be much less desirable, but a person who fell to one of these rudimentary, second-chance co-ops made up of people cast out of other co-ops would still not be homeless. A person who did not work well with others might live in a tiny home or a shared dwelling, but they would not end up starving under a bridge and begging passers-by for money. People should be surrounded with opportunities for education and employment as they grow up, and some promise of assistance throughout their life when needed, but if everyone is guaranteed a monthly payment without any reciprocal contribution required, there is a huge risk that that the number free riders will increase exponentially.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a vision of a more perfect world that included a complete redesign of our economy. He pictured something similar to what the Essenes practiced or what the Jesuits created for the Guarani tribe in South America, prior to the dissolution of their mission. To a billionaire, who sees human beings and their labor in terms of units of currency, such a hypothetical economy sounds like utopian nonsense. To people who are fortunate enough to live in a community where there is shared abundance and where people are loved and cared for by their neighbors (who are also friends with whom they share important beliefs about how to live), it is a system based on common sense. Today we live in an economy designed by billionaires for billionaires. Back in 1968, MLK dared to dream of a world without poverty or injustice. Now it is time for us to pick up the torch and make the great man's dream a reality.

NATIVE AMERICAN ECONOMICS

In the culture of pre-contact Native American tribes, there was no economic sense of me and mine; there was only a sense of we and ours. A tribe shared a piece of land as a community. Each person had their own individual identity, of which they were proud as anyone from ancient Greece, as well as their own family and belongings, but when an issue of serious need arose, all members pitched in to assist. In today’s modern, fragmented communities, when a person loses their job, they lose their income, possibly their house, and possibly their health and life as well. In a traditional Native American milieu, a person who is down on their luck is helped by all the other members of the tribe. There is a sense of being united on the same team that extends beyond the walls of one’s house (or apartment, condo, lodge, or teepee, as the case may be). This view of the community as being one team, like a big family, is far superior to the crude, impersonal, every-man-for-himself system we now practice.

When it comes to the way people interact with each other in the European mode of life versus the Native American mode, the Native way is more efficient and more resilient in the face of adversity. For example, during COVID, because we were committed to doing things the European way, millions of people in the food industry lost their businesses because they couldn’t pay their bills, while hundreds of hungry millions who wanted to continue to benefit from their labor were unable to connect financially with these hungry-for-work suppliers. In a Native-style economy, when one enterprise does not work out in its current form, we as a community find a way to instantly reconfigure our economic flow chart to accommodate everyone, make the most of our available skills, and guarantee that everyone gets what they need to survive and thrive. Work does not always have to be in the form of a business begun at one person’s individual financial risk, including monthly rent payments and other fixed costs that hover like a Sword of Damocles over the owner’s head. In a Native scenario, where the land is owned by all, the determination to engage in a particular business can be a joint one, and the benefits of each person’s time and energy can be shared regardless of momentary disruptions in the market. When unforeseen occurrences such as a global pandemic come along and business as usual becomes impossible, the supplies to create food continue to exist, along with the needs of consumers. Rather than putting everyone through the stress and inactivity of unemployment (and possibly foreclosure, bankruptcy, etc.), in a Native economic model, the landlord, the chef, and the consumer are not only on the same team, these jobs are shared by every member of the tribe. Business continues on, relatively uninterrupted, operating at maximum output despite issues that would instantly short-circuit our current, inflexible style of economic exchange. When a business fails under the Adam Smith model, we say that it had to be weeded out because there was not enough demand for the business, but in truth there might be a huge demand, and the problem lay in high rent, interest rates, materials, labor shortages, legal complications, pandemics, etc. There are too many assumptions, points of contact, and potential problems in our current flow chart of economic transaction, and all these considerations make it a near-miracle that any business ever gets off the ground without a huge amount of wealth to give it a running start and keep it afloat.

In terms of the attitude of the two economic systems and their attitude toward the land itself, they are polar opposites. Native Americans viewed the Earth as their sacred Mother and refrained from doing anything to harm her. When Europeans arrived on the scene, they ignored Native rights and stole the land they found. They divided it up with artificial lines on maps and assigned legal ownership to governments, individuals, and corporations. The land was seen not as a living mother to be respected and preserved, but as real estate: a non-living possession and a container of valuable natural resources to be emptied as quickly as possible. Gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, and other valuable metals were to be mined and turned into cash. Forests were to be clear cut and sold as timber. Fish and game were to be systematically overharvested without a thought for the future. The Native Americans followed a way of life and thought that mirrored the teachings of the Chinese sage Zhuang Zi, who wrote, "A superior person should be generous and free from the ambition of being distinguished above others. . . when people follow this enlightened approach, precious metals remain stored in the mountains, and pearls remain in the depths. People should not see a benefit in accumulating property or money. They should show no interest in riches and honors" (Zhuang-Zi, chapter 12). As we look back on over a century and a half of wanton despoliation in the American West, we can only regret the destruction caused by careless misuse of the land and reconsider the more enlightened policies of the Native Americans. The mineral and agricultural resources of the planet can certainly be used when necessary, but from now on this should be done in a wise, non-polluting, and sustainable way. Ironically, the global warming that has resulted from the European attitude toward land is causing sea levels to rise, which will dramatically reduce the amount of land with which to play the make-believe game of European ownership of real estate.

