'Business' and 'Making money'

'American free-enterprise, capitalist democracy and the right to make as much money as you can and spend it any way you choose' (as long as there's no law against it :-) is the single agency of greatest per_capita resource/environment destruction and waste in the history of man.

The evolution of tools and knowledge can generally be viewed as representative of the evolution of civilization, a 'machine that goes by itself' self-reflexively in (a) 'successively intelligencing resource/environment use' and (b) 'an easing of life'. 'Resource/environment use' and 'ease of life' are dynamically interrelated then, and they depend on 'the sophistication of humans regarding eventualities of an inevitably moribunding carrying capacity'(*1). The peculiarity of thus-far human evolution however, is that it is also that, continuing, of a new, initially primitive and fundamentally pecking-ordered vertebrate diasporating into an econiche'(*2), thus knowledge of this situation comes about only by 'ignorantly hitting the wall' -circumstances effectively precipitating and forcing observation, or thru 'forcefully intelligencing observation' -circumstantiality, and 'learning to think about things in advance'. 'Lifestyle and the quality of life', in other words, is to a great degree still pecking-order-based in spite of 'existing knowledge and tools regarding those eventualities'; civilization is, rather, then, at a stage of 'cerebratively primitive' population growth, environment invasion and resource consumption, a stage of 'diasporatively and wantonly cheap natural resources and labor'.

Distinctly apart from human cooperation then ('Note' below -*5), pecking order generally identifies what power one has for determining (a) 'superiority of lifestyle and quality of life' with respect to others of a people, and (b -implicit) what least one has to do to maintain and even expand that in addition. Thus, in modern government/economies, money is power, and power, money, and 'You make as much money as you can with least effort you can' out of (c) the nature of government and its 'expression' (influence) or out of (d -economics) 'the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services' where the how and what of 'production et cetera' ('government' an evolving service) are 'optable' or manipulable to effect the pecking order of 'whom'(*3). -Crucial here is that it is not possible to "Make as much money as I can and spend it any way I choose (as long as I do nothing illegal :-)" except out of 'diasporatively cheap natural resources and labor ' One 'makes money' and 'earns a living' in general, then, by working in either already existing 'production, distribution and consumption of goods and services' that support lifestyle-and-quality' (or so purport), or (and apart from the advance of science and technology)-

One makes money by 'conjuring' 'New and Improved!' goods and services into existence, goods and services that are 'Faster, Cheaper and Work Better!' (or 'Make you more money!)' than you already have or competitors sell' -a machine that goes by itself, inevitably, in goods and services 'YOU NEED AND DESERVE!' -anything that makes money, in other words, 'easy come, easy go', without respect to validity or merit -derivatives, eventually, making money by betting on the outcomes of money-making betting??? -*4).

American free-enterprise, capitalist democracy and the right to make as much money as you can and spend it any way you choose -as long as there's no law against it! (that too, free-enterprise optable, however :-)

One day, someone of the future will ask "What did they think they were doing?"

feedback? perryb@condition.org)
First posted: February 9, 2002; Last updated: December 17, 2003