Wake up: Earth has finite resources
The Earth is finite. All of the natural resources on it are also finite. That means if we keep using these resources at the current rates, we will eventually move from more to less to none. That will be an evil day for the human race. Perpetual growth is a myth. The belief that technology can overcome scarcity is a superstition. The belief that the growth of the human population is not a problem is an example of denial. The Earth has a finite carrying capacity. When we exceed that, very bad things begin to happen. There is probably even a tipping point beyond which recovery is impossible.
There is no medical cure for starvation, and all that is necessary for starvation to start killing people is for the price of food to rise beyond their means. Whenever there have been famines, there has always been food somewhere in the world. It just wasn’t available or affordable to the people who were dying. Depending on altruism is putting your hopes in a leaky bucket.
Since human life absolutely depends on food and clean water, you would think that agriculture would receive more attention than it does. The past few administrations have seemed to think that subsidies to corporate agribusinesses are all that is necessary. But agriculture is a great deal more complex than the buying and selling of commodities. There is the matter of preserving the land and its fertility. There is the matter of producing food that is uncontaminated by chemical pesticides and herbicides. There is the matter of preserving access to water in the more arid areas. There is the matter of religious faith in free-market capitalism.
The value of the latter depends on what is meant by free-market capitalism. Private ownership by an occupant who works the land and intends to preserve it for his heirs is a great system. Private ownership by an absentee corporation that intends to extract the maximum amount of profits in the shortest possible time without regard for the future is a bad system.
Business expansion financed by savings and retained earnings is good; business expansion financed by loans and highly leveraged financial schemes is not so good.
The theory that the selfish man working for his own profit “accidentally” creates benefits for others is much more limited than we are led to believe. To expect corporate executives to be good citizens and conservators is, with rare exceptions, to expect the highly unlikely. As an English clergyman once put it, the trouble with corporations is that they have neither a body to kick nor a soul to damn. All the pressure on the corporate executive is to make a profit and to boost the stock’s value. The welfare of employees, who have been reduced to “human resources,” is not a consideration. We are seeing more and more corporate executives willing to close their American plants and contract out their manufacturing to cheap-labor countries. This increases corporate profits, but it reduces the standard of living for Americans.
Private capitalists are notorious for demanding favors from communities in exchange for promises of jobs – promises that often are broken. They are equally notorious about shifting their costs onto the public. Substituting plastic and aluminum containers for reusable glass bottles is a prime example. Glass bottles were recycled by the manufacturer. Plastic and aluminum are recycled by the public or stored in public dumps.
Perhaps we should find some biologists to run for public office rather than lawyers and businessmen. Both the House and the Senate could stand a little juicing up of its average IQ and knowledge base.
Write to Charley Reese at P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802