European economic ideas, which have been in ascendancy since the 1600s, are about to suffer an inevitable decline. Native American attitudes about the relationship of the individual to the group, individual ownership of land, and the purpose of life in general, are clearly superior. The rapid adoption of these attitudes is necessary to our continued survival. As some Native tribes used to do, we should always consider what the effects of our decisions will be, not only on the next quarter’s profit report, but on the next seven generations. We should look upon ourselves not as owners of the planet, which we will carve up greedily for a moment of wealth, but as stewards of the planet, whose systems we must lovingly maintain for the future.

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

In The Dream of the Earth (Counter Point, Berkeley, 1988), author Thomas Berry describes the inability of modern economic systems to grapple with the destruction they cause in the natural systems around us. He writes:

“The deficit in its extreme expression is not only a resource deficit, but the death of a living process, not simply the death of a living process, but of the living process, a living process which exists, so far as we know, only on planet earth. That is what makes our problem definitely different from those of any other generation of whatever ethnic, cultural, political, or religious tradition, or of any other historical period. For the first time we are determining the destinies of the earth in a comprehensive and irreversible manner. The immediate danger is not possible nuclear war, but actual industrial plundering” (page 72).

“Until recently but textbook economics and corporation practices have ignored the implications of such data or have given it minimal attention. Deficits in nature were simply external and unreal costs of doing business, costs that were not entered into the bookkeeping records until social protest brought about environmental impact statements, limits on pollution of the environment, cleanup of waste sites, and liability for personal and physical damage resulting from toxic disruption of the basic life systems. Even the existence of such sites that need cleanup is telling us something: that the industrial system is a failing system. Whatever fictions exist in Wall Street bookkeeping, the earth is a faithful scribe, a faultless calculator, a superb bookkeeper; we will be held responsible for every bit of our economic folly.
Only now do we begin to consider that there is an economics of the human as a species as well as an economics of the earth as a functional community. The primary objective of economic science, of the engineering profession, of technological invention, of industrial processing, of financial investment, and of corporation management must be the integration of human well-being within the context of the well-being of the natural world. Only within the ever-renewing processes of nature is there any future for the human community. Not to recognize this is to make economics a deadly affair. The exploitation itself was and still is experienced by the commercial enterprise not as a deterioration of the planet, but as a creative process leading to a wonderful existence. This is 'progress,' a belief so entrancing for the modern world that no doubt of its validity is permitted. Even though this belief has long ago been severely critiqued and its limitations indicated, it remains the functional basis of our economy. The GNP must increase each year. Everything must be done on a larger scale, with little awareness of the built-in catastrophe involved in the exponential rate of increase. However rational modern economics might be, the driving force of economics is not economic, but visionary, a visionary commitment supported by myth and a sense of having the magical powers of science to overcome any difficulty encountered from natural forces” (pages 74-75).

Economist and author Thomas Piketty described the self-destructive enigma of capitalism in his 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: “Capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.” Piketty proposes that increased taxation on the rich is the way to solve the problem of inequality. This is a catch-22, however, because the power of the wealthy over governments and media prevents this sort of aggressive taxation from ever being implemented.

Muhammad Yunus, author of the 2017 book, A World of Three Zeros, wrote “Deep in our hearts, we all recognize that the old dreams of the economic theorists have been exposed as fairy tales. The existing capitalist engine is producing more damage than solutions. It needs to be redesigned, piece by piece – or replaced by an entirely new engine” (Yunus, 15). Yunus proposes a world of zero unemployment, zero poverty, and net zero carbon emissions. He attempts to be both idealistic and pragmatic, but he suggests only a series of tame, market-based solutions that would never be implemented by the powers that be, let alone affect the big picture in a major way. The new engine he is looking for is a cooperative socio-economic system, based on direct democracy and a more enlightened culture where people act with the greater good in mind.

Economist Kate Raeworth became disillusioned with standard capitalist economic theories that ignored nature and the environment. In her 2017 book, Doughnut Economics, she views the human-environment interaction in terms of a balance wherein humans have enough to meet their needs but do not destroy the planet on which we all depend for survival. She created a new model: two concentric circles (like a bull’s eye, or a doughnut) with an area called critical human deprivation in the very center, and an area called critical planetary degradation at the extreme periphery. A solid line labeled social foundation is a circle that delineates the inside edge of the doughnut. The area of the doughnut itself is called the safe and just space for humanity. The ecological ceiling is a dark line on the outside border of this safe and just space for humanity. Outside the radius of the doughnut is excessive exploitation of the environment that will lead to planet-wide systems collapse. Then she took this new model of a sustainable, livable economy and went in search of the best “economic mindset” to achieve a planetary existence in the goldilocks zone of the “doughnut” (where people have enough to live in the safe and just space, but do not destroy the planet in the process). Here are the seven strategies she came up with to change the “economic mindset:”

1. Change the goal: meet the human rights of all people.

2. See the big picture: recognize that the thing we call “the economy” is part of society, and that our actions take place within the bounds of the natural ecosystems on planet Earth.

