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…
