Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 16:39:37 -0800
From: "Nancy H. Cady" 
Message-ID: <34CA89C9.794B@cais.com>
References: 
Reply-To: nhcady@cais.com
Subject: Re: usury, capitalism and Miss Piggy
To: Jim Anderson 

Jim Anderson wrote:
>
> I'm more inclined to the view that the stock market represents the varying
> mass movements of greed and fear on the part of investors, investment
> managers and corporations who have large sums of money at risk. It values
> equally the production of cancer causing chemicals, the medical equipment
> and pharmaceuticals used to treat patients who have contracted the disease
> from those chemicals and the coffin and cemetary space used to bury the
> deceased cancer victim.

This reminds me of the difference between productivity measured by the salaries and profits generated and productivity measured by the results. For example, a hurricane or flood can generate salaries and profits - after all, we measure the impact of a disaster by its financial cost. But all of the new investment of labor and material cannot be translated into that much more value in the end product. A destroyed house may be replaced by a new house which generates wages and profits but the net result does not increase the capital - the house is, after all, a replacement. Thus chemical poisons, health care, and coffins may all represent wages and profits but do nothing for our life capital.

I think our emphasis should be on adding to the capital of life - comfortable living, reasonable communities, personal and spiritual growth, education and talent, you name it. Investment of our life energies and resources (including money) should maintain life-sustaining wages and profits and should avoid depleting life capital. And life capital is our education, our health, our ethics, etc etc. This is our mission. I believe we have enough intangible, renewable life capital to conserve our tangible non-renewable physical capital resources - water, fuel, soil nutrients, material, etc., even the beauty and wonder of wild places and wealth of ecological systems. I.e., we've got to apply our brains, our social organization, our talents to this. Doesn't mean we have even begun to know how to do it. In fact the world does this pretty poorly. Thus this list.

I may be way off base tying life capital to financial capital - maybe it's just a clever use of definitions in my own brain. But we have choices - in investment decisions, living styles, product consumption - to translate this life capital into physical capital (financially measured if we must so measure), living wages and profit. This then turns back to improve life capital.

I'm losing my train of thought - sorry. But I don't think investments and personal growth/satisfaction are separate tracks. Both are part of the bigger scheme of things.

Therefore, I am as interested in the world coffee economy as I am in my retirement investments. And as concerned about my life style choices to keep me free of heart disease as I am in the plight of the world wide fish stock. These are not easy links and the more I learn the more I discover how complex it all is - I appreciate the list tremendously for bringing ALL of this to my attention.

Maybe usury is really the depletion of our capital - of all kinds. And remember too that usury is using capital to produce something - if we're lucky, it's more capital and not just wages and profit. Ah, the complexity.

Miss Piggy, whoops, I mean Nancy.

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