The Ideal of a Local Economy

Wendell Berry via How to Save the World:

A TOTAL ECONOMY is one in which everything—“life forms,” for instance,—or the “right to pollute” is “private property” and has a price and is for sale. In a total economy significant and sometimes critical choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become the property of corporations. A total economy, operating internationally, necessarily shrinks the powers of state.... A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations: communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world…

How are they to protect themselves? There seems, really, to be only one way, and that is to develop and put into practice the idea of a local economy—something that growing numbers of people are now doing. For several good reasons, they are beginning with the idea of a local food economy. People are trying to find ways to shorten the distance between producers and consumers, to make the connections between the two more direct, and to make this local economic activity a benefit to the local community. They are trying to learn to use the consumer economies of local towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of local farm families and farm communities. They want to use the local economy to give consumers an influence over the kind and quality of their food, and to preserve land and enhance the local landscapes. They want to give everybody in the local community a direct, long-term interest in the prosperity, health, and beauty of their homeland. This is the only way presently available to make the total economy less total. It was once, I believe, the only way to make a national or a colonial economy less total. But now the necessity is greater...

Perhaps one also begins to see the difference between a small local business that must share the fate of the local community and a large absentee corporation that is set up to escape the fate of the local community by ruining the local community....

The “free trade” which from the standpoint of the corporate economy brings “unprecedented economic growth,” from the standpoint of the land and its local populations, and ultimately from the standpoint of the cities, is destruction and slavery. Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.

I can visualize a specialization in financial planning that would get out in front of this trend, with both personal planning and local investment vehicles.  As the auction rate securities market locks up, the mortgage loans default, the stock market drops, gas and food prices rise, the dollar collapses, derivatives unwind, and as official cost of living statistics (driving raises and Social Security increases) are systematically understated, people are going to have to adjust by unplugging from the bubble economy and its global Superclass and start looking closer to home, among friends and neighbors who actually do something useful, like grow tomatoes or fix a toaster oven.  Sounds grim, but money will be made, no doubt, getting out in front of this mega-trend.

Comments

[Theinvestingspeculator]

I think a bigger view is in order. as the internet opens the world up and people are exposed to foriegn ideas, free market economies are promoted.
www.theinvestingspeculator.com

[phil]

A little of everything on the internet.