Recession or the Emperor’s Old Clothes?
by We are all facing financial problems at the moment. But isn’t there a simple solution and isn’t much of it merely a matter of perception anyway? This lyrical little article steps back and takes a wider look.
We are all complaining at the moment. We are all scared and shifty and we don’t trust one another.
They said we’d need 10,000,000 one bedroomed homes and 6,000,000 family units in the next twenty years. But they’ve stopped building now. Where will all those people live? They won’t go away, will they?
Wedgwood was going. Woolworths went. A company with a great idea about a hotel couldn’t quite hack it. But we still need our pots and our pick and mix and our luxurious moments to look forward to.
What’s the point of repossessing that man’s house? He was doing well, then the company he worked for decided to stop making cars, even though people still needed them. So he defaulted on his mortgage. He and his family have to live in rented accommodation. The rent is higher than the mortgage he was paying, so he defaults on that and the landlord defaults on her mortgage and the bank repossesses that house as well. The mortgage company can’t sell either house for enough money to cover the mortgages that were on them – or even for less, because they’re not giving out mortgages any more. What’s the point? Won’t they get more money back if they just wait a little bit longer?
But they won’t wait. The mortgage people lay off workers and the nice lady who always answers the phone can no longer shop at M & S, or travel with BA, or afford Virgin Media and all three companies lay off workers who then default on their mortgages, even though the sun is still shining and that is the source of everything.
An old man with over £1,000 in the bank decides he can only afford to spend £2.00 a head on his half dozen or so relations. “There’s a credit crunch on, you know.” So the blue and white pots stay in the shops, and the pick and mix rots and the hotel workers are laid off and there’s no holidays for anyone.
Money is artificial and is supposed to represent labour / and or raw materials. The sun is still shining and the earth is still full of riches. There is plenty of work to be done. Money is supposed to be our servant but it has become our master, a bully of a master. Its meaning has become skewed.
Stop. Pull down the redundant structures.
Start again. Give everyone some new building blocks.
Rid the Emperor of his old pretend clothes and give him some new real ones. Let everyone, even the Emperor, work to their joy and get machines to do the rest. Machines that run on the power of the wind and the sun. Let us all enjoy the abundance.
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