SC: So I’ve been reading though your web forum and noticed a lot of interesting information. You have a different take on economics that I haven’t really heard before. Can you explain that a little bit?
AS: Foundational Economics. Throughout my life I understood the concept of money very readily and I have been kind of fascinated by it. I’ve worked in banking for about 14 years and done other things. So everybody that goes into economics starts with the assumption that we have to use money. They don’t look at why they use it in the first place. I spent many years pursuing the reasons why we feel it’s necessary to account for how much energy we’re putting in and whether we’re worthy enough of being allowed to survive on this vastly abundant planet. That’s where I came from. I said, ‘I want to know why we’re doing this in the first place.’ After looking it and studying it, reading a lot of works, and contemplating it, and trying to figure out why things are so messed up in this world when I was told that the real goals were one thing; it isn’t even going close to that.
Putting it all together, when I got to the ground level I realised that’s what we’re doing. We’re saying, “Ok you’ve put X amount of time-energy in and looking at the product we value it this much. So we are going to throw a few accounting tokens at you, which you previously consented to, contracted to. Except for that amount of time-energy you have expended.”
It’s the very basic foundation of why we exchange to survive because we feel the need to account for these things. The reason we had to account for these things had everything to do with… it took energy to acquire things, create things, work things. So what we are really accounting for is our energy. This planet sits here, abundant. We could support easily 100 times the number of people on this planet if we got rid of planned obsolescence for example. So we have this blockade between the abundance of the planet and us, which is creating an artificial scarcity on this planet.
Which creates what we see when we look at pictures of children starving with buzzards over head waiting for them to die. It’s like what a minute, this is wrong. We shouldn’t have this. As far as I’m concerned, Pope’s not withstanding, everyone who’s born to this planet is an owner if you will. I don’t really like that term own, but it’s here for all of us. It’s like we have this buffet and if we worked it right we could make it so we can all take what we liked out of the buffet.
