by wayburn » Fri Jul 12, 2019 6:45 am
What we really need, instead of money as we know it, is more like rationing than it is like salaries or profits earned. Suppose we have already established the necessity for equality in standards of living. Then, it is necessary for each economic actor in the community to consume as little emergy, fresh water,and human labor exerted by others as possible - but, in any case, no more than 1/Nth of the sustainable community dividend - while utilizing no more than 1/Nth of the land not reserved for the community in common for working, living, and other personal activities.
Note [a word on land]. Suppose we have agreed that all values must be established by invariant physical measures. That is, if no such theoretical value can be established (independent of what anyone thinks, desires, or believes), then we must agree that that economic entity may not be consumed or assigned permanently to anyone. In short, it may not be bought and sold even in an old-fashioned economy in which buying and selling is still carried on. This discussion applies to land. It is easy to find a suitable measure for the value of land for a unit of area and a unit of time. This would be the insolation (energy per unit area absorbed from the sun per unit time). But, there is no useful measure that can be applied to land for utilization in perpetuity. (Infinity is not a useful value.) Perhaps, we have here a germ of an argument against most private property even though the contents of our household should be assigned their emergy, water, and labor values. It seems that, after food and clothing, our households will receive most of our rations. (As described elsewhere, most of our current forms of employment will need to be eliminated and some of our highest paid workers in today's economy will need to be furloughed. We must be able to afford their support at equal standards of living to everyone else but certainly not greater regardless of what they were previously. I am most anxious to discuss this on a theoretical basis but not on the basis that it is unheard of or that no one will accept it.
It is now the middle of the night and I must rest before I write a second draft of the above which has a number of rough passages.