4 WAYS WE CAN MOVE TOWARDS A STEADY STATE
If you are a player of strategic games like chess you'll be a natural for making the moves needed to get to a steady state economy.
In chess, you have to simultaneously attack and defend; you'll never win if you only defend and you run the risk of losing if you only attack.
The ‘enemy' in this scenario is banking, corporates, politicians, and avoidance which are all inextricably linked: the banks loan ever-more, the corporates need to earn ever-more, they can purchase evermore politicians (think of the Trans-pacific Partnership Agreement) to reduce red tape which means avoiding the real costs.
Their system has essentially crashed and is currently on life support, but is still robbing the future in an ever-greater manner. Its life support is actually us ordinary folk becoming poorer by any of Herman Daly's measures. Banks are bailed out but mortgage defaulters are shown the door.
It's a one-way vacuum-cleaner which has to be parried, protested, exposed. If we don't, we will be unable to apply our environmental laws, unable to use Pharmac, unable to go Ge-free, unable to be organic.
The old system is incapable of altering to something sustainable in the longterm, and those that move and shake in it, like the G20, the IMF, the World Bank, the Bilderberg Group, are incapable of changing it anyway.
That leaves us, but how can we do it?
Don’t borrow from them
If we don't borrow from them, and don't buy stuff from outfits which borrow from them, then the banks are gone. It's a bit like buying Fair Trade but instead we're buying from the ‘non-borrowed'.
Loan to each other (instead of the banks)
However, there's one important proviso: no interest. Charge a flat, agreed fee by all means, but no compound interest. The net result must be that we are all better off because interest charges take more than half our life's earnings, one way or another.
Stick to Herman Daly’s four points
These have nothing to do with money but everything to do with being able to continue into the future.
Interact personally, which mostly means locally
Voluntary work, free help, brownie points given and taken between trusting/trusted peers.
It makes entire sense. It would mean grandparents passing on knowledge to youngsters, not being shunted off into rest homes. It would mean talking, learning and co-operating with each other. It's hard to see a downside.
Time-banking, green dollars and local markets are ways that local folk, starting small (change always comes from local folk starting small) are trialling this way of life, evolving sustainable future trading systems. Those who control the present system will pressure the politicians to outlaw these threats and sooner or later there will be a showdown. Inevitably, though, the current system will lose because unsustainable things always cease and one or more of the new systems will prove to be a best fit.
We have lived in a short period of interesting times but what we have to do now is organise a long period of nointeresting times. The transition will be interesting.