Dancing Rabbit hopes to have a thriving local economy one day. To be sustainable, it's important that Dancing Rabbit not rely on shipping goods from far away to meet our needs. Similarly, it's important for the people who live at DR to be able to work on the land, so we can stop driving to work. We want our community to demonstrate a sustainable way of life, and this means we need to have a sustainable economy.
This will be a series of articles discussing the issues involved in Dancing Rabbit economics, how we might address those issues in the future, and what we're doing right now to create the Dancing Rabbit economy.
My hope is that at Dancing Rabbit, we will always consider the real value and real cost of our economic decisions. If we continue to subconsciously accept that the accumulation of scarce official currency is as, or more, important than creating a sustainable culture, it will be very difficult to evaluate the real costs of our purchases. To force ourselves out of that scarcity mentality, we need to bring valuation out of the subconscious and into the conscious. In this first installment I'll describe some aspects of our economy I'd like us to be conscious of.
Providing for most of our needs locally and supporting the local community:
To build a more sustainable culture, we need to ship
goods dramatically less, so we need to strive for local self-reliance. To create local markets, as a culture we need to favor local sources of goods over distance sources. To change the production methods of our world, we need to convince producers it's important to consider ecological and general ethical costs associated with production. It's much easier to open a dialogue about production methods and resource usage with a local producer than one on the other side of the world, whose methods are difficult to determine.
- Making capital readily available for people who need it:
- Making capital available to anyone who needs it is important to create a more egalitarian culture not split into haves and have nots. This could be in the form of loans for new businesses or homes, providing labor for a big work project, or just pooling resources where it makes sense to.
- Not being in debt:
- As a community, we need to earn as much as we spend. In the long term, being debt-free is a necessity for economic sustainability. In order to acquire capital to create Dancing Rabbit infrastructure we've had to take out loans we can't soon repay. In the future it would be desirable for projects to be supported by the wealth of the community.
- Having a sufficient currency supply:
- To create a culture of abundance rather than scarcity, there needs to be enough currency to facilitate the exchange of abundant resources. If people feel like money is very scarce, they have a tendency to hoard. When there really aren't enough resources, this is very sensible. But hoarding happens even when there is more than enough for everyone, just because money is scarce. Money is not the actual value in the world, it just acts as a sort of lubricant for making trades. When there isn't enough money, the economy, like a machine, can grind to a halt. This can be extremely painful if you make your livelihood by providing a wonderful, but not strictly necessary, product. I want Dancing Rabbit to be robust enough to support a wide variety of artists and musicians and craftspeople. For that to happen, the members of the community need to consistently feel like there is enough abundance to support those pursuits.
- Equitably distributing scarce resources:
- This is a thorny problem. In theory, a sufficient currency supply should prevent hoarding of abundant resources, but helping everyone get their scarce resource needs met is much more difficult. Capitalism solves’ this problem by ignoring it, assuming that the rich, the people who are best at producing goods and extracting resources from the environment, are the most appropriate controllers of scarce resources, because their production will create an abundance of goods that would otherwise be scarce. Unfortunately, producers frequently produce goods that no one really needs or wants, then try to convince consumers they need the products, all the while ignoring the ecological costs of production and disposal. Some other solutions to scarcity need to be found.
One example of a solution we're pretty excited about is the way we're addressing the issue of land scarcity. Our land is held in a land trust, which means that individuals don't own the land, the entire community does. This allows us to plan our land-use in a way that isn't possible when land is treated as a commodity to be traded among individuals. It allows us to encourage things like densely clustered housing, which makes more efficient use of land than scattered housing, making more land available for everyone.
Separating intrinsic value from US dollar and global market valuation of goods and services:
To make the world socio-politically and ecologically sustainable, it's important to limit, and hopefully end, our economic support for unethical and unsustainable systems of production. On the free market, the cost of goods has only a distant connection to the ecological impact of their production and consumption. It's very frustrating when something that's cheaper in the long run, like organically grown food, is more expensive than its more harmful equivalent, like food grown using synthetic chemicals. This is made possible by externalizing, that is, passing on to the government or future generations, the ecological costs of unsustainable production and disposal. For a culture that is obsessed with getting the most for the least effort, this inevitably leads to gross disregard for the real costs of the modern way of life. We are borrowing from our future to finance our luxuries today.
By separating value from the marketplace, we could make significant changes to the value associated with different kinds of goods and services. Prices that have been inflated, like computer programming, could be brought into the realm of sanity. I am not doing five times more productive (or less pleasant) work when I write a computer program than a gardener is doing when growing food. Prices should be changed to reflect this. Similarly, prices that have been depreciated due to low required skill, like ditch digging, could be increased to reflect the fact that ditch digging is arguably much less pleasant work than gardening or programming. In fact, ditch digging should probably be valued more highly. Finally, prices that have been depreciated due to externalization of costs, like clearcut wood, could be increased to reflect their real cost.
These are some of the main issues that need to be addressed in Dancing Rabbit's economic planning. In my next article, I'll examine the nature of money. In subsequent articles, I'll talk about possible solutions, their drawbacks and benefits, and how they relate to what we're doing right now.
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