[quote=steveyoung]the people involved in OWS either don’t get the main 3E message of this site, or they haven’t internalized the message so that it gets swept aside by an agenda that feels good (jobs for all, education for all, high minimum wage, single payer health care, …), but will run head on into resource limitations right out of the gate.[/quote]Here’s an idea… the CM movement should start organising public showings of the CC at all the get togethers/protests. If they need educating, who better than a well prepared CM follower?
It’s moments like this I wish I was in America after all…!
Mike
[quote=darbikrash]And that’s exactly right, a study of history reveals that the Federal Reserve System was created by capitalists for capitalists. One of the factors was JP Morgan virtually single handedly bailing out the US Government in the Panic of 1907, a predecessor to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. These were of course the days of the robber baron, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing, which required vast sums of CAPITAL to realize the growth imperative of the day.
But a better comment to those that perennially claim that “what we have today is not capitalism” and that “capitalism ended in 1913”, (or 1971, or whenever) is that they should stay off the internet and make it to a library post haste. A quick review of the state of capitalism before 1913, stretching backwards to 1776 yields a non stop series of financial train wrecks caused by endless boom/bust cycles and rampant exploitation. And then there is the labor side of this, which is far more egregious, what with 14 year olds working 12 hours days in appalling conditions, mass labor riots with troops regularly shooting and killing strikers , etc, etc.
[/quote]
Isn’t it strange that during a century of these "financial train wrecks" so much progress was made? Surely some of this progress must be attributable to "capitalism". As for labor, are you claiming that we would still have 14 year olds working 12 hour days in factories today, the killing of strikers,… if not for what exactly? I guess we would also still have slaves living on plantations if not for Abraham Lincoln.
That is somewhat silly. I assume you are using the halcyon days definition of "a period of peace and happiness". Capitalism is never at peace. It’s always creating and destroying. New technology replaces old technology. An old business closes, a new business is opens. This is often destructive and almost always quite messy.
You make this claim often but then I wonder if we are all using the same definition of capitalism. Is any other result truly inconceivable? What would have happened during the crash of 1907 if JP Morgan had not bailed out the banking interests? Would we all be banging rocks together today as hunter gatherers? What if the FED or income tax were not created in 1913? Would capitalism have suddenly ended? How about the many manifestations and failures of various gold standards? Does capitalism require all these events to occur in such a deterministic sequence?
If any of these events (to name the few that you mentioned) did not have to occur, then how can you claim that "capitalism" always results in our current state? To claim this is axiomatic seems quite a strech.
I agree that "He who has the gold makes the rules" but isn’t that is just another way of saying that power corrupts. If corporations have the power of the state, I agree that they will use that power corruptly. Of course you don’t mention if some other entity has that power ( or the state itself ), it will also be corrupt. Unless you believe that those corporate executives are evil but somehow if they would only leave the private sector for government service they will somehow become altruistic incorruptible saints. Why is that?
It is strange to be called evangelists or accused of proselytizing by the very people that have multiple daily posts to threads that push their ideology to others at CM.com Is there some free market capitalist thread that I have been missing or are we just supposed to stay quiet and move to the back of the bus?
[quote=DamnTheMatrix]What else can you do with your CAPITAL than INVEST ? After all, the root word of Capitalism is CAPITAL, and there’s only one thing you can do with capital, and that’s to invest it to make more. You could call that manipulation…
[/quote]
You could save it, work a little less, buy a non-necessity, give to charity or yes, you could choose to put it at risk and see if you can grow it or help someone else reach their goals. Are you telling me you spend every bit of your money. No savings at all? Are you saying that your business you never used any savings of any kind to help support yourself between clients or jobs?
Could be any of those or the ones I lists. Still nothing here that says "Capitalism requires growth".
Wow, i’ll have to assume your joking with that one… :-) Interest rates are completely manipulated by the central banks. With sound money (non-fiat currency) interest rates would be through the roof everywhere. However, for us in the US we get the benefit of screwing most of the rest of the world, and then those that can get the loans get to screw all the savers…
Yes, entrepreneurs borrow money at interest and try to make profits. Many fail… The investor looses their capital and the money is never repaid. If there was not an endless supply of money being pumped into the economy by the central banks interest rates would be much much higher. Investors would demand a much higher return for risk. Fewer people would get loans since they would have to prove to investors that they had a good plan to actually succeed. Many people would not choose to invest but rather save - however due to the central bank manipulation you can’t save but have to speculate - but that’s not capitalism. That’s socialism via monetary policy (both corporate and public).
