[Grovenet] Genesis 4:9

[Walt Wentz]

Wotwotwotwot wot???
There was NO physical wealth in the New World until "Captialism" 
created it? No rich lands? No abundant natural products? No precious 
metals? No nuttin'?
I wonder if the pundit of capitalism is talking about the same New 
World as we live in.
The earliest Europeans to take advantage of that nonexistent wealth 
were probably the Portuguese and British fishermen who pursued the 
huge codfish schools of the waters off North America, in the years 
before Columbus arrived. Such near-unlimited amounts of food 
constituted enormous wealth. Consequently, those vast schools are 
long gone.
Once the European settlers settled in, Tobacco (which exhausted the 
soil of entire counties) was shipped to the Old World in enormous 
quantities, generating more fortunes. After the American Revolution, 
the huge whale fisheries of New England also generated more huge 
fortunes--while helping drive the whales to near-extinction.
The great pine woods of Michigan, and the vast cypress swamps of the 
south, generated enormous wealth-- while they lasted. Those forests, 
a resource once touted to "last forever," are long gone now.
  (I'm not counting the few Icelanders and Greenlanders who harvested 
American timber shortly after 1000 AD. Theirs was a negligible take; 
their real trade with Europe came from fish, hides and ivory 
harvested in their REALLY barren islands).
Then there was the movement west. Once the pesky Indians had been 
removed, via the Trail of Tears, European diseases or a judicious 
application of gunpowder, enormous fortunes were made in cattle and 
grain on the newly-opened lands. Thanks to our abundant coal and iron 
ore, transportation, via riverboat and railroad, made inconceivable 
fortunes moving eager settlers and the products they produced from 
their new "barren" lands. In the process, the vast herds of bison 
were eliminated (there was a brisk market for buffalo hides, but the 
rest of the animal was usually left to rot) and the great prairies 
which had sustained the bison were broken to the plow (beginning the 
process of wind erosion and groundwater depletion which continues 
today).
No precious metals? Tell that to the ghosts of the 49ers and their 
successors, who swarmed from one "strike" to another, diverting 
entire rivers, removing mountains and poisoning lands and streams to 
get at the tons of gold and silver hidden underground. More fortunes 
were made there--sometimes even by the people who originally found 
the mines.
>
>Wealth that is enjoyed in this  country is almost entirely created, 
>from the origins of settlers here, whether those settlers came four 
>hundred years ago or four thousand.  When they moved here in the 
>Elizabethan era they expected gold and other riches but came up dry. 
>When they began moving here it was poorer than today's' third world 
>countries. In fact it still is.  We are poorer in terms of natural 
>resources than Asia, Russia, South America and Africa. By a long 
>shot.  We are a poor hemisphere.  The poorest next to perhaps 
>Antarctica, we have some oil but more countries drill it than we do. 
>We have no precious metals stones, very little land rich for 
>livestock, or any of the other things they were looking for when 
>they came. What generates the United States' wealth was capitalism.

Eh? I went though my Ayn Rand period also. But I got better.  You'll 
note, in all the above examples, that it was rarely the fisherman or 
the harpoon man or the axeman or the miner who got rich. You could 
work as long and as hard and as faithfully as you wished, and scrape 
a modest living until you were too old or stove up to work any 
longer. Then, unless you had managed to save enough money in one of 
the rather undependable and unscrupulous and unregulated banks of the 
day, you were dependent on charity, or your adult children. The great 
fortunes were made by those few who managed to monopolize the sources 
of wealth, and control the incomes of those people who actually 
produced the wealth for them. The era of King Cotton is the epitome 
of this dream of greed, when the  labor producing the wealth could be 
bought and sold like cattle.  Ah, them was the days! The neocons of 
today still pursue the same old dream of destroying all group loyalty 
between laborers (unions and such) and  reducing production costs 
(including labor) to the absolute minimum, and to hell with any 
constraints, such as water, air and land pollution created by the 
unfettered, unregulated production of more and more wealth. Since 
Reagan, they've made a pretty good start at realizing this dream.

>But we eventually created more weatlh, and now it is almost all 
>created symbolically, not divided from the physical spoils, those 
>don't exist and never have. What suppresses the third world's riches 
>is and turns them into poverty when four hundred years ago they were 
>richer than less than one percent of the people that now live in 
>Europe is that the humanism of western Europe has sent them their 
>failed dictatorship, including Swiss Bank Socialism. They by and 
>large are choosing democracy for themsleves, even though there is 
>regress, but the relatively bloodless American revolution and civil 
>War established the democracy necessary for democracy, and it has 
>been sky's the limit ever since in terms of economic growth. Even 
>though no diamon mines, no large oil fields, no rich cultural 
>heritage.

Symbolic wealth? You mean just wealth, the power to control products 
and people and the profits they generate. The "Information Age" is a 
bubble. You can't eat information, or keep the rain off with with 
symbols. Sooner or later, it comes back to the necessities, and 
whether we can continue to sustain the production of necessities from 
a world increasingly strained to support both the dream of unlimited 
greed and an ever-growing population of poor people with no resources 
of their own

>I have never done links here. But this guy is super brave. TED is 
>liberals congratulating themselves, when the people on the ground 
>say time and time again that it doesn't do much except redistribute. 
>It doesn't end up CREATING, which is ultimately how this country got 
>out of the two hundred years' of quagmire that was the horrendous 
>poverty of the collonies.  We did it without being colonialists 
>ourselves or confiscatory taxes, we did it through freedom to create 
>economic activity. It made up for our total lack of actual wealth. 
>We had zip.  It really was the American dream, to take nothing and 
>make something out of it.  That is what I have lived personally, so 
>that is why I am a true believer I guess.  I think of how much worse 
>I would be if I lived in the near CASTE systems in Europe where my 
>parents had been born in the lower middle class and all the 
>government ever thought was good for me was to be my keeper -- in 
>the criminal justice system or the welfare system, but never really 
>thinking that I had the right to have my own first fruits, let alone 
>my own herds to create first lings for someone else.

Carefully left unspoken, but nonetheless implicit in the dream of 
unfettered Capitalism, is the idea that the poor should die. If they 
can't lay claim to some new and heretofore unsuspected source that 
the capitalist has somehow missed claiming, if they aren't willing to 
work for wages lower than the huddled masses of East Rattbaggistan, 
where the jobs have been outsourced--(a quaint, shrewd,almost 
sanitary term, that), if anyone is crippled or stupid or insane or 
sick or belongs to an unpopular group, and has no family able to 
sustain him or her, they should quietly vanish. People who try to 
"organize communities" are dangerous radicals going against the 
Natural Order. People who call for "social programs" are robbers, 
stealing the fruits of their labors from those wise and saintly 
Capitalists.
Phooey.  No matter how convoluted the rationales for "rugged 
individualism and survival of the fittest," human life isn't that 
simple. We are social animals, and responsible for each other. Even 
the Cro-Magnons knew that. Otherwise, the species would not have 
survived.
Walt