–
In the Great Depression, that followed The Great War WW1,
my Midlands Leamington Spa parents had to keep-migrating for Work –
up to Scotland, then ‘down’ to the South West to Torquay, Newton Abbot, then Barnstaple –
and lastly in 1931 to Saltash and 1935 to ‘West Villa’ Burraton –
where opposite was a plain Wesleyan Chapel .
But we were already “Church of England” – and “low” at that –
and therefore were motored to St Stephens every Sunday
in Dad’s Austin & Shell Mex and BP company car
[shortly to be ‘permanently’ replaced by a .new polished black Hillman ‘Minx’].
—————–
The ‘point’ I remember so clearly, outside of that now-gone Chapel, is its “Wayside Pulpit” l –
that regularly stood “witnessing” to passers-by
one or other “text” from the Bible –
“Samuel, Samuel – lovest thou Me ?”
————
yet in particular one stands in my memory very clearly,
but to this day I really don’t know “why”- ?
“Remember Thy God
in the Days of thy Youth”
=======================================
As I now “spring-clean”, I need to send many things into “Self-Storage”
[for gifting to the “Sustainworthying-Community” when I find it].-
One such of my many “individual-human-development and holistic-health-building books
attracted a quick glimpse inside.
This is what it fell open at:- page 144
“The trouble is that an economic system run on the basis of ‘redistributive-exchange’
simply cannot generate the kind of gains to be had from a system of voluntary, or mutual, exchange,
Small parasitic elites might have benefited
by organising society that way, but society in aggregate suffered…
(and)…
instead of allowing such self-organizing systems of specialization and exchange to (naturally) ‘evolve’,
with all the complexities therein,
for most of human history small elites have used a combination of command and custom
(as ‘social norms’)
to direct production –
and to take their cut.”
“Without free exchange, intensive economic growth is simply not possible.
Why not ?
For a start, a system based on ‘redistributive-exchange’ tends to impoverish the most productive enterprises and people.
If a farmer knows that he will have his grain taken from him, leaving him only a bare minimum required to feed his family,
what incentive does he have to increase his yield ?”
As Leonard Read described
(“) even producing a simple pencil involves an extraordinarily complex process, which no one person can fully understand, let alone direct.
No elite, no matter how powerful and determined, has yet existed
with the wherewithal to produce even a pencil
more efficiently
than the self-organizing system of ‘mutual-exchange’ that makes such things today (“) (2017)
Rebel – How to overthrow the emerging oligarchy (by Douglas Carswell).
=====================================================================
So –
let us look forward to finding other “Wayside Knowledge” –
and maybe “New Know-How” too –
———-
Whilst I have long been sceptical about Economics anyway – because of two “basics” each of which later gets “contradicted” –
(1) All humans are insatiable. “Negated” by the ‘more-advanced’ Law of Diminishing Utility.
(2) Earth’s natural resources are self-renewable – Many times “negated” by for instance
the human-economic extinction of the Dodo, and of many other natural species;
the mass-destruction of Rainforests;
the “exhausting” of previously richly-productive crop-soils
(Nature will take 3,000 years to create a soil of a mere few centimeters depth, even deep enough for a lettuce to grow in) ;
and the one-way-burning-up of fossil-fuels, and the one-way wasting-and-life-extincting “dumping”
of both side-product plastics and toxic-chemicals, as well as irreplaceable metals –
out of Earth’s Longest-Life-Span Underground and even “Sacred” Reserves.
————– 2005 Sunday 11 February 2018 —————-
“There is nothing ‘economical’ about Economics”.