Celebration as free-market juggernaut staggers

The free-market advocates should be celebrating.

Holden has worked the system perfectly in that the car manufacturer has privatized the profits and socialized the costs.

In the past decade, the Australian and State Governments, that is you and me, have given more than $2 billion to the company and now, to further enrich its takings, it has sacked 500 people – Holden has pocketed the profit and we pay the bill.

Simplified equations can always be interpreted in any way preferred, but this one is loaded with indiscretions that are not a public responsibility, rather the success, failure or otherwise of Holden should be contained within the free market it so idolizes.

The world in which Holden was founded, grew, boomed and profited massively was different from what exists today; different in that growth, as it is traditionally understood, equates with difficulties we can’t yet comprehend.

Rather than prop-up what is a struggling, if not dying industry, our governments, Local, State and Federal, should be using their resources to help us understand how we can flourish in a society that is not dependent on economic growth.

That is quite the opposite of the philosophy that saw us align ourselves with an industry that because of what it is and the appeal it has to our egoistic wants, holds humanity hostage as it plunders our fancies and earth’s finite resources.

It seems our governments believe they have a mandate, and maybe they do, to ensure the validity of these inappropriate businesses; inappropriate as they are entirely about only answering wants and pay little, or no role in ensuring human needs are attended to.

We face multiply difficulties, among them the fact that we live in a liberal democracy; a fundamental good that has within it a disabling difficulty enlivened by the inability of politicians, and us as the electors, to look beyond their present terms of office.

Humans have solidified their supremacy in the food chain through their unique ability to imagine, memorize and plan ahead, skills that have been absent as we have sacrificed altruism, decency, fairness and an ethical understanding of our responsibility to care for other species and the environment on which they, and we, depend to economic growth.

Rather than support a dying and monolithic industry, our energy, and cash, should be directed at reassessing the corporate world and replacing it with a more fine-grained society that emulates the belief of Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board and author, the late E.F. Schumacher, who said “Small is beautiful”.

If we are to have anything significant in society that has access to the communal bank, our taxes, it should be something that carries the pre-fix “public”, such as a nation-wide transit system.

A smile brings an understanding about life's complexities

A pretty young woman smiled at me recently.

That, in itself means nothing beyond the fact that it makes near 65-year-old bloke feel pretty good, but it does tap into the far broader psychological questions of life.

Edward O. Wilson.

The smile, altruistic and given in a moment of fleeting inclusive friendship, illustrated that what is best about life is simple, uncomplicated and without cost to either the giver or the receiver.

In fact a smile and its more exuberant cousin, laughter, is an international human language, just as are those other emotions of sadness, fear and distress – they make sense and we relate to them irrespective of colour or creed.

However, the simplicity of a smile and the force of its message are a timely reminder of the insistence and urgency of a message of which we should all take heed.

Human life is of such complexity that it now stands in direct conflict with the intricate biology that sustains all life on earth, including you and me.

Trying to make sense of a life he considered to be burgeoning out of control, E.F. Schumacher sat down in the early 1970s and wrote “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People mattered” to quickly secure something of cult following.

The implication of Schumacher’s “small” was that something as uncomplicated as a smile and so simple seemed closely related and stands in contrast to the complexity to which humanity is now heavily embroiled.

Climate change, oil scarcity and the world’s economic difficulties are or little significance according to American biologist and author, Edward O. Wilson.

Edward O. Wilson's
"Biophilia".

Wilson, writing in “Biophilia” and then “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth”, repeatedly emphasised of humankind’s need to ensure the sustenance and survival of every species, from the microscopic to the massive, to equally ensure its own survival.

Wilson explains that fewer than 10 per cent of the life forms on earth are known to science and of those, less than one per cent has been studied beyond simple anatomical description and few notes on natural history.

He said we don’t need a moon base or a manned trip to Mars, rather an expedition to planet earth.

Considering Wilson and Schumacher’s views, we don’t need the gigantism or complexity of our modern world, instead we need certain smallness, an understandable simplicity of life and a way of living that is on a decided human scale.

Contemporary growth, many claim, hinges on complexity, size and speed, but within such sophistication are often unintended consequences that alienate humanity and solutions are to be found in something that is smaller, slower and simpler.

That, by its very nature, would less demanding on our biosphere and so would make everyone smile, young or otherwise.

We need to watch and learn from our front row seat

Goulburn Valley people, and their Australian fellows, have a front row seat to watch the removal of another rivet in the superstructure supporting the U.S.

America's President,
Mr Barack Obama.

U.S. president, Barack Obama, has argued for a package of tax cuts and government spending aimed at invigorating his country’s economy.
The package, worth about $US447 billion ($A421 billion), is ill-directed, being aimed at a return to business as usual and in doing so appeasing most Americans who see their comfort in living as they have for many decades.
Rather than spend the country’s wealth on a way of life that is unquestionably unsustainable, Mr Obama and those around him, should overtly embrace the hope, audacity and the idea of change that saw him elected in 2008.
America is staring at economic collapse; a societal breakdown that will end its world hegemony and is the natural outcome of what former political philosophy professor and noted author, Sheldon Wolin, has described as “inverted totalitarianism”.
Wolin sees decided danger in the dysfunctional marriage between government and the corporate world, a union that he argues has routed democracy leaving America with a militarized, industrial complex.
Survival of that complex hinges on an obedient populace, one, which in Wolin’s terms, is distracted and titillated by such things as sport, entertainment and discussion and debates about what are ultimately unimportant matters.
And so while democracy survives in name, what America has, and Australia trails along behind, is inverted totalitarianism – a facade claiming social equity, but which is really a process favouring a few.
Mr Obama’s plan does have tax cuts for both employee and employers and billions to prevent teacher lay-offs and hire more police and fire officers, and it would spend $50 billion to improve highways, railroads, transit and aviation.
Examined, however, through the prism of climate change and seriously depleted energy resources, the plan’s outline quickly becomes distorted and dated.
Rather than grasp at exhausted ideas, the Americans need to abandon what once worked, and failed, allowing them to embark on an adventurous and exciting new project that would fundamentally change the fabric of its society.
Such systemic change is resisted by an American elite that appears unable to comprehend the fraying of its empire and beyond that is so misled by its own beliefs and values, that its impending doom goes unseen.
Rather than rescuing flailing and failing companies, the U.S. should be advancing concepts that call for the localization of communities and employing the idea of late author and influential economist and statistician, E.F. Schumacher that “small is beautiful”.
America is the world’s biggest and most influential economy and as its collapse will render ours destitute; we need to watch attentively, and learn, from our front row seat.