Ah - yes, the cc talks about having to have growth, but that’s not capitalism - that is fiat currency and fractional reserve banking - two completely seperate things. So, how does capitalism require growth? Not fiat currency, not central bank manipulated markets, capitalism…
Here’s an idea… the CM movement should start organising public showings of the CC at all the get togethers/protests. If they need educating, who better than a well prepared CM follower?
It’s moments like this I wish I was in America after all…!
Mike[/quote]Mike,
You don’t understand the nature of the "get togethers", first they are called "general assemblies" where people participate. The agenda of a general assembly is by consensus, proposals to be voted upon during a general assembly come from the consensus of participants in work groups that take place prior to a general assembly or during a general assembly itself. There are no global rules on how proposals make it to a general assembly rather each occupy group decides what works best for their group. Also, terminology may vary from group to group.
You want to make a proposal that the "CM movement organize public showings of the CC at all the get togethers/protests."
Again there are no global rules and this is a general outline of how you might get a proposal to show the CC to a vote for consensus in a general assembly–for brevity it is not complete. First you would make your pitch for the proposal at an appropriate sub-work group which may have 2 to 10 participants. Anyone can participate in a work group. This is where you would make your first pitch for the CC showings. Because this type of proposal is not an emergency it would likely take place in a work group prior to a general assembly. If and only if there is consensus at this level it would go to whole work group where your sub-group would make its case for the proposal. If there is consensus by the work group it would then be put on the agenda and you would be able to make your proposal in the general assembly.
Since all occupy groups are independent you would need to go through a similar process at each occupy group where you want to show the CC.
Disclaimer: I am not speaking for OWS or any other occupy group. Only the general assembly of an occupy group can speak for that occupy group.
I would suggest that the incredible progress we made during the last couple centuries was the product of an economic system, capitalism, in an era of cheap abundant energy. If that era isn’t now in its death throes, it soon will be. It is not at all clear that capitalism will function in a no-growth era. Although some have asserted that capitalism can exist without growth, I haven’t heard any cogent explanation how that can happen.
As for more humane working conditions, that’s largely attributable to the labor movement. I don’t know if today we would be living under conditions described in The Jungle or practiced by the railroad magnates against the coolies without the labor movement, but I am convinced that working conditions would be a hell of a lot less accomodating than they are without organized labor. Given the downward trajectory of the labor movement and the deteriorating condition of the middle class over the past few decades, we may yet experience the joys of unrestricted capitalism. Or at least, our children will.
Doug
[quote=steveyoung]Perhaps it’s true that OWS was organized by socialists or labor or whoever and that these organizations still play a significant role in the ongoing protest. Now that it’s grown so big and has spread to so many cities, how can they possibly maintain control? There are millions of frustrated and angry people out there. The opportunity to protest and participate in a general assembly where somehow a group of hundreds can reach consensus is probably the most refreshing thing they could experience. I was part of the general assembly meeting of 300 people last night that agreed to begin an occupation of Albany, NY this Friday afternoon at a park across the street from both the State Capitol and City Hall. It was an empowering experience. It certainly felt like the will of the 300 people in the room, not some socialist agenda orchestrated from behind the scenes. About 125 people indicated their intention to begin sleeping out at the occupation site the first night.
With that said, it is certainly possible that this movement could get hijacked by some sort of lefty agenda, be it socialist, democratic or whatever. For the most part, the people involved in OWS either don’t get the main 3E message of this site, or they haven’t internalized the message so that it gets swept aside by an agenda that feels good (jobs for all, education for all, high minimum wage, single payer health care, …), but will run head on into resource limitations right out of the gate.
[/quote]
I wish you well. I’m familiar with Albany and the park you speak of. Beautiful area with lots of interesting history and architecture.
I am a little less sanguine about the prospects of the Occupy Albany efforts than you, based on my experience with Occupy Buffalo at the other end of the state. They have been camping out in Niagara Square for a month and the gathering I attended last Saturday, and reported on at Comment 102, was considerably less productive than you hope for. I am still exploring to see if one of the working groups might be open to a CC presentation, but I have my doubts. I will be very interested to hear about the progress of the Albany group and your efforts to present the CC ideas.
