Common Grace Avenue
03/December/2008 08:02 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 10, Issue 48
PDF copy
Few people, either in the print media or on the Internet have written more, for a longer period of time on the subject of stupendous change than yours truly. Surely there are those who have forecast a financial collapse, or pending judgments of God, global warming disasters, or a whole host of other pet topics, but writing about general stupendous change and somewhat reasonable options after the happening are quite rare.
Well, a stupendous financial crisis is upon us and it’s ramifications are now being stupendously felt in various ways not only in the United States, but all over the world. Words such as bailout, depression, deflation, meltdown, and many others are now becoming part of almost everyone’s conversations.
We hear a lot about Wall Street, normally contrasted with Main Street, but it is going to be a very long time, if ever, before either are back to what we once called normal, or secure. So what then, how do we move forward in some sort of consistent basis, while all around seems to be fighting continued and impending chaos?
For our part, we will ask you to move your thoughts to Common Grace Avenue here at Wonder Springs. Common Grace Ave will attempt to take the failed or depressed paradigms and apply common grace attributes gathered from nature to inject not only some hope but some practical absolutes by which a revitalized economic and enterprise structures can develop.
President elect Obama has now named his economic team and for the most part they are closely related to the Bush advisors, if not the Clinton era instigators of this current financial calamity. So on the ocean of non-energetic debt capital there will be just a new group of Titanic passengers rearranging the deck chairs. We say passengers because, not only do they look like they do not know what they are doing, in a somewhat professional way, they freely admit that truth. The last I heard, we have given them about eight trillion dollars to see what they can do, and a blank check to print more money if need be.
Having said that, the truth behind these appointments is that there really was no other sensible alternative. Our generation long bubble of continued economic growth fueled by cheap, essentially free, debt and deficit spending, solely on consumer material goods, has basically made extinct, any opposition species.
There are a few pundits raising their voice stating that we are burdening future generations with our debt. We blew up that iceberg with the $700 billion bailout package. Somewhere down the road, the dollar, and all world currencies will have to be revalued in relation to true wealth. How long it will take to get to that point and how much that devaluation will be depends on how long we attempt to float the currently failed financial consumer paradigm.
So much for Wall Street, so little for Main Street. That truth has really not changed in this generation either. I suppose the good news is that Wall Street has really replaced Main Street by making everything a cheapo global commodity. Hence any enterprise that still exists outside that commodity, big box, bubble will continue to survive provided they have not greatly leveraged their personal wealth in an effort to live like the Joneses, when they were really just the Jones’ neighbors.
So let us adventure to Common Grace Avenue. The first thing you will notice is that Wall Street’s influence is either non-existent or well hidden behind the scenes. Furthermore you can see that the land not that distant from the Ave is much like a desert. Not that you want to go there, but sort of like Ephrata, Washington, four miles long and four blocks wide, beyond that and the desert takes over.
Ephrata is really small town America however, population about 7000. Ephrata is about 50 miles to Wenatchee and 20 miles to Moses Lake the closer and slightly more populous neighbors, and Soap Lake (stated population about 1800 but that is very hard to believe it is that big) is just down the road. From Moses Lake you can pickup Interstate 90, which can take you east to Spokane (110 miles), or west to Seattle (180 miles). The last I heard Microsoft owns about 60 acres near Ephrata, for future development. Ephrata is situated in Grant County, which has some of the cheapest electricity rates in the world, because the Public Utility District owns hydroelectric dams on the adjacent Columbia River.
Having known a number of Microsoft employees, their pretty much unanimous conclusion was they would rather live anywhere else in the world, than have to work in and move to Ephrata. This brings up the cultural attraction of urban areas in contrast to small towns.
To paraphrase an old cliché, “How are you going to get them to move to the farm, once they have lived in the big city?”
Before we continue, I need to emphasize that Common Grace Ave is not specifically small town, or urban, or suburban, but really a place that can overcome your sense of insecurity, with a new and better understanding of reality, especially economic reality.
About twenty years ago on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, I picked up a book in a left wing bookstore discussing the urban financial bias not only in the United States, but also especially in developing countries. I did not read the whole book and it has been a number of years since that time, however the conclusion was that when financial capital is scarce, the perceived risk is too great outside the financial center of the country, to do any investment in the non-urban areas.
