[ExI] jobs created or saved

[Lee Corbin]

Eugen writes

> ...we failed to start a number of critical
> innovations around 1970s, when  money and talent was plentiful.

I wonder why money was plentiful. Maybe there were
traditional modes of spending and saving that were
not completely vitiated by then.

> By now we would have little to none issues if critical infrastructure and
> R&D work (nuclear, aerospace, synfuel, electrochemistry, photovoltaics) 
> would have been started back then. Well, we blew it.

This amorphous "we" have never done anything right. The
last strong "we" with a clear vision of what to do was
the mighty USSR. "WE" need to stop screwing with everything
---not screwing at yet higher and higher levels with
interference in the basic processes of wealth creation.

Bridges fail. Railways collapse. Just take a look at
the 19th century. But then the bridge is fixed, the
railroad is repaired. Government was as yet too weak
to remove trillions and trillions from the wealth
producing sectors. THAT'S why in 1970 there was still
money.

> *The* most critical areas right now are energy and food, with mineral
> resources trailing close behind.

Yes! Yes!

> To address this now requires a world war scale effort.

NO! NO! If you collectivize everything, scoop up all ordinary
wealth producing efforts into the bottomless maws of
governments, believe me, the "crises" we are seeing now
are nothing at all compared to what we will see, if the
basic capitalist wealth producing is not left alone to
heal properly.

> No, I'm not exaggerating.

Yes, I do know that you are not exaggerating what the problems
are. It's just that your solution will only aggravate the
problem.

> We need to move to crisis mode yesterday.

All power to the people! All power to the Central Committee
who are so smart that they're almost as brilliant as
Vladimir Lenin! Centralize action on a massive scale!

> As far as I can see awareness for this is close to zero.
> Obviously the gap will appear to be sudden and painful,
 > and wars for resources won't be far behind.

That is so true! As the vast governments of all the
nations find that the squeezing and squeezing and
squeezing of their own populations are proving
insufficient, what (a la Keith Henson) will be
any alternative, when millions of people find
that their governments can no longer bail them
out when hunger comes to their doors?

> By the time you're in nuclear/bioweapon
> conflict territory you're no longer trying to solve problems, but
> trying to stay alive. Recovering from that will be extremely difficult. 

And the only hope is to STOP TRYING TO ORGANIZE EVERYTHING
ON GLOBAL LEVELS. We need to return to simply profit and
loss: those small local groups that profit must live, and
those small groups that cannot be on their own feet
economically of use to others must wither. As Popper said,
let our jobs die instead of ourselves.

> The longer we wait, the more people will die. I have no idea how to
> address it. Politics is more than useless, and very little is happening
> at the grassroots.

I totally agree. But with different emphasis: the longer
we wait to get off the backs of those who create wealth,
the nearer we come to uncontrollable catastrophe.

> Assuming we here can do something, what should we do? Forget personal
> attacks at climate science or dangers of tobacco. This is too important.

We could start saving. We could start spending less. We
can restore vitality to our economics by thinking locally
and acting locally.

D.E.C.

Lee