First the economics of the whole thing. So when you buy something, anything really you can think of yourself as paying 4 different prices. 1st you're paying the lateral price. This is the part of the money that goes to someone at more or less your level of the food chain and mostly in your community. In a corporate store like a Target that is the portion of the money that goes to the store staff, and the local delivery men who deliver the goods to the store, and the part of the overhead that pays local bills like electricity and waste removal for the store's trash etc. You get the idea. It's the portion of the money you're spending that stays in your community.
The second part of the cost is what I'll call the elevator cost. This is the portion of the money you spend that goes up and out of your community. So at a corporate store like Target or Wal Mart this is the hunk of cash that goes up to the corporation. It doesn't stay in your town. Now this doesn't all go to the "1%" as it were. Some of it goes to secretaries in corporate offices, and some of it goes to janitors in those offices, and national delivery drivers etc. Still this is the portion of your purchase that goes away from your local community. Even in a small local co-op some of your purchases are going to be products that shipped from another state or country. So some portion of almost any purchase is going somewhere else.
Next are the taxes. The first are government taxes. Really in the US this is state and in some cases city or county sales tax. There isn't much to say about these taxes. Really all fairly straight forward.
The final portion is the corporate tax rate. This is the portion of the price of your purchase that goes to credit card fees. Even if you only shop with cash there is still a corporate tax because early experiments with charging people who use credit cards more for the portion of the transaction that the banks take off the top failed. So stores include the credit card charges in their overall prices and average it out across all their sales.
No one of these expenses is necessarily good or bad. Money flowing between markets in general is healthy because of the lifestyle it allows. The convenience of credit cards is certainly worth some price, and responsible use of credit can facilitate a standard of life that living without credit does not allow. The same is true of government tax and the money that stays local. They each have their place and can be both good and bad for the economy.
What becomes a problem is when these four cash flows go out of balance. We now live in a world where entirely too much money goes to the top. The portion of commerce that goes to credit card expenses goes almost exclusively to corporate profits, and the corporate portion of our general commerce (McDonald's products, Wal-Mart's infrastructure, etc.) also syphon money away from us. This is something the Occupy movement has put a lot of effort into illuminating.
The imbalance in the system is facilitated by a pronounced and unhealthy dependence on the supply chain. There was a quote I saw about how we have become a species where no one knows how to create anything. The example that was used is that no one knows how to create a computer mouse. That might seem impossible, because obviously they are created every day, but no one person has the knowledge necessary to produce the mouse. Petroleum must be drawn from the earth, then refined, then processed into plastic, then manufactured into the case of the mouse. Metal must be extracted from the earth, then refined, then turned into the wiring for the mouse. Silicon must be refined to create the micro circuitry. The protocols and standards of the USB specification must be followed, and then there are drivers and other software involved in the system. No one person has the knowledge necessary to take all the steps I have listed above and those are only the ones I can think of in 30 seconds off the top of my head. I'm sure that the production of a basic $15 PC mouse is much more involved than what I have just detailed. That same concept can be applied to just about anything we do. This supply chain was a huge innovation and allowed for separation of labor and a standard of living that could have never been imagined in the pre-historic days before trade really took off, or even 100 years ago before we expanded it to the monolith it is today.
However, like anything the supply chain can be abused. You can become so dependent on it that dysfunction grows out of that dependence. Leveraging the supply chain to produce something like a computer mouse is an incredibly positive example of using this structure. However, when you can't buy raw ingredients and make your own food, or pull out some thread and fix a small hole in a pair of shorts then the supply chain becomes a source of oppression, not human potential. That is what we are seeing in our culture more and more. Once upon a time the poor did not have servants of any kind. Service wasn't something the poor could afford. The poor had something the rich did not have though. The poor had expertise. They knew how to do for themselves. There was an independent streak to the culture of poverty until very recently. If you doubt that, or want me to cite sources then I cite our grandparents. Go out and talk to your grandparents, especially the ones who lived through the great depression as children. I know there are very few survivors of the great depression left, but they knew how to do for themselves.
When we move to a "service based economy" as so many people like to talk about, everyone just pays someone else to do for them. You know how to do the one thing that you "do for everyone else" but is that one thing really a complete thing? What if you work in a McDonald's, perhaps as management, maybe even making a decent living? So you know how to handle frozen foods pretty well, but do you know how to properly bread a piece of raw chicken? Do you know how to handle ground meat without overworking it? Can you control heat on a stove at home? The answer to these questions is very possibly not. So then something really interesting happens. As the people setting the prices realize that everyone HAS to pay for service, because it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity caused by their lack of knowledge they can begin to charge as if it's a necessity. If you're paying to not have to do dishes one night because you're tired you'll pay one price. If you're paying to . . . well . . . . get food that's edible because you can't make a dish for yourself at home you'll pay a very different price, because you HAVE to eat. That is the world we have found ourselves in.
