previous - ideas - further
ID-5 Observations. January 8th, 1986
Observations.
The impoverishment of the community.
The leaking bucket applies not simply to the economic situation
of every single person and business organization, but also to
every single community, from the village to the nation.
You have what you have, and it goes when you spend and comes as
you earn.
Within the community there exists a cascade of money from bucket
to bucket, employing local people until someone spends it
outside the community, perhaps on a holiday, perhaps to import
tools, equipment, foodstuffs.
Each community exists in the world in a more or less precarious
balance between its income and expenditure.
Hence the drive to export goods to increase income, and the
incentive to shop locally, to keep the money in circulation.
This is equivalent to maintaining blood pressure for the bleeding
patient with continual transfusion.
Unfortunately, the dependency of each community on external sources
of funds can dramatically distort priorities.
From the nation, to the province, to the city and the village, we
have an appalling history of selling our soul to the export
market.
This is quite understandable, since the cash flow is literally
the life blood of the economy, and the community can get quite
strange when it goes into shock from loss of blood.
When there are only a few jobs in town, stress can easily develop
between those who have and those who have not.
A community which is harmonious in good times can become highly
contentious when the internal competition for the scarce cash
becomes fierce.
The short term and short sighted response to this is usually some
frantic effort to get the rest of the world to spend in our
community rather than somewhere else.
Proposals to this end typically entail increasing distortion of
the economic, social, political and ecological texture of the
community.
Landsman Community Services Ltd. ID-5 Page 1
ID-5 Observations. January 8th, 1986
Intelligent standards are compromised with the faint hope that we
can return to "normal" when the world economy recovers.
Recovers what ?
"If you can keep your head
when all about you are losing theirs.."
... then you probably haven't grasped what is actually going on.
Landsman Community Services Ltd. ID-5 Page 2
previous - ideas - further