If you look at the Wall Street meltdown, what you really see is, speculators of many schemes, playing financial games with highly leveraged money within the well-defined structure of Wall Street and similar monetary centers around the world. In the context of that book, western society has taken that urban financial center only investment paradigm and basically dried up all other sources of capital and wealth creation anywhere else in the specific country and in the world generally.
In the (last) Great Depression, the game of Monopoly became a hit. It was and is still a get rich game, based upon real estate. That same monopoly game is essentially the allegory behind the subprime mortgage collapse. Really the only difference is that in Monopoly you got $200 every time you passed Go, and it was a cash business. In the subprime game, it was all borrowed money, but it still was essentially Monopoly money as in the game. It is no wonder then the game essentially ended, because just as in playing a real Monopoly game, it wasn’t real, in the sense of the real world.
So the Wall Street, Monopoly game players are still in charge of that reality. It will be more than interesting, to see if they are really interested in changing the way the world works, or if they will eventually provide some real capital to do something other than just continue to share Monopoly money amongst themselves.
There is now a large body of sound economic evidence that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies prolonged the Great Depression until the United States entered World War II. The President elect essentially ran on a New – New Deal platform. Under the current fallout from the bailout, his New – New Deal financial agenda, is just slightly more significant than the noise level, of the still undefined trillions of economic bailout and stimulus universe. Therefore with a slight enlargement of this universe, most of his plans can be implemented without the need to raise taxes, as Roosevelt did, because there is no plan to ever or can ever repay this newly accrued debt.
Now infrastructure in the United States, especially governmental infrastructure, has been neglected essentially since the gross materialism generation began, so we need to spend money making that infrastructure sound because it is the basis of economic prosperity. Hence that infrastructure development can and must occur on Common Grace Avenue, simply because Monopoly players for the most part are unwilling to get dirty or get out of their high rise offices and into the real world.
About six months ago gasoline was in excess of $4 a gallon. Monday at Costco in the Spokane Valley, it was $1.64 and crude traded below $50. In October we pointed out that new alternative energy resources needed a crude price of approximately $80 per barrel and gasoline prices around $3 per gallon to be economically viable. There is now a window to wisely develop some of those resources and not burden the rest of the economy with energy deficit spending. There is a certain amount of risk associated with these types of investments, but doing it now will mean that true wealth can be created on Common Grace Avenue, with an understanding of natural energetics, that are completely absent in any current economic models.
Barack Obama campaigned with a hope of developing new small businesses in the United States. There were no specifics in that hope, but now is the time for a program to be developed. The risk and time to develop small businesses and future Wall Street businesses need to be rewarded. The first and easiest way to do that is to exempt early rounds of adventure equity up to a certain cap rate from ever having to pay capital gains tax and then to provide an easy way to allow all people to invest in and sell their equity if need be.
Furthermore that needs to be done without a costly regulatory scheme that requires entrepreneurs to spend valuable resources providing paperwork to provide job and retirement security to governmental bureaucrats and investors with a prospectus that states chances are slim to none that you will ever make a penny on your investment. Small business is risky, but the real significant problems with developing a small and rapidly growing enterprise are the lack of entrepreneurial training, especially financial training, the current total lack of early rounds of capital, and growth exceeding financial projections, not too slow of growth.
At Wonder Springs we are proceeding with that small business developmental model, absent any specifics from governmental blessings, simply because the current Wall Street and Main Street models no longer work in the real world. They are both basically based upon and directed by material consumerism, plain and simple, because everything, including human beings are considered as on an evolutionary progression towards being, or are currently just a material commodity.
Since you lost a lot, if not most, or all of your investment wealth, in unsound Wall Street hype of their stocks and real estate, perhaps it is time to look elsewhere, closer to home, for future opportunities.
Common Grace Ave is based upon the common grace absolutes of creation. Ten to twenty years ago I called that Business Ecology. Since I began writing these articles we have spun the jargon in different ways, but the essential underlying reality of creation, as the reality by which human enterprise has always been mostly innocuously modeled, has not changed.
The reason that especially Wall Street has failed is that they only recognize a fallacious reality, which makes Wall Street, New York City and similar financial centers around the world an absolute zenith of human enlightenment and evolutionary development. That is a lie and it is now facing a day of reckoning. That reckoning has gone on for a couple of months, and will probably continue for a few more years.
Now is the time to look at the real world, where most of the people and opportunities reside. People are the ultimate gift and opportunity for humanity; we will look at that more in depth next week, as we begin to do the surveying for a new infrastructure, which is called Common Grace Avenue.
PDF copy
Few people, either in the print media or on the Internet have written more, for a longer period of time on the subject of stupendous change than yours truly. Surely there are those who have forecast a financial collapse, or pending judgments of God, global warming disasters, or a whole host of other pet topics, but writing about general stupendous change and somewhat reasonable options after the happening are quite rare.
Well, a stupendous financial crisis is upon us and it’s ramifications are now being stupendously felt in various ways not only in the United States, but all over the world. Words such as bailout, depression, deflation, meltdown, and many others are now becoming part of almost everyone’s conversations.
We hear a lot about Wall Street, normally contrasted with Main Street, but it is going to be a very long time, if ever, before either are back to what we once called normal, or secure. So what then, how do we move forward in some sort of consistent basis, while all around seems to be fighting continued and impending chaos?
For our part, we will ask you to move your thoughts to Common Grace Avenue here at Wonder Springs. Common Grace Ave will attempt to take the failed or depressed paradigms and apply common grace attributes gathered from nature to inject not only some hope but some practical absolutes by which a revitalized economic and enterprise structures can develop.
President elect Obama has now named his economic team and for the most part they are closely related to the Bush advisors, if not the Clinton era instigators of this current financial calamity. So on the ocean of non-energetic debt capital there will be just a new group of Titanic passengers rearranging the deck chairs. We say passengers because, not only do they look like they do not know what they are doing, in a somewhat professional way, they freely admit that truth. The last I heard, we have given them about eight trillion dollars to see what they can do, and a blank check to print more money if need be.
Having said that, the truth behind these appointments is that there really was no other sensible alternative. Our generation long bubble of continued economic growth fueled by cheap, essentially free, debt and deficit spending, solely on consumer material goods, has basically made extinct, any opposition species.
There are a few pundits raising their voice stating that we are burdening future generations with our debt. We blew up that iceberg with the $700 billion bailout package. Somewhere down the road, the dollar, and all world currencies will have to be revalued in relation to true wealth. How long it will take to get to that point and how much that devaluation will be depends on how long we attempt to float the currently failed financial consumer paradigm.
So much for Wall Street, so little for Main Street. That truth has really not changed in this generation either. I suppose the good news is that Wall Street has really replaced Main Street by making everything a cheapo global commodity. Hence any enterprise that still exists outside that commodity, big box, bubble will continue to survive provided they have not greatly leveraged their personal wealth in an effort to live like the Joneses, when they were really just the Jones’ neighbors.
So let us adventure to Common Grace Avenue. The first thing you will notice is that Wall Street’s influence is either non-existent or well hidden behind the scenes. Furthermore you can see that the land not that distant from the Ave is much like a desert. Not that you want to go there, but sort of like Ephrata, Washington, four miles long and four blocks wide, beyond that and the desert takes over.
Ephrata is really small town America however, population about 7000. Ephrata is about 50 miles to Wenatchee and 20 miles to Moses Lake the closer and slightly more populous neighbors, and Soap Lake (stated population about 1800 but that is very hard to believe it is that big) is just down the road. From Moses Lake you can pickup Interstate 90, which can take you east to Spokane (110 miles), or west to Seattle (180 miles). The last I heard Microsoft owns about 60 acres near Ephrata, for future development. Ephrata is situated in Grant County, which has some of the cheapest electricity rates in the world, because the Public Utility District owns hydroelectric dams on the adjacent Columbia River.
Having known a number of Microsoft employees, their pretty much unanimous conclusion was they would rather live anywhere else in the world, than have to work in and move to Ephrata. This brings up the cultural attraction of urban areas in contrast to small towns.
To paraphrase an old cliché, “How are you going to get them to move to the farm, once they have lived in the big city?”
Before we continue, I need to emphasize that Common Grace Ave is not specifically small town, or urban, or suburban, but really a place that can overcome your sense of insecurity, with a new and better understanding of reality, especially economic reality.
About twenty years ago on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, I picked up a book in a left wing bookstore discussing the urban financial bias not only in the United States, but also especially in developing countries. I did not read the whole book and it has been a number of years since that time, however the conclusion was that when financial capital is scarce, the perceived risk is too great outside the financial center of the country, to do any investment in the non-urban areas.
If you look at the Wall Street meltdown, what you really see is, speculators of many schemes, playing financial games with highly leveraged money within the well-defined structure of Wall Street and similar monetary centers around the world. In the context of that book, western society has taken that urban financial center only investment paradigm and basically dried up all other sources of capital and wealth creation anywhere else in the specific country and in the world generally.
In the (last) Great Depression, the game of Monopoly became a hit. It was and is still a get rich game, based upon real estate. That same monopoly game is essentially the allegory behind the subprime mortgage collapse. Really the only difference is that in Monopoly you got $200 every time you passed Go, and it was a cash business. In the subprime game, it was all borrowed money, but it still was essentially Monopoly money as in the game. It is no wonder then the game essentially ended, because just as in playing a real Monopoly game, it wasn’t real, in the sense of the real world.
So the Wall Street, Monopoly game players are still in charge of that reality. It will be more than interesting, to see if they are really interested in changing the way the world works, or if they will eventually provide some real capital to do something other than just continue to share Monopoly money amongst themselves.
There is now a large body of sound economic evidence that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies prolonged the Great Depression until the United States entered World War II. The President elect essentially ran on a New – New Deal platform. Under the current fallout from the bailout, his New – New Deal financial agenda, is just slightly more significant than the noise level, of the still undefined trillions of economic bailout and stimulus universe. Therefore with a slight enlargement of this universe, most of his plans can be implemented without the need to raise taxes, as Roosevelt did, because there is no plan to ever or can ever repay this newly accrued debt.
Now infrastructure in the United States, especially governmental infrastructure, has been neglected essentially since the gross materialism generation began, so we need to spend money making that infrastructure sound because it is the basis of economic prosperity. Hence that infrastructure development can and must occur on Common Grace Avenue, simply because Monopoly players for the most part are unwilling to get dirty or get out of their high rise offices and into the real world.
About six months ago gasoline was in excess of $4 a gallon. Monday at Costco in the Spokane Valley, it was $1.64 and crude traded below $50. In October we pointed out that new alternative energy resources needed a crude price of approximately $80 per barrel and gasoline prices around $3 per gallon to be economically viable. There is now a window to wisely develop some of those resources and not burden the rest of the economy with energy deficit spending. There is a certain amount of risk associated with these types of investments, but doing it now will mean that true wealth can be created on Common Grace Avenue, with an understanding of natural energetics, that are completely absent in any current economic models.
Barack Obama campaigned with a hope of developing new small businesses in the United States. There were no specifics in that hope, but now is the time for a program to be developed. The risk and time to develop small businesses and future Wall Street businesses need to be rewarded. The first and easiest way to do that is to exempt early rounds of adventure equity up to a certain cap rate from ever having to pay capital gains tax and then to provide an easy way to allow all people to invest in and sell their equity if need be.
Furthermore that needs to be done without a costly regulatory scheme that requires entrepreneurs to spend valuable resources providing paperwork to provide job and retirement security to governmental bureaucrats and investors with a prospectus that states chances are slim to none that you will ever make a penny on your investment. Small business is risky, but the real significant problems with developing a small and rapidly growing enterprise are the lack of entrepreneurial training, especially financial training, the current total lack of early rounds of capital, and growth exceeding financial projections, not too slow of growth.
At Wonder Springs we are proceeding with that small business developmental model, absent any specifics from governmental blessings, simply because the current Wall Street and Main Street models no longer work in the real world. They are both basically based upon and directed by material consumerism, plain and simple, because everything, including human beings are considered as on an evolutionary progression towards being, or are currently just a material commodity.
Since you lost a lot, if not most, or all of your investment wealth, in unsound Wall Street hype of their stocks and real estate, perhaps it is time to look elsewhere, closer to home, for future opportunities.
Common Grace Ave is based upon the common grace absolutes of creation. Ten to twenty years ago I called that Business Ecology. Since I began writing these articles we have spun the jargon in different ways, but the essential underlying reality of creation, as the reality by which human enterprise has always been mostly innocuously modeled, has not changed.
The reason that especially Wall Street has failed is that they only recognize a fallacious reality, which makes Wall Street, New York City and similar financial centers around the world an absolute zenith of human enlightenment and evolutionary development. That is a lie and it is now facing a day of reckoning. That reckoning has gone on for a couple of months, and will probably continue for a few more years.
Now is the time to look at the real world, where most of the people and opportunities reside. People are the ultimate gift and opportunity for humanity; we will look at that more in depth next week, as we begin to do the surveying for a new infrastructure, which is called Common Grace Avenue.