So what does this everyday radical stuff accomplish? It accomplishes breaking that relationship. It's about taking back our ability to get by without services. I have seen so many people complain that the "poor" aren't really poor because they have cable, and eat out, and buy trendy cleaning contraptions, etc. when they should be paying their rent. The cable bit I'll agree with, I think most people should just ditch cable altogether but the rest of it is a matter of generational conditioning, and the atrophy of life skills in our society. So let's work that muscle out again. It gives us more say in how our money shapes the economy we live in, and takes a little bit of power back from the big guys.
In closing I will just say the little ideas that I pose on this blog and on the facebook page aren't really meant to be ends in and of themselves. They're starting off points. Ok, so I can make cleaning liquid out of white vinegar and water, what all can I do with it? What other cleaning materials can I make? How hard is it to make soap? My thought it less about just giving out occasional home and garden (and little ways to screw the banks) tips and more to get people thinking about the things they could do for themselves and taking that control back.
Ideally I'd love to see some other people start to post how they do things for themselves on the page, and I hope that people are using some of the ideas I'm throwing out there. I'm sure there are better ones, but it's what I had to start with.
The imbalance in the system is facilitated by a pronounced and unhealthy dependence on the supply chain. There was a quote I saw about how we have become a species where no one knows how to create anything. The example that was used is that no one knows how to create a computer mouse. That might seem impossible, because obviously they are created every day, but no one person has the knowledge necessary to produce the mouse. Petroleum must be drawn from the earth, then refined, then processed into plastic, then manufactured into the case of the mouse. Metal must be extracted from the earth, then refined, then turned into the wiring for the mouse. Silicon must be refined to create the micro circuitry. The protocols and standards of the USB specification must be followed, and then there are drivers and other software involved in the system. No one person has the knowledge necessary to take all the steps I have listed above and those are only the ones I can think of in 30 seconds off the top of my head. I'm sure that the production of a basic $15 PC mouse is much more involved than what I have just detailed. That same concept can be applied to just about anything we do. This supply chain was a huge innovation and allowed for separation of labor and a standard of living that could have never been imagined in the pre-historic days before trade really took off, or even 100 years ago before we expanded it to the monolith it is today.
However, like anything the supply chain can be abused. You can become so dependent on it that dysfunction grows out of that dependence. Leveraging the supply chain to produce something like a computer mouse is an incredibly positive example of using this structure. However, when you can't buy raw ingredients and make your own food, or pull out some thread and fix a small hole in a pair of shorts then the supply chain becomes a source of oppression, not human potential. That is what we are seeing in our culture more and more. Once upon a time the poor did not have servants of any kind. Service wasn't something the poor could afford. The poor had something the rich did not have though. The poor had expertise. They knew how to do for themselves. There was an independent streak to the culture of poverty until very recently. If you doubt that, or want me to cite sources then I cite our grandparents. Go out and talk to your grandparents, especially the ones who lived through the great depression as children. I know there are very few survivors of the great depression left, but they knew how to do for themselves.
When we move to a "service based economy" as so many people like to talk about, everyone just pays someone else to do for them. You know how to do the one thing that you "do for everyone else" but is that one thing really a complete thing? What if you work in a McDonald's, perhaps as management, maybe even making a decent living? So you know how to handle frozen foods pretty well, but do you know how to properly bread a piece of raw chicken? Do you know how to handle ground meat without overworking it? Can you control heat on a stove at home? The answer to these questions is very possibly not. So then something really interesting happens. As the people setting the prices realize that everyone HAS to pay for service, because it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity caused by their lack of knowledge they can begin to charge as if it's a necessity. If you're paying to not have to do dishes one night because you're tired you'll pay one price. If you're paying to . . . well . . . . get food that's edible because you can't make a dish for yourself at home you'll pay a very different price, because you HAVE to eat. That is the world we have found ourselves in.
So what does this everyday radical stuff accomplish? It accomplishes breaking that relationship. It's about taking back our ability to get by without services. I have seen so many people complain that the "poor" aren't really poor because they have cable, and eat out, and buy trendy cleaning contraptions, etc. when they should be paying their rent. The cable bit I'll agree with, I think most people should just ditch cable altogether but the rest of it is a matter of generational conditioning, and the atrophy of life skills in our society. So let's work that muscle out again. It gives us more say in how our money shapes the economy we live in, and takes a little bit of power back from the big guys.
In closing I will just say the little ideas that I pose on this blog and on the facebook page aren't really meant to be ends in and of themselves. They're starting off points. Ok, so I can make cleaning liquid out of white vinegar and water, what all can I do with it? What other cleaning materials can I make? How hard is it to make soap? My thought it less about just giving out occasional home and garden (and little ways to screw the banks) tips and more to get people thinking about the things they could do for themselves and taking that control back.
Ideally I'd love to see some other people start to post how they do things for themselves on the page, and I hope that people are using some of the ideas I'm throwing out there. I'm sure there are better ones, but it's what I had to start with.
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