There is a popular meme I’ve seen here a few times about how a medieval peasant got more time off than you and it’s made me think. The true problems of work and equality of today stem from one source. That is the premise that our entire system is built on. The need for growth.
In capitalism the capitalists are ordained the cultivators of that growth and so make the decisions, in communism it is the workers so their elected officials make those decisions of how to run things, at the end of the day the result is the same, we have a system where more is taken out than is put back in. This is wrong. For the Christian’s out there, “God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth. God also said: See, I give you every seed-bearing plant on all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; and to all the wild animals, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the earth, I give all the green plants for food. And so it happened.” (Genesis 1:28-30)
For all heathens out there “When one tugs at a single thing in nature he finds it is attached to the rest of the world” (John Muir)
The civilizations that we consider primitive today did not have the waste problems that we have today nor did they have the cataclysmic economic disparity that we have. But these civilizations have all be died since the Industrial Revolution. The common factor behind communism and capitalism is the economies of scale that the rise of industry has created. I believe that the problems that we talk about on this sub can ultimately be resolved through a limiting of economic scale rather than continuing to fight the same battles over and over concerning workers rights or corrupt governments.
The governing principle behind this must be that the distance on the economic ladder of success between the poorest individual and the richest must be as small as possible and that the lowest rung on this ladder must be as high as possible. This is impossible to achieve with communism and capitalism because in the former it doesn’t matter how low that first rung is while in the latter it is necessary that the distance between the bottom and the top is always increasing.
I propose this, that rather than governing an economy on its scale an economy should be governed on limiting its size. The mandate of any business should be to cover the cost of doing business and sharing the profits equitably among the employees. But to go a step further, any business should only be conducting their operations within a defined geographical area in order to limit the growth.
This is a concept that I’ve been thinking about for some time and ultimately the core philosophy is that good stewardship must be at the center of the economy, a business can’t take more than it puts back with its operations. It can’t take more resources from the earth than it is able to replenish, it can’t take up more market than it needs to survive, the bosses can’t take more than they are they are giving their employees etc. The market can’t sustain growth forever so it has to stop growing and be maintained at whatever size is the most beneficial to those that make it run.