As The Worm Turns

As The Worm Turns

The Internet, like all of man’s creations, can be a boon or a bane, depending on how it is used and the purpose for using it. I suppose that if the Internet were to suddenly vanish, along with television and radio, the world would be forced back to that time when books, newspapers, public forums of entertainment and discussion, and religious forums of enlightenment would be our main source of information, of news, and of social intercourse. Of course the main problem with the Garden of Eden is that once we were forced out and made to make our own way in life that place left within us a desire to return, a place where it’s summer time and the living is easy, fish are jumping and the cotton is high. Your daddy’s rich and your ma’s good looking, so hush little baby, don’t you cry. All this from a New Your Jew who once spent the summer of 1934 in South Carolina as the guest of Edward Dubose Heyward. Edward wrote the novel Porgy in 1925 and his wife, a playwright, wrote the stage play. After meeting George Gershwin he invited Gershwin to his house in South Carolina where Gershwin wrote what was to become the musical “Porgy and Bess”. At the time of it’s opening on Broadway a stunned audience reacted with silence, unable to comprehend just what they had experienced. It took a few more showing before New York audiences understood the genius of that work.

But I am not here to talk about Gershwin nor about New York audiences and their perceptions. No, our subject is man’s creative genius and the creations that arise. Writing is a symbolic communication system whether it be pictograph (Egyptian symbols) or cuneiform, or what would later develop. Before that, our histories, our cultures, our entire system of knowledge was passed from father to son, mother to daughter, from elders to children bu the use of memory. To give you an indication of the power of memory, Homer composed his work, The Odyssey, completely in his memory, never wrote down one single line. And for centuries Greeks would memorize or learn that work and be able to quote it verbatim. Most individuals today in America can’t even memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and recite it. We live in a time where knowledge is at our fingertips and that is where we keep it. I may be wrong but I believe Socrates was one of those Greeks who remarked at the passing of memory in favor of the written work. Perhaps he was remembering the old adage, “Out of sight, out of mind.” It may be though that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, but that saying would come much later in time.

Man’s creations have consequences we never foresee. You may recall the story of the one Roman Commander sending a soldier who was illiterate to convey a secret message to another commander. The soldier who was sent also had orders to give the receiving commander a message written on a piece of paper. The written message read, “Kill this messenger’”. Ignorance can prove to be fetal, But not all of our creations turn against us. The domestication of animals has had mixed results for after all, when we learned to ‘tame’ oxen and yoke them together we could use them as beasts of burden. Find a suitable tree limb with a crotch at one end and tie it to the yoke on your pair of oxen and now you can plow your field easier and faster than a number of human workers and you don’t have to feed the extra ‘plowmen’. Of course it was not a total loss for the working stiffs, some one still had to cut the wheat stalks, still had to gather them up and transport them to the threshing floor, and someone still had to thresh the wheat stalks and the winnow the chaff from the seed. You didn’t look any workers because you expanded the number of acres plowed and planted and then harvested. Technically, it was a wash.

Then someone invented the horse collar Yokes will kill horses when used, and now we have more horse power, so to speak. A pair of horses can plow more acres than a pair of oxen and consume less food doing so. And they an pull chariots of war, give soldiers who sit on them an advantage over those on foot. And fill the streets of a city faster when pulling carriages and drays. We were about to suffer the great London and New York City horse shit crisis when we created the gasoline powered automobile. And yes, we, cities really were approaching a crisis of streets being literally many feet deep in horse shit at the turn of the century. Well, so much for the Gay Nineties. All we could see were clean streets in the future, not the kind of traffic congestion, the air pollution (we would trade one for of air pollution for another), and an increased population problem. Supposedly the creation of the EV (electric vehicle) will solve the problem of automobile exhaust and other pollutants, including noise, with nice clean and quiet EVs that are also smaller and self driving. Why the city can own fleets of them and you simple put in your travel order and let the city take you for a ride. Meanwhile, as clean as Evs are supposed to be we never tell you how dirty they are to make and operate. Seems we have a problem getting things right the first time…. and the second time….and the third time. Do you see a pattern?

We created corporations, legal entities that gave our business activities limited liability from creditors in the event our ventures loss too much money and had to be liquidates (bankruptcy) and soon found out that we could also shield ourselves from criminal prosecution (the corporation did it, not me). But I have never seen corporations in the federal pen doing time and appealing for parole, have you? Well, their officers are suppose to be held responsible for the misdeeds of the corporation and yet we see very few CEOs and board members in the federal pen, why is that? Seems we have yet to figure that one out, but maybe its the money. Corporations by their very creation are designed to pool, concentrate, and enriches the power of its money or capital as it were. The Trusts used prior to TR’s trust busting administration (actually Congress we well into the act, TR didn’t do it alone) to control vasts amounts of industry into the hands of a few financiers. Trusts enabled many of these financiers to create defacto monopolies through collusion. Funny how those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.

Now that doesn’t mean that corporations are all bad. The key idea in creating this legal entity was to avoid the personal loss of one’s fortune through the misadventure of the corporation’s operations. In investing and insurance this is called risk avoidance. This actually comes from the idea called “The value of a dollar”, that is, what is a dollar worth to you today versus that same dollar tomorrow or ten years from now? If I want to spend my dollar today, then why should I lend it to you for some time period? Of sure, you promise to return my dollar but I have tow considerations, the first is the risk I will never see my dollar again, and the second is, what’s it worth to me to lend you my dollar? Seems to me that I should get some consideration for the lending to my dollar to you. Here is where the idea of the corporation comes in. I give you my dollar, it’s no longer a loan, I am buying something from you, the right to participate in the profits, if any, in your business shared on the number of dollars I have bought an interest in future profits. You issue to me the number of shares of interest, also known as shares of stock. Now the one thing that happens is that you no longer have any risk to your private fortune if the corporation fails and goes bankrupt and the only risk I have is the loss of my dollar or dollars.

All that sounds very reasonable and my expectations to share in the future profits is related, wither directly or indirectly in my judgment of you and your business. If my judgment is bad I will, most likely, lose my money. So now we come to the current state of affairs. There are thousands of these small and even medium sized businesses that are corporations and none of them seek to rule the world. But we do have those few who are like black hols in space, the increasingly grow larger and larger by sucking all the matter (well, it’s gravity, really) from the surrounding area and giving off black body radiation (black holes do die through energy dissipation, in a manner of speaking). Mankind has created this ‘thing’ called a multinational or global corporation and it is a black hole. Here we are, faced with another horse shit crisis and wondering what we can create to end this crisis. I’m sure it will be a godsend until it isn’t. Let’s hope our collective memories are working a little better this time.