Brushbail’s musings on money, capitalism and resources

To bring some much needed light relief to a serious subject, we introduce a new character Brushbail. Despite the comedy element this is intended to help us see a situation differently.

As Brushbail I can tell you that in our more advanced society of Zog, we have dispensed with money.

But how, I hear you ask do people ‘pay’ for goods, homes and services.

I think here, kind humans, you will first have to empty your glass. First imagine what life was like without radio, television, mobile phones, aeroplanes, cars, ipods and electricity. No concepts of mass communication, being able to see imultaneously what is happening all over the world, instead of only being able to travel as far as you can walk in a day. No supermarkets
or mass food outlets.

People used to barter what skills or goods that they had for other goods or services. But imagine when people roamed the earth that did not understand the concept of owning land. They simply had things like tents because they needed them to live within.

I am told I am naïve and that you live by crucial laws of economics. Is that why in 2007 many companies lent those who had virtually no incomes large sums of real money, then these unsupported, ‘sub prime’ loans were packaged with better ones and sold on over and over leading to hundreds of billions of dollars of bad debt worldwide. If this was only a blip why have most of the world’s biggest financial institutions lost so many billions then collapsed? Much of your money is fantasy trading like this, and then the loans cannot be paid the debt is ‘written off’ by billions of pounds. In other words that money which is real is ‘taken off the balance sheet’ ie it no longer exists.

Your money can be devalued, revalued, more money supply can be created (by printing more money), ‘futures’ can be traded on electronic markets which look at possible future prices of products, making profits over things that have yet to happen.

The World’s most powerful country has trillions of dollars of debt yet can go on ‘growing’ its economy, and spend billions of dollars on starting a war. What happens if all of America’s debt is called in at once? America as a country would be a sub prime loan.

In Europe you pay huge subsidies to produce food as you claim it is ‘uneconomic’ to produce
it. This is only because we assign artificial monetary values to those goods which are artificially
controlled by financial markets, subsidies and price fixing.
You see, economics does not use natural laws; it invents rules which are often utterly ludicrous, which only work because society agrees or is forced by bureaucrats to use these artificial parameters.

What happens if all of the world’s money disappeared overnight, along with all of the gold, and precious stones? The oil rich nations would no longer be rich, because their product would be worthless as no one could buy it.

But how would we decide the ‘value’ of anything, such as a house, without money?
Look at this wider, Worldwider.

What if ‘nice’ areas where houses are valuable suddenly find that other areas become regenerated and become ‘nice’, then the ‘value’ begins to equal out. What if all homes, like in Amish society were built to the same high craftsmen and women standard, then people may still favour a slightly different plot? So ‘value’ is currently an artificial monetary construct. If house prices all crashed by 75% because of the current credit crisis, then they would be the same houses, but their ‘value’ would be less. Sure, more people could then afford them so demand may rise which can be met by building more homes to avoid the prices going up. The real problem is the artificial economic notions regarding demand and supply. If a product is in demand and supply is short, producers can push up prices and make more profit, if there is over supply then prices fall. But this notion ignores the real environmental costs of production.

If we produce a plastic toy that will not biodegrade then the full cost of storing it forever outside of landfill should be added to the price. The price will then be so high that it will be uneconomic to produce. The same toy produced of new biodegradable materials may be much more expensive in the development phase, but have a similar price as you do not need to add in the costs of storage.

If you think I am creating artificial constructs to suit my argument then think again. My intranet tells me that, in the 1950’s, UK Nuclear Power was going to be so cheap it would be not worth metering or charging for. In fact the disposal cost for the highly dangerous bi- products from the first generation nuclear reactors is currently £70 billion pounds and will go on for millions of years! If that real cost had been added to people’s bills at the time, people would have paid tens of thousands of pounds a year for their energy in the 1960’s which no one could have afforded. Instead the UK taxpayer will have to still fund it now when £70 billion pounds invested in alternative energy could now solve all our energy needs. So what do politicians do to solve this for the very long term future, they recently announce a new generation of nuclear reactors….!!!!

And don’t tell me where would the money come from, I read your newspapers yesterday – where does the £100 billion you plan to spend on war machines over the next 3 years come from, when you have a deficit?

There is huge financial waste on your planet. Disposing of the millions of unrecyclable products and toys is costing you billions of dollars, pounds, yen, yuan, and euros.

You HAVE the money; all you need is a new paradigm. Here endeth Brushbail’s sermon.Ps We don’t have religions in Zog because we realised they got in the way of faith and spiritual wellbeing.

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