Balder Ex-Libris

Author : The Creativity Movement online magazine
Title : Imperium 12
Year : 2014

Link download : Imperium_12.zip

Self-reliance. The best way to help the economy is to spend money. So say the financial experts with all the fancy degrees from all those prestigious universities. You don’t ever hear those experts extolling the virtues of self reliance. That’s because the more self reliant you are the less money you spend. A lot of people view self reliance as an outdated virtue, old fashioned to the point of being outright historical. You would grow and preserve your own vegetables and then you wouldn’t have to spend so much on food. You would sew your own clothes, quilt your own bed covers and fix your own cars out under the shade tree. But what about the modern entrepreneur who uses his laptop and the internet to do business and keep records and do taxes instead of hiring a secretary and bookkeeper? The secretary and bookkeeper he does not hire do not have paychecks to spend that will contribute to the economy. What about those home schoolers, who collectively reduce the number of teachers who find jobs and receive paychecks to spend? How about all those texters and emailers who have reduced the number of postal employees who spend their checks into the economy? The thing about self reliance is that it does not show up in the figures put out by all those lettered experts. The number of jobs may be down because all those extra teachers and postal employees are not getting paid. But the population itself enjoying better finances because of the self reliance afforded by modern technology. Less work and less pay is not such a bad thing if it does not mean less goods and services, but does mean less taxes. The industrial revolution brought about a mass-production mentality in which people stopped being independent individuals and locked themselves into roles as part of the larger society. They performed their limited functions in the economy and paid for others to perform the functions they no longer did themselves. This system failed us miserably. Now technology has enabled us to restore self reliance to our lives, side by side with participation in a mass-production based system. We can move back and forth between them as benefits ourselves. Don’t be fooled by those gloomy numbers put out by the experts. They are based on corporate ways of measuring things. The experts, if they want to retain any credibility at all, need to come up with new points of measurement that accurately reflect the way things work now. Meanwhile don’t let the chicken-little media scare you. Get right in there and live. The more self reliance you add to your life the less you will depend on the corporations and the powers that be and the more they will appreciate your business and your labor. Brian Vincent. ...