The Consumer/Employee Coupling Problem

There is a famous exercise in applied mathematics known as the "rabbit lynx coupling" problem (not "coupling" in the sense of "mommy and daddy time", but in the sense of coupled differential equations describing the two populations).  The population of rabbits goes up when the population of lynxes goes down and vice versa.  In a stable ecosystem, the two populations will oscillate at the same frequency with opposite phase.  It's all great fun, unless of course you're the rabbit.

In modern capitalist economies, there is, it seems to me, a similar problem with coupled populations: Consumers and Workers.  In this case, however, they're really the same population or at least there's a great deal of overlap (you NEVER find a rabbit who IS a lynx!).  As I have said before, and is certainly well known anyway, money must flow if the economy is to be healthy.  One way money flows, in fact we're finding that it's the principal way,  is that people buy things.  In order to buy things they need to have money.  In order to have money they need to have jobs.  Furthermore, when they think there is a likelihood that they might lose their job, people buy only what they absolutely need.  This is important.  It turns out that this isn't enough.  For the economy to be healthy, people must buy stuff that they don't need.  That's crazy!

And this is where we are now.  The economy is struggling to get out of a recession and the way we're told this will happen is that people will buy things (that they don't need).  But in order to do that, they need jobs so they can have more money than just what they need to buy just what they need.  And what do we expect those jobs to be?  Why, making stuff and selling stuff and disposing of stuff that we don't need!
Look:  if people don't need stuff, a new car, a new dryer, a new sofa, our economy shouldn't collapse if they don't buy it anyway.  In fact, the economy would be more sustainable if it could survive with people only buying what they need, or at least mostly buying what they need.  It may be, and I have serious trepidation even raising this, that not everybody needs to be fully employed to make what everyone needs.  Ultimately, after all, it's really the farmers, and extractors (oil, minerals, ...) who make what we need.  Everyone else is really making stuff so those guys don't get all the money.  And, by the way, I'm not talking about old MacDonald here.  The farmers in question are Cargill and Monsanto and ArcherDanielsMidland.

Anyway, the problem is that our economy depends on the coupling between different aspects of the same population: workers and consumers.  There are no jobs if people don't buy steering wheel covers, or t-shirts, or paper clips.  Likewise, there is no stuff if people don't have jobs.  But most of it is stuff we don't need.  That is, it's the stuff we're not buying now because we're limiting our buying to what we need.  But because of "lack of consumer confidence", no new jobs are being created so consumers are even less confident.  But it's all made up.  We're not rabbits suffering from an abundance of lynxes.  Nor are we lynxes suffering from a scarcity of rabbits.  We are all both workers (money receivers) and consumers (money spenders).  And we shouldn't have to buy more than we need to ensure that we will be able to buy what we need in the first place.  We ought to find a way of living so that we produce enough for people to have what they need (and then some) and for people to acquire those things and not have to keep acquiring what they don't need.

So okay, you'll say that this is socialism and planned economy and that it doesn't work.  Fair enough.  But I think it's obvious that this, what we have now, doesn't work either.  So why is capitalism not working so much better than socialism not working?

Why I'm not a Democrat

The Democrats are like a big pile of cow shit between me and a big pile of pig shit, that being the Republicans.  They may smell better, but they still stink.  And they're full of shit.