It is, after all, technocrats wielding creative innovations, engineering knowledge, organizational talents, management skills -- and billions of workers wielding specific knowledge and hand skills -- who built the global industrial economy. All of the productive infrastructure was built by work and knowledge: intelligent human effort. But it was bought and it is owned by capitalists wielding dollars that are created out of nothing by bankers. The physical stuff was built by engineers and workers. The ownership of all the stuff was engineered by bankers and capitalists.
That's what money does: assigns ownership. The power to issue and allocate money is the power to assign ownership of the Earth.
Like Libyans, we are not "naturally economically impoverished" by any inherent inability to build and make (or trade for) what we want. We are artificially financially impoverished by the banksters who own and control our money-issuance and allocation systems. We have technologically defeated the natural tyranny of economic scarcity. But we now live under a psychological and political tyranny of $numbers: the bankers' debt-based money system.
All the money that bought and paid for all the stuff is all owed to the bankers who created and issued the money as 'loans'. So even though we are materially rich, we are financially poor, because the nations of the world are literally in debt bondage: bond debt that we owe as nations and taxpayers; and private debt that we owe as individuals and businesses.
We already live in material luxury, but feel it is "not enough" and we have to struggle to have "more". We are impoverished by our refusal to believe in the reality of our present abundance, and by our clinging to the punishing mentality of scarcity. We allow tyrants wielding $numbers to indebt and rule over and punish us. Is that residual Puritanism telling us we don't "deserve" abundance? That our liberation from the curse of Adam is sinful?
Banksters, corporatists and plutocrats who enjoy great wealth and abundance are happy to perform the role of indebting, ruling over, and punishing us. So maybe it's a symbiotic relationship after all: sadists punishing masochists. But there's nothing "natural" or "inevitable" about it.
Crushing public and private debt is not the natural condition of man. Nor is debt the result of moral weaknesses like sloth and consumer gluttony. There is plenty of "stuff" for everybody, including those whom you might judge did not "earn it". Construction workers make houses. How, exactly, does going to work each day and tapping on a computer keyboard "earn" you a house? Factory workers make cars. How, exactly, does sitting in a boardroom talking about the cleaning products business "earn" you a luxury car?
Beyond the local scale and simplicity of a do-it-yourself village economy, there is no discernible meaning to the word "earn". Otherwise the construction workers and factory workers who made all the houses and cars "earned them" by doing the work of making them, and should own them all. Clearly, the modern economy does not assign ownership to the "makers" of the material goods. A modern technological economy is in its essence a communal cooperative enterprise. This kind of economy produces material abundance for everybody, not just for workers who directly "make" the stuff.
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