Free movement of goods: general framework
As western European nations joined together to form the European Free Trade Area and then eventually the European Union, increased truck traffic through nations soon became an issue. Traffic increased due to the abolition of barriers between nations. Materials and goods must be moved frequently. This causes increased truck and other traffic through Europe. This increased traffic has caused severe problems for Austria and Switzerland. Austria and Switzerland, as well as France and Italy, have Alpine regions which are tourist attractions and provide significant income for the nations. The truck traffic through these regions caused increase pollution and the possibility of environmental damage in the areas. France and Italy have continued to follow the regulations imposed by the European Commission which allows free movement of goods. Austria and Switzerland, however, have attempted to negotiate restrictions on this traffic.
TED Case: Austria Truck Traffic
In other words, this is having serious impacts on the environment, for example, the Alps:
Fernand the Mountain Guide part 1 - Retreating Mt Blanc Glacier - YouTube
Super-sized shipping: The impact of new mega ships, trucks and tunnels » Greenfudge.org
... although there are attempts to do something about it:
Alpine Initiative - Why we need the Alpine Initiative
Switzerland's Gotthard Base train tunnel is redefining Europe - Telegraph
and there are logistical solutions:
Should we tax truckers for time on the road? – – CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly
But these are not the only impacts...
It seems that Europe might well be following the United States lead:
The evolution of low wage America: The most common jobs by state in 1978 to 2014. The destruction of the manufacturing industry.
The US continues to see a widening gap between the army of low wage workers, the highly paid small upper-class, and a dwindling middle class. We’ve already shown through IRS tax data that households make a lot less than people think. The US has been on a very steady trend towards having a massive pool of low wage labor with nearly non-existent fringe benefits. Benefits have been decreasing while the cost of healthcare and planning for retirement is surging. It is always interesting to look at Census and BLS data for employment figures. There was a fascinating report looking at the most common jobs per state over time, starting in 1978. The evolution is interesting and what we can take from the report is that the secretarial position went from being very common to being virtually non-existent. And today, truck drivers are the most common job in many states thanks to the obvious reality that you can’t outsource a big rig trucker driver (although I’m sure driverless technology will soon handle that in a few years).
The most common jobs by state
There seems to be a few overarching themes to the data:
-Dominance of truck drivers (hard to outsource)-Rise and fall of secretaries (the personal computer has been a big push here)-Fewer farmers
Take a look at these maps between 1978 and 2014:
This is a fascinating look at the evolution of work in the United States. It also plays into the overall trend of low wage labor expansion. You can see that the Mid-West had a healthy representation of manufacturing work in 1978. This is good paying work. But take a look at what has happened to that sector...
The evolution of low wage America: The most common jobs by state in 1978 to 2014. The destruction of the manufacturing industry.
Why America is now a nation of truck drivers - The Washington Post
Map: The Most Common* Job In Every State : Planet Money : NPR
And why is it so easy to truck stuff across vast distances?
Futures Forum: Subsidies and social engineering: or why we build roads.
Energy and Transportation Issues: A Libertarian Analysis
Kevin Carson’s fourteenth research paper, Energy and Transportation Issues: A Libertarian Analysis, argues that “it is the state’s constraints on market freedom that have created an economy centered on long-distance shipping and the automobile-highway complex, and led to the geometrically snowballing consumption of subsidized energy inputs with declining net benefit. And it is market freedom—simply put, a society in which big business operates on its own nickel instead of the taxpayer teat—that will deliver us from our enslavement to this unholy monoculture.”
Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth: Juliet B. Schor: Amazon.com: Books
blog.p2pfoundation.net/juliet-schor-plenitude/2011/11/03
blog.p2pfoundation.net/juliet-schor-plenitude/2011/11/03
Of course, Adam Smith famously thought it was a good thing to transport goods over long distances
Comparative advantage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
And of course, certain products can only be produced in certain parts of the world - which necessitates transporting them, sometimes over long distances:
Smith was a terroirist. He believed in the idea of terroir and wrote in the Wealth of Nations that the wine grape was particularly sensitive to local growing conditions.
On Champagne: Keynes or Adam Smith? « The Wine Economist
Nevertheless, the question is, how much do we need to transport over how long a distance?
