Fixing the Economy

By MARK ANDERSON

The late English philosopher Alan Watts, who introduced the emerging “hippie” counter culture to “The Way of Zen” (1957), had an uncanny way of explaining and simplifying subject matter, to help us see the errors of our ways and realize how to correct them. Too often, we’re trapped in a “prison” and don’t know that we possess the key.

And the “prison” that “surrounds” us all, no matter our political leanings, is, in the final analysis, a debtor’s prison for which actual walls would be superfluous. Our own ignorance keeps the walls standing and the cell door shut, inasmuch as key members of the plutocracy tend to function, wittingly or not, as our virtual “wardens.”

Watts wrote: “Money is a way of measuring wealth but is not wealth in itself. A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft. He needs real wealth, in the form of a fishing rod, a compass, an outboard motor with gas, and a female companion. But this ingrained and archaic confusion of money with wealth is now the main reason we are not going ahead full tilt with the development of our technological genius for the production of more than adequate food, clothing, housing, and utilities for every person on earth.”

That last sentence is of particular interest. People as divergent in their views as Winston Churchill, Scottish engineer and monetary-reformer C.H. Douglas, novelist Robert Heinlein, and US academician Gorham Munson bemoaned our “poverty amid plenty” and realized that the amazing advancements of the industrial arts, leading toward a world where humankind could be freed from the heavy yoke of obligatory labor—wherein we toil for toil’s sake with constantly shrinking room for real progress and actual prosperity—could instead establish a marvelous world of relative leisure. The economic “machine” could and should be reworked precisely for “the production of more than adequate food, clothing, housing and utilities for every person on earth.”

In Heinlein’s novel “For Us, the Living” (written in 1938 but not published for the first time until 20 years ago) the population receives “heritage checks.” Those checks are based on the production of goods and services largely through non-labor, i.e., automated means; the monetary value of such production is calculated by a non-partisan, transparent, accountable government agency, and is then paid out to a population that’s treated as shareholders-in-common—a kind of universalized capitalism that’s neither “left” nor “right.” There’s no money redistribution, meaning the “wealthy” are not taxed to pay the “poor.” And money is directly created by the government, interest-free, rather than being born as debt, like now, in our foolish “arranged marriage” to the private world banking consortium.

Who arranged the marriage? The US Congress, on Dec. 23, 1913, 110 years ago, via passage of the Federal Reserve Act.

Adding a nationwide passive income to the mix in this way, to supplement whatever constructive, relevant work for which human labor is still needed, may very well be the grand idea whose time has come. Watching the Fed monkey with interest rates, acting as if it doesn’t know that inflation is the Fed’s own creation, with those raised rates pummeling “main street USA” while the uber-rich always come first, should be enough in itself, not to mention the 2007-08 mega bank bailouts and the 12 recessions of the 20th Century, to justify an ultra-major overhaul. The future is us. We need to think boldly and fix this defective thing we call “the economy.”

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2023

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