3. Nurture human nature: stop defining human behavior as a fixed thing and human thought as selfish and cynical.

4. Get savvy with systems: stop using outdated models (like unrealistic self- balancing supply and demand curves) and admit the dynamic complexity of the world with more sophisticated models that reflect what is really going on.

5. Design to distribute: redistribute wealth by sharing control of land, etc., to allow more people to benefit from economic activity.

6. Create to regenerate: make it a necessity for people to maintain the cycles of nature as a basic part of planning their economic production and consumption.

7. Be agnostic about growth: drop the addiction to endless growth as a goal, since it is impossible and counter to the laws of nature.

Her book is both an insightful critique of the current system and a wonderful picture of what a more user-friendly, sustainable, green, and downright utopian (in the good sense: a nice place to live) economy might look like. What is the one glaring weakness of the book? Once again, it lacks any practical suggestion of how to actually bring about such a major shift. She suggests a series of fundamental alterations to capitalism that early 21st century capitalists are not about to embrace. All of her strategies, however, are perfectly addressed by the model of cooperative economics that I propose.

In an interview on the February 5, 2018 broadcast of Democracy Now!, Professor Richard Wolff made the following poignant observation about the U.S. economy:

"The decisions we see are the decisions made by the people who run the businesses of America – the corporations, the boards of directors, the major shareholders – who really do control this economy and have for a long time. If we’re not happy with the outcome, which I assume we’re not . . . then we have to go to that problem. We have to be willing to change the system. And for me, what I work on is to change the way corporations are run. Democracy Now! I love the slogan. I love your name. I want it in the workplace. I want democracy there for the first time. We don’t have democracy at the workplace. We have a tiny group of people at the top: the major shareholders, the boards of directors they select. They make all the decisions – what to produce, how to produce, where to produce and what to do with the profits everybody helps to produce in an enterprise. Why do we allow such an undemocratic system? The decisions at the top, everybody who works there has to live with, and yet there’s no accountability. The mass of people who work in each enterprise can’t control, don’t elect, have no role. They live with it, but they have no participation. That’s the opposite of democracy. . . if we put the people in charge of our businesses, if we make the economy run by the people in each enterprise, I think, for the first time, we’d have an economy that serves people rather than asking all of us to serve an economy run by a tiny minority."

This may all sound good in theory but too high-minded to be profitable in actual practice. Actually, a private equity expert, not known for his philanthropy or volunteer work, but hard-nosed business acumen, has been singing the praises of making workers part-owners of the businesses for whom they labor. This was featured on a recent segment on 60 Minutes ("Work to Own," season 56, episode 51), which told the story of C.H.I. Overhead Doors, located in Arthur, Illinois. In 2015, C.H.I. was bought by KKR, a private equity firm. Pete Stavros, a CEO at KKR, happens to be an advocate for worker ownership. Having listened to lectures from his father as he grew up, Stavros believes that the social contract for workers is broken in America. He says that far too many workers don't have hope, don't like their jobs, are only paid by the hour, and have no plan for a dignified retirement. His idea is that by giving workers a stake in their own businesses and a voice in how things are run, they will start thinking like owners: feeling a personal involvement, working harder, caring about the product they make or service they provide, and coming up with good ideas to improve efficiency.

Workers are also promised a share of the profits if and when KKR sells a business to another investor. Payouts of course depend on how the business performs. In the case of C.H.I., business boomed and the company expanded. KKR sold C.H.I. for ten times the amount they initially invested, and workers were paid according to seniority. Those with nearly 20 years' seniority received checks for around half a million dollars. In another deal, when KKR sold a company called Geostabilization International (GSI), some employees were paid over $325,000. Stavros admits that this program, while life-changing for many employees, will not, by itself, solve the wealth or salary gap. For this to happen, a thorough restructuring of the whole worker-owner arrangement would be necessary across the entire economy. Company employees should not need to pray for the intervention of a benevolent corporate overlord in order to gain the fruits of their labor; this model of worker-owned business should be expanded upon until all businesses are fully owned by the employees themselves.

NEW AGE NEWS

ECONOMICS

A BETTER WORLD IS COMING

BUT WE HAVE TO BUILD IT OURSELVES.

- SO WHERE DO WE EVEN BEGIN?

Utopia Found is the result of over 30 years of research to answer this difficult question. The book describes how to bring about the long-awaited Golden Age of world peace and Spiritual Renaissance, starting with you: right here, right now.

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