Decentralized Manufacturing
Let’s examine the immediate crisis facing America, the debt crisis. Why do we have so much debt?We could rightly blame the money system or the political process, or the wealthy elite who control both, but the most direct explanation is that for many years we have done more consuming and borrowing than producing and saving. For decades our productive capacity has been migrating out of our country, so that now there are fewer quality jobs and we must borrow money from foreigners to pay for imported goods that we formerly produced ourselves.
Did you know that televisions are no longer made in the USA? What’s wrong with this picture? Do we really gain something by buying TV’s and other products from big box stores, shipped from the opposite side of the world using dwindling reserves of oil, only to see them end up on garbage scows heading back to Asia because our landfills are already overflowing with junk? We could produce virtually everything we need ourselves as we once did, and then use our surplus products and resources to trade for whatever else we may need. So why don’t we?
Globalization, with its offshoring and outsourcing, was sold to us as a means to a better life based on cheaper products, but it is really a “get something for nothing” scam intended to transfer wealth and consolidate power at the expense of the middle-class. It is the final stage of a process that began several hundred years ago and that has lead us to the brink of ruin. But we have everything we need to save ourselves, once we understand the basic problem beginning with how we got here.
In the early centuries of the industrial revolution, great advances were made in precision mechanical gears such as those used in watches. Gears were also used to transmit power from local sources such as wind and water to increase productivity in a variety of repetitive operations such as grinding, beating, hammering, cutting, sawing, pumping. pulling, and bellowing. But with the introduction of the steam engine in the 18th century, the industrial revolution entered a new phase characterized by centralization and gigantic scale. Steam engines were not cost effective on a small scale. They needed a constant supply of fuel and tenders to operate them, so they were built on a large scale and became the center of sprawling factories that often operated in shifts around the clock and were feed by transportation networks connecting to coal mining operations.
Very large capital investments were required, beyond the means of ordinary individuals and neighborhoods. A worker class evolved to perform monotonous tasks in the factories and mines for long hours and low pay, for the benefit of the few who had the resources to create the infrastructures. The wealthy industrialists wanted a guaranteed return on their investments, so they found ways to ensure that a profitable market for their products would persist for an unnaturally long time whether by influencing labor, patent, tax and tariff laws; using marketing psychology to create artificial demand and an appetite for frequent style changes; designing in short product lifespans and the need for frequent maintenance and repair; or suppressing competing companies and technologies — anything to keep the profits flowing. A steady revenue stream is always preferable to a one-time sale. Monopolies are always preferable to free market competition.
Large factories are like lumbering behemoths, designed for a specific purpose and therefore difficult to adapt to changing circumstances. This centralized industrial model has a built-in resistance to progress, stifling innovation and adaptation because of the need to recoup investments in large-scale dedicated machinery and buildings. In contrast, skilled craftsmen operating locally and with relatively low capital overhead can adapt rapidly to changes, either in market demand or technology. Local industry conforms itself to the needs of society, whereas society must conform itself to the needs of large-scale industry.
In retrospect, it’s unfortunate that electrical machinery did not appear before the steam engine.Because of its efficiency even on small scales and relative ease of transport, electricity could have been introduced directly into homes and neighborhoods, increasing the productivity of manufacturing even more than the steam engine but without as much need for centralization. But by the time electrical machinery appeared in the 19th century, the wealthy industrialists were already in control of society and so brought electricity into their factories to improve their productivity but without changing their centralized system. And so their power, wealth and influence have increased ever since, to this day.
To maintain their dominant position, they must create a steady stream of products whether needed or not, and so they have become experts at sophisticated psychological manipulation as pioneered by Edward Bernays. People must be conditioned to feel that they always need the latest gadget or fashion to be happy, and they must be kept stressed and distracted so that they never realize what is being done to them. But there is more: To ensure that the assembly lines never stop, they intentionally design their products to fail in a short time and they deliberately avoid a modular, reusable approach. If something breaks or wears out, it should be thrown away and replaced; and if it doesn’t break, it must be discarded anyway to avoid the appearance of being unfashionable. And more still: Even despite these strategies demand for new products eventually dries up, perhaps because there is a recession caused by the elite to facilitate wealth transfer. But the factories must keep producing to recoup the enormous capital investment in them, so wars are started to generate artificial demand for military products.