Doug
Doug,
I know what you mean about substance. Other than the decision to occupy a space which everyone seems to support, the group seems to be more interested in either their pet issues, most of which are relevant to some degree at least, or finding someone to blame (most often those in the "1%" - without distinguishing that some of those 1% are productive community members while others might qualify as corrupt criminals). A friend of mine sent me an image with a buddha statue and the words "Occupy yourself - one breath at a time". I would put it in this post if I could figure out how to upload it from my computer. I get the feeling that many in the crowd could benefit from looking closely at themselves and their motives. I’m going to see what I can do about a CC viewing that is open to all and publicized well enough to get some of the more open minded people there.
Steve
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-enforce-the-laws-for-the-99.html
Prosecute the fraud! It’s the essential first step. It’s obvious. It’s "easy," compared to the other needed actions. Everybody except the guilty and co-conspirators can support it.
How about a cogent explanation of why capitalism won’t work in a no-growth or even declining era? While fiat money systems are built that will only survive with growth (the nature of ponzi schemes), I see nothing that says capitalism will require growth.
Now much of what has occurred in the last 100 years is not true capitalism because the value of capital has been manipulated by central banks to fund most of the unsustainable problems we see today. What we see today is the unsustainable nature of socialism. Promises being made that can never be fulfilled based on a ponzi scheme of cheap money.
That includes all sorts of things - from guarantees that banks won’t fail and loose all your money (FDIC), that pensions can’t fail and loose all your retirement savings (PBGC), artificially high wages (minimum wage, health care provision requirements, work-mans comp), guarantees that large employers won’t fail (GM, Chrysler, the airlines, large banks and insurers), and an ever increasing debt of thousands of promises being made that will eventually prove to be unsustainable. All this brought to you by the ability to print money and secretly tax citizens via inflation instead of via direct taxation required with sound money.
You must work hard to survive… You are right that the era of cheap energy cause all kinds of distortions allowing us to believe that we could have it all without hard work. It allowed this ponzi scheme to continue far longer than possible. As resources decline all those promises will be broken and people will work much harder and much longer (most likely until the day they die). No system will solve the problem of fewer and fewer resources, particularly with growing overpopulation.
The only thing we have to really debate is who gets to decide how resources are deployed. Who will make the decisions about the best use of scarce resources? We can choose to allow a small select group to make that decision for people (socialism, communism) or we can choose to allow the people to make that choice via their actions (capitalism). I say a large diverse distributed decision making process is much much more resilient and more likely to produce a better result for more people.
So - who gets to make the decision about ever declining resources - you (via your labor, purchases, savings, investment) or do you turn key decisions about your life and how you will live it over to someone else? That is the true nature of the debate between capitalism and all the others (socialism, communism, etc).
Why do you persist in the fantasy that OWS is OWNED by one or another progessive or martian group. Before you answer if you yourself haven’t participated firsthand in an occupy group and one of their work groups then what you are saying is hearsay.I am not speaking for any particular occupy group only the general assembly of an occupy group can speak for their group.
We hunted the billions of passenger pigeons - even used them for fertilizer - until they became extinct. We hunted millions of buffalo until they were almost extinct. As we know from the Crash Course, we’ve high-graded the ores, drilled the cheap oil. People don’t do "sustainable" when they have freedom to take as much as they can and don’t have to think about the next 30 years.
All that was done by us humans - whether under capitalism, communism, socialism, or whatever. Personal profit was the motive. (In the U.S. it is capitalism, with businesses lobbying for rights and contracts and favourable legislation.)
So what happens when we’ve high-graded eveyrthing (potash, oil, gold, uranium, bluefin tuna, etc.) and only the most marginal stuff is left? Soylent Green?
We need a new way of ordering things, of sustainable extraction. If we want to continue capitalism, how do we make sure it works without taking freely from the tragic commons until there is nothing left to extract or use?
These are some questions to think about. Because the idea that we should fish the world’s bluefin tuna or mahi mahi to extinction doesn’t sound right for the inheritance of future generations. And we can’t trust everyone - especially not the trawlers and Wall Street - to "do what’s right". We know we can’t because they just move on to the next thing. Like they say in mining: "They extract the best. Then the best of the rest."
Poet
You have to have private ownership of everything - you have to have someone that has a vested interest in protecting resources for the future. Right now we have private exploitation of many publicly owned resources. There is no one to say, wait, that’s my stuff - I need to protect it.
At this late stage of the game, we have been borrowing for many many years from the future, and the payback time is coming. It is the nearly 100 years of false prosperity that must now be repaid with less. However, we have used that prosperity to grow population dramatically so less is not an option.
So, I don’t actually think it matters for most of the problems you listed - it’s not a control issue at this point as much as it’s a population issue. We will continue to extract resources at a faster and faster rate because population is continuing to grow. We will do so until we reach a point where resources can not support the population and we will have a large die off.
I believe at this point the best we can hope for is to allow individuals the right to make their own choices and try to survive the coming carnage. Any other choice is simply picking an individual or group of bueraucrats to decide who lives and who dies…
You both make very good points…
I agree wholeheartedly that capitalism should be able to withstand contraction… in fact it should thrive on via creative destruction. I also agree that it needs regulation… but certainly not the kind we have now, which simply pushes us father and farther down the slippery slope of moral hazard… and indeed, FDIC insurance is the first step… if we actually had to worry about our capital (savings) being at risk… then we would give a crap about the health of the bank, and vote with our savings. If AIG had been allowed to fail… then CDS market participants would have realized that this "unregulated" market is dangerous, and some form of self-regulation would have come about spontaneously. The current regime of over-regulation… the perpetuation of the status quo… the TBTF and the bailouts… all signs of a broken capitalism to me. We can all go on and on about how broken it is, I am sure.
Maybe the (capitalist) system itself needs very little regulation… allowing things to fail… people to vote with their dollars, be it in banking or medical treatments… should cause self-regulation. That being said, maybe the regulation that the gov’t does deploy should be focused on protecting limited resources, and insuring that we don’t "sh*t in our bed", so to speak. I really think this boils down to a few simple ideas… we have just botched it up with so much complexity and moral hazard.
[quote=rhare][quote=Poet]
We need a new way of ordering things, of sustainable extraction. If we want to continue capitalism, how do we make sure it works without taking freely from the tragic commons until there is nothing left to extract or use?
[/quote]
You have to have private ownership of everything - you have to have someone that has a vested interest in protecting resources for the future. Right now we have private exploitation of many publicly owned resources. There is no one to say, wait, that’s my stuff - I need to protect it.
At this late stage of the game, we have been borrowing for many many years from the future, and the payback time is coming. It is the nearly 100 years of false prosperity that must now be repaid with less. However, we have used that prosperity to grow population dramatically so less is not an option.
So, I don’t actually think it matters for most of the problems you listed - it’s not a control issue at this point as much as it’s a population issue. We will continue to extract resources at a faster and faster rate because population is continuing to grow. We will do so until we reach a point where resources can not support the population and we will have a large die off.
I believe at this point the best we can hope for is to allow individuals the right to make their own choices and try to survive the coming carnage. Any other choice is simply picking an individual or group of bueraucrats to decide who lives and who dies…
[/quote]
As i suspected, no one is able or willing to answer the question I have asked a number of times on the forum. How will capitalism work as a no growth economy?
rhare
So, in your fantasy world there would be no Yellowstone Park, no (as Rachel Maddow is fond of pointing out) Hoover Dam, no forever wild wilderness areas, no public streets, no county parks, no public schools, no land grant colleges, no public harbors maintained by taxpayer dollars or regulated under state and federal law and no land free from the rapacious instincts of private mining, lumbering and fishing industries? Really??
Doug
[quote=Doug][quote=rhare]
You have to have private ownership of everything - you have to have someone that has a vested interest in protecting resources for the future. Right now we have private exploitation of many publicly owned resources. There is no one to say, wait, that’s my stuff - I need to protect it.
At this late stage of the game, we have been borrowing for many many years from the future, and the payback time is coming. It is the nearly 100 years of false prosperity that must now be repaid with less. However, we have used that prosperity to grow population dramatically so less is not an option.
So, I don’t actually think it matters for most of the problems you listed - it’s not a control issue at this point as much as it’s a population issue. We will continue to extract resources at a faster and faster rate because population is continuing to grow. We will do so until we reach a point where resources can not support the population and we will have a large die off.
I believe at this point the best we can hope for is to allow individuals the right to make their own choices and try to survive the coming carnage. Any other choice is simply picking an individual or group of bueraucrats to decide who lives and who dies…
[/quote]
As i suspected, no one is able or willing to answer the question I have asked a number of times on the forum. How will capitalism work as a no growth economy?
rhare
So, in your fantasy world there would be no Yellowstone Park, no (as Rachel Maddow is fond of pointing out) Hoover Dam, no forever wild wilderness areas, no public streets, no county parks, no public schools, no land grant colleges, no public harbors maintained by taxpayer dollars or regulated under state and federal law and no land free from the rapacious instincts of private mining, lumbering and fishing industries? Really??
Doug
[/quote]
It is quite saddening as a youngster to come here and read all these posts. Emotional attachement to ideology is a detrimental thing within a emergent universe, as our understandings will continually change, yet most here on this forum can think of nothing else other than ‘capitalism vs. socialism/communism’
I know the human brain likes to clump information together into categories, but we seriously need to expand our horizon of options before we destroy this planet arguing about BS ideology.
For me, capitalism simply means orienting supply and demand of resources through the competition between producers/owners and workers. The government is an entity of supposedly democratically elected individuals, put in place to regulate or enforce private property if thats what you want to call it (rhare). Socialism/Communism simply means capitalism with a bigger government. The biggest problem with this system is the competition between the producers and the need to maintain cost efficiency within this competitve paradigm.
In order to maintain cost efficiency, they have to make cuts in production, extraction, and distribution, along with increasing unneeded demand. Those cuts generally equate to human expoitation, and environmental degradation, another phrase for this phenomenon is externalizing costs.
These acts aren’t evil or greedy, they are confining to the requirements of a restriced access, competition based system, that will eat itself alive through ecocidal actions. When I think of corruption, I think of any act that results in exploitation or environmental degradation, and by that definition, every single purchase we make is corrupt, as that product required some form of exploitation and environmental unsustainability to be produced. This only needs to occur within our contemporary economic belief structure, only through objective, humane applications to resource management will our decline halt.
As far as the ‘requirement for growth’ argument, as suppose capitalism doesnt require growth, but without it a feudal society emerges, with a few super rich owners, and a majority poor workers (with technology it’ll soon be-majority poor/unemployed). Growth in GDP is the only way to better a societies standard of living. Without growth, we see continual deflationary contraction, and with that continual increases in poverty, and with that, continual increases in crime and depravation, for the sake of maintaining an outdated ideological system that is centuries old.
For the human population argument, guess what!?! The more access to resources, including education, the less children on average an individual will have. It is the poorer populations that produce the insane amount of children; it will only be through the increasing their access to resources that population rates will stabilize.
Yes - really. However if we as a society choose to even start down that path we could stop long before we slice up the large national public parks and still be much much better off than we are today. The other things on your list "no public streets, no county parks, no public schools, no land grant colleges, no public harbors maintained by taxpayer dollar" should be left to individual communities to decide what they want.
It’s the progressive cry of "what about the children" as usual. How about we leave it up to the parents to decide how to educate their children. How about we leave it up to communities to decide what and how should be regulated in their community.
Let’s approach it from another perspective, we have huge bureaucracies setup to protect us from the "rapacious instincts of private mining, lumbering and fishing industries", and what have we got to show for it? How are all those vaulted protections working out for you? We have government encouraging over fishing, we have private companies being bailed out. We have incentives for all kinds of bad behavior - all via that great and wonderful government. As government control has grown all those things you seem concerned about have become worse… Perhaps a correlation? I know, I know, it’s just we haven’t given the government enough control over our lives yet - just a bit more and I’m sure it will all get better… Are you sure I’m the one in the fantasy world?
I claim private ownership of the redwood forests.
You heard it here first, folks!
Anyone want some redwood mulch or redwood fenceposts? I can sell it all in pieces, except for the last grove, that’ll be a tourist spot north of San Francisco.
Then I’ll use the gold to buy the Pacific Ocean and launch fleets of trawlers. Get as much out as possible. Right now bluefin tuna commands north of $100,000 per fish in Tokyo’s fish markets. Maybe the price will rise to $1 million if I make them rare enough.
Then I could use the gold to buy South America.
Today Sausalito. Tomorrow, the world!
Poet
[quote=Poet]We need a new way of ordering things, of sustainable extraction. [/quote]Much too late for that… we are in serious overshoot already.
Mike
Capitalism has a perpetual growth imperative which is independent of any monetary system.
There are two main mechanisms which drive the growth imperative:
1.) Investors demand for return on investment. When using other people’s money capitalists must compete for investment funds by providing a combination of secure investment and attractive yields. At scale (more on this later) dividend payments from corporate profits can become unsatisfactory to investors, who may search (and find) similar investments that have not only dividend payments but equity appreciation. The equity appreciation component can come from increased valuation in the markets, and one of many contributors to equity appreciation is growth, which is to say increasing market share, increasing market size, and increasing profit margins. Naturally, as investors chase better returns with less risk, they are constantly evaluating the cost/reward ratio, and shift funds accordingly. Some businesses become too agressive and fail, some are too conservative and cannot capture sufficient capital to remain competitive, and also fail. In a dynamic feedback loop, the market provides information to investors that allows them to asses the risk/reward relationship and act accordingly. However, although a technical point, this interaction does not intrinsically require growth, but it most often does.
Steve Keen has done some interesting work that shows that it is possible to have a credit based economy that is self sustainable without requiring growth. However, such an economy must be highly regulated, anathema to the free market evangelists. Sophisticated models show that some non-unique combinations of investment, interest income, entrepreneurship, capitalists and labor base can result in a sustainable market that can exist without growth. But this is not free market capitalism, not by a long shot. And when you take the controls off the system, or invoke a regulatory environment that is captured by the capitalists, then you have a system that exhibits dynamic instability, which is to say it will experience boom and bust cycles that increase in frequency and in magnitude until the crisis is so large that the failure then becomes catastrophic, and not just for the capitalists, but for the non participants as well. And here is where the laissez faire argument falls apart spectacularly, it is fine to invoke Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” but when this scales to the magnitude where you take down an entire civilization some less altruistic citizens may take offense to this outcome.
2.) These bits aside, the capitalist has another, much more compelling reason why he must grow, and grow perpetually. And that is survival. As was discovered in the 19th century(!), the growth imperative that is so often associated with capitalism is not borne of greed, but of survival. The capitalist that has success in the form of surplus value (profit) cannot in fact save his surplus, as has been claimed in previous posts, in fact he must invest some of it back into the business. If he fails to reinvest, his competition will invest, and his competition will then move ahead to enjoy economies of scale, increased market access, new technologies, etc, all of which take capital investment to realize. This places the capitalist at competitive disadvantage, therefore those that make the investment can grow in strength by capturing additional market share at the expense of the non investing capitalist. They can then apply (downward) pricing pressure further reducing the non investing capitalists’ foothold in the competitive market. Eventually, the non-investing capitalist will go out of business. This phenomena is called the Coercive Law of Competition, as all capitalists are compelled to reinvest surplus capital (growth) to stay in business. To stop growing is to seal your death sentence.
Now to the point of scale- do these coercive laws of competition apply to two nine year old girls running a lemonade stand- no, of course not. Similarly, it certainly is possible to run a “Mom and Pop” business at a local or regional level that is scaled to serve a community based on service and a unique product offering. But it must also be said that these “Mom and Pops” are vulnerable, as long as some group of investors does not decide to buy up all the lemonade stands in the US, and undercut those 9 year old girls with thousands of Starbucks style stands on every street corner, those girls can enjoy the fruits of their labor, and so can the community.Technically, these small entities are not really capitalists, rather petit-bourgeoisie, so differentiated as they typically do not own the means of production, But at scale, at the scale of big corporations, multi-national corporations the coercive laws of competition are in full swing.
These imperatives force corporate behemoths to actively search out the lowest labor cost in foreign countries, and also to seek out new markets in the same. They cannot be constrained by resource availability, they are locked in a race to the bottom, and take on increasingly larger parts of the socio-political spectrum to gain (or maintain) competitive footing in the global marketplace.
LOL! You beat me to it… I want Yosemite. You heard it here first, folks! Then I can charge every rock climber who wants to use it ten bucks a head per thousand foot of climbing height. Then when I’ve made enough money from that I can build a huge hydro dam between El Capitan and Half Dome to generate all the power the Western states could ever need.
Rhare, you are even weirder than I thought… Now I understand how you came to have the world’s biggesr renewable energy system.
Oh and not not only can the big C not operate without growth, I predict it willl totally disappear. 100 years from now there won’t be anyone left to run it.
Mike