LIFE SUPPORT ON EARTH

            Life-support shortage?

In 1600 Queen Elizabeth I and a few intimates founded the East India company. Exercising her crown privileges the Queen granted the company limited liability for losses on the part of the enterprise backers. They could lose their money if the ship were lost, but they could not be held liable for the lives of the sailors who were drowned. While the owners could insure and very greatly limit the magnitude of their losses, the sailors and their families could not.

“Ltd.”—limited, in England—and “Inc.”—incorporated in the U. S. A.—and other similar legal definitions in all capitalist countries constitute “for ages uncontested” –ergo, custom-validated and legal-judgments-upheld-royal decrees greatly favoring ig-money capitalism over the mortal, breadwinner-loss-taking vast majority of the poor.

Elizabeth’s East India Company scheme was to have her national navy (and armies) first win mastery of the world’s sea-lanes. This advantage would thereafter e exploited by her privately owned enterprise. This scheme became of the first of such national power structures bids for establishing and maintaining world-trade supremacy through dominance of the world’s ‘high seas’ ocean currents’, trade winds’, critical straits’, and only-seasonably-favorable passages’ world-around line of vital and desirable supplies. All the other world-power-stature individuals who vied for supreme mastery of the world’s high seas lines of supply also operated invisibly through monarchs and nations over whom they had sufficient influence.

Through such behind-the –throne influence the influenced nation’s resources could be politically maneuvered into paying for building and operation pf the navies and armies that would seek to establish and protect their respective privately owned enterprises.

With the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the British Empire won “the world’s power structures championship” and became historically the first empire “upon which” it is said, “the sun never sets”. This is because it was the first empire in history to embrace the entire spherical planet earth’s 71-percent maritime, 29-percent landed, wealth-producing activities. All precious empires—Genghis Khan’s, Alexander the Great’s, the Roman Empire, et al,-- were all land areas surrounded by the unknown. The British Empire was the world’s first spherically closed finite system.

Building and maintaining the world’s most powerful navy, The British Empire was to maintain its sovereignty of the world’s oceans for 113 years.

In 1800 Thomas Malthus, later professor of political economics of the East India Company College, was the first human in history to receive a comprehensively complete inventory of the world’s vital and economic statistics. The accuracy of the pre-Trafalgar 1800 inventory was verified by a similar world inventory taken by the East India Company in 1810. In a later post-Trafalgar—book Malthus confirmed in 1810 his 1800 finding that world-around humanity was increasing in numbers at a geometrical progression rate while increasing its life-support production at only an arithmetical progression rate, ergo, an increasingly majority of humans would have to live out their short years in want and misery.

“Pray all you want” said Malthus, “it will do you no good. There is no more”

A half-century later Darwin expounded his theory of evolution, assuming that nature’s inexorable processes were the consequences of “the survival only of the fittest species and individuals within those species.”

Karl Marx compounded Malthus’s and Darwin’s scientifically convincingly conclusions and said, in effect, “The worker is obviously the fittest to survive. He is the one who knows how to handle the tools and seeds to produce the life support. The opulent others are ‘parasites’.

The opulent others said, “We are opulent because we demonstrate Darwin’s ‘fittest to survive.’ The workers are dull and visionless. What is needed in this world is big-thinking enterprises, courage, cunning, and fighting skill.”

For the last two centuries these two ideologies have dominated the political affairs of world-around humanity. Each side says you may not like our system, but we are convinced we have the ‘fittest’, fairest, most ingenious, way of coping with the lethal inadequacy of life support operative on the planet, but because there are those who disagree diametrically on how to cope, only all-out war can resolve which system is fittest to survive.”

Those in supreme power politically and economically as of 1980 are as yet convinced that our planet Earth has nowhere nearly enough life support for all humanity. All books on economics have only one basic tenet—the fundamental scarcity of life support. The supreme political and economic powers as yet assume that is has to be either you or me. Not enough for both. The hat is why those in financial advantage fortify themselves even further, reasoning that unselfishness is suicidal. That is why the annual military expenditures of the U.S.S.R., representing socialism and the U.S.A. representing private enterprise have averaged over $200 billion a year for the last thirty years, doubling it to $400 billion –making a thus-far-total of six trillion, money spent in developing the ability to kill ever-more people, at ever-greater distances, in ever-shorter time.

If that money had been spent developing newer and better methods of agriculture and colonizing other planets such as Mars and the Moons of Jupiter there would be no threat of a life-support shortage. There is plenty of real-estate out there for those with enough ambition, intelligence and guts to go get it. Get up off your haunches…