Poverty

Poverty is the absence of wealth. Wealth comes in three forms; Natural Capital, Built Capital and Promised Capital; as in a growing tree, sawn lumber and an IOU for wood. We've not kept track of the conversion of the first and second into the third; as a result our world is poorer in Nature and Artifice, yet richer in Finance, in paper wealth. We're so rich overall, financially, that there's not enough natural or built reality to keep those promises with. Furthermore, this financial wealth keeps sloshing around the world's banking system to receive the maximum financial return, in an unseemly, but unseen process that makes good real world planning difficult. And the threat of capital flight to some other region of the world undercuts attempts to build commonwealth and to pay fair wages, since Finance's flightiness inspired workers and communities to bid against each other in a race to the bottom that only Finance wins. It doesn't have to be this way.

So, what's the problem? Can we fix this if I put it on my credit card? <cough> So what's to be done? One small step we can take is to discourage the sloshing with a financial transaction tax, by applying sales tax to financial sales. Another is to recognize piracy and theft for what it is.

Finance that reproduces itself at the cost of natural or built value is not a just imaginary gain, it is actually a real loss. If you chop down a cherry tree, breaking the axe, but get a paper promise of ten cherry trees, you didn't really gain. If most people get their cherry trees chopped, and their axes broken, but a few get handfuls of cherry tree certificates, we haven't succeeded in managing our affairs well. We can do better.

But how? Capital Flight only happens when there's somewhere else to flee to. If all communities act in unison to set fair workable limits to returns for Finance, and all workers in unison insist on fair wages, there won't be anywhere else for financial Capital to flee to, and this tragic game will finally end. The we can get back to building real wealth together, and to living well together.