Picture a giant operation stretching across our planet in which conveyor belts bring gobbled up resources into giant processing plants where they are converted into plastic-wrapped products before exiting on other conveyor belts to be delivered into the mouths of force-fed and miserable consumer-creatures, whose excrement collect in vast toxic pits. A few elite fat cats sit on the roofs of their factories surveying their empire, heedless that non-renewable natural resources are rapidly disappearing and the toxic waste spewed by their factories is poisoning the very air they breathe. Animals and plants are dying everywhere, the earth and its oceans are becoming waste dumps, and smog blots out the sun. If this is “economies of scale”, then their idea of economy has nothing to do with what Thoreau practiced at Walden Pond.
Picture instead a world more like the Amish culture, or certain indigenous cultures with ancient traditions of living in harmony with the land, yet having the option to take advantage of remarkable technological advances that can support fractal sovereignty with a manageable environmental impact. It is easier now than ever before to create a society in which perpetual struggle for survival is replaced by satisfying creative work balanced with plentiful leisure and opportunity for creative pursuits, and with such an abundance of the most basic necessities of life that no one need do without them.
We have been conditioned to believe that the conveniences of modern life would not exist without mega-corporations. Why is it then, that we are working harder and longer for less? Why is so much of humanity still mired in poverty? An iPhone is at least a thousand times more powerful than the computers on board the Apollo space capsule that took men to the moon. The increases in productivity due to the 20th century introduction of computers, not to mention other scientific and technological achievements, should have led to world where people only need work about one day per week to meet their most basic needs. Instead, the bounty of human ingenuity and labor has been funneled to a few elite whose only skill lies in their ability to exploit others, including the tactic of keeping the masses so preoccupied with stress and distractions that they don’t realize there is a better alternative. They’ve convinced us that there isn’t enough to go around; it’s a dog-eat-dog world where they are the alpha dogs and so we’re better off joining their pack and keeping our heads down.
So, we have the advantage of modern electrical machinery and computers along with other innovations such as advanced materials, all together which make it possible for localized, light manufacturing to play a much more prominent role in our society. This advantage is multiplied if we also adopt the open source and modular philosophies pioneered by the computer software community, but which also apply to the world of hardware and tangible products. Open source, modularized software has proven to the world that decentralized innovation combined with free sharing creates a global abundance that greatly exceeds that of the centralized, secretive, territorial and wasteful dominant industrial model. Thanks to the internet, when open source software or hardware designs are released, thousands if not millions of people around the world instantly benefit, and then they may also incorporate them into their own work, resulting in exponentially rapid advancement for humanity.
The psychopathic controllers and their sociopathic minions don’t like this trend. They are always seeking ways to tap into revenue streams and siphon off the fruits of others’ labor and creativity, and they’ll use any means to accomplish that. I prefer to think of them as predators and parasites. This helps put them into their proper place in the order of things. If you can imagine them as vampire squids and tapeworms, then they can be dealt with on those terms. It’s a simple matter of choosing not to be their prey by disengaging from their systems, which always rely on some form of coercion, manipulation or deception. Their numbers and influence will decrease as their food supply dwindles. No need to despise them; they actually serve a useful role in that they make us stronger in the long run, just as their counterparts do in the natural world.
The more that you and your neighbors become self-sufficient, the less vulnerable you will be to coercion and manipulation. If your neighbors aren’t ready to at least partially disengage from the dominant parasitic system, then it may be better to relocate or find virtual neighbors through the internet rather than stand alone. There are progressive communities springing up everywhere. As more people join them, they will serve as an example of a model for an abundant and sustainable society for those still trapped in the old paradigm, until a tipping point is reached.
Let’s summarize:
- The sustainable development of humanity was hijacked by a predatory and parasitic segment of the population during the industrial revolution, diverting us into a cul-de-sac characterized by central control, concentration of wealth, widespread poverty, diminishment of individual freedom and innovation, depletion of natural resources and environmental degradation, and high-overhead, large-scale operations which alter society to accommodate, serve and perpetuate themselves, even after they become obsolete or destructive.
- The way for humanity to return to a sustainable path of development is through massive decentralization, supported by technological innovation shared globally through open communication channels. Creative solutions found anywhere can immediately spread everywhere if the predators and parasites are taken out of the loop, resulting in an explosion of sustainable abundance and advancement.
So, what are we waiting for? Here is a list of resources, projects and movements to join or support, relevant to decentralized manufacturing. In future articles I will examine other social subsystems such as money and education from a decentralized perspective.
.
.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment