Friday, March 6, 2009

Why the meltdown of the DOW doesn't matter

Yes, all of you baby boomers out there are feeling the pain, my own parents included. The meltdown of the stock market after the crash of the financial industry has likely left your retirement in shambles at best. Who knew, after all that campaigning against Social Security, that you were going to need to depend upon it?

Having said that, your pain doesn't matter in the long run. It's a symptom, not the problem. The problem is the systemic failure of the free market to control fraud. If you were invested in a non-market, religious based retirement system like the Knights of Columbus annuity, you'd find that you wouldn't have the losses that you do in the open market.

Subsidarity and Solidarity- these are the watchwords of the Catholic Church's preferred economic system, and these are the watchwords of the Knights of Columbus in what they invest in. That is also where we should be headed. Manufacturing and service should be done at the lowest level of complexity possible, that's Subsidarity. Your immediate neighbor is your brother in the fight against international centralization- and you should stand in Solidarity with him.

Only with these, can we rebuild our world. The time of centralized markets like the NYSE and the DJIA is over. The time of localization has come. Want a real retirement? Find a need in your local community and fill it- and you'll never need to retire.

2 comments:

James Mercedo said...

>Subsidarity and Solidarity

>Manufacturing and service should be done at the lowest level of complexity possible

I agree, but how?
I think it is necessary to have much higher productivity as a premiss to achieve its ideal.

Dow's meltdown doesn't help build a local unique market, either.

Theodore M. Seeber said...

One emerging technology, the combination CNC fabber, may yet defeat productivity in favor of solidarity. While it may never be worthwhile to keep a full inventory of potential raw materials on hand, I can easily see city, county, or district factories where you pay a small fee to "fabricate" your plans from the internet for a huge variety of items, much as print-on-demand publishers such as lulu.com do right now (both lulu and amazon use local book publishers for this purpose to reduce shipping cost).

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Oustside The Asylum by Ted Seeber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://outsidetheaustisticasylum.blogspot.com.