Your boss gets a budget for raises that represents a fixed percentage for everyone in the department.
It's her call who gets what, and the increase is not uniformly distributed.
If you knew about this in advance, would you feel cherished because of your higher-than-average raise? Would you grumble your resentment at a lower one? Perhaps you would fret that your bounty comes at the expense of another employee.
That's why you may not know.
Your company has decreed that the department "head count" remain constant.
Nevertheless, your boss needs to hire someone with a specific skill set.
He figures he can get another employee to double up on what you do.
Good bye.
The university you wish to attend has an affirmative action policy.
There are only so many openings.
Your qualifications are top-drawer, but you do not belong to a protected group.
You get a skinny envelope of regrets in the mail.
As a director of marketing for a major widget manufacturing company, you know that you are looking at a market of fixed size.
There are three other widget manufacturers in this country and a half-dozen overseas.
You have tried to penetrate some of the foreign markets, but that turf is protected for native widget manufacturers.
Your only option for future growth is to increase your market share.
By definition, that means another company has to lose share.
Earth in the Balance Your income, your job security, your ability to secure an education for yourself and your children, and your success in the marketplace are all profoundly affected by conditions which, in the absence of a frontier, have acted to eliminate choices for individuals and businesses.
What's wrong? Nothing.
This is zero-sum economics.
In its strictest sense, the zero-sum game is defined by the sum of wins and losses.
If you add them up, you get zero.
There are no winners without losers.
Al Gore, in his 1991 book Earth in the Balance, proposed a global Marshall Plan that would have the developed countries pay for population control, deployment of environmentally benign technologies and enforcement of social justice, among other goals.
Gore blames the world's current ecological predicament on what he calls our "addiction" to consumption, which amplifies the impact of industrialized populations on the environment.
In a perfect example of zero-sum thinking, he wants to use the Marshall Plan mechanism to transfer wealth from the First World to the Third in an attempt to ease the burden on a finite resource, the earth.
What Does It Mean? In 1993, Business Week blamed the end of the Cold War for the emergence of a new, cutthroat world economic order.
The head of a major European steel producer hurting from foreign competition told a Business Week reporter, "To the extent that you raise the standard of living of developing countries, you must have a corresponding drop in the living standard in the West.
" Says economist Herman Daly, "The equilibrium wage under free trade will be the Third World level".
According to professor Michael Cox of the London School of Economics, a reckoning of the planet's largest economies will shortly not include the United States at all.
Goldman Sachs, possibly the world's most proficient brokerage firm, predicted in 2001 that the future would belong to the emerging economies of Latin America and Asia: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
Their timeframe: 50 years.
By 2008, it had become obvious to many that the economic destruction of the West would proceed much faster than expected.
On a less global scale, we can observe a lot of nast.
y behavior in ordinary citizens that could be termed "Zero-Sum Syndrome.
" A study by the Amerian Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety reports that violent traffic incidents, which the papers call "road rage," have increased "through the term of all cited studies.
" According to the report, they are "rarely the result of single incidents.
Rather, they seem to be the result of personal attitudes and stress in the motorists' lives.
" Could these include career setbacks, job loss, and the struggle to make ends meet in multi-job, multi-kid, or low-income households? We have the single-minded pursuit of group advantage, as typified by affirmative action.
Asian immigrants to the U.
S.
have faced face violent, sometimes lethal, attacks fueled, at least partly, by the fear that they are taking jobs away from Americans.
A fuel-testing laboratory falsifies records to the benefit of a client.
A blending and packaging company is sued for substituting base oils in the lubricant it was manufacturing under contract.
An exporter, negotiating a large contract for delivery of motor oil to Saudi Arabia, insists that each bottle should be underfilled by at least an ounce.
Says one businessman to a reporter.
"The most important business asset in the 21st century will be a lack of moral ethics.
" How's It Working For You? What are they thinking, those who believe that, while grocery stores and gas stations and individual labor should have competition, governments and social systems should not? They are thinking that the world should be divided into slaves and masters, and that they should be the masters.
We say, some of us do, that competition is more than a fundamental attribute of a free market.
It is nothing less than the right to leave a supplier, an employer, a city, a state, a country.
Such a simple thing, yet it is the most fundamental right of all, the right to leave.
Here is the hard part: the realization that only a frontier creates competition for governments and social systems by its remoteness, its resources without proprietors, and its anonymity for immigrants.
Without a frontier, and the last ones on Earth vanished more than 100 years ago, there can be no competition, no right to leave, and no freedom, economic or political.
We've tried a frontierless world for a century now, with Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolph Hitler, and Mao Tse-Tung leading the way.
How's it working for you? "Is frontier formation even possible anymore?" you ask.
The oceans are too close to the seats of power, which covet them.
Every place on Earth can be eliminated on the basis of proximity, accessibility, resource depletion, and social baggage.
Only space satisfies the criteria of isolation with ready availability of raw materials and energy.
Risks must be taken.
Old nuclear pulse rocket technologies, buried in the '60s to permit détente with the Soviets, must be revived and employed to drive 100,000-ton payloads into orbit as a bootstrap (the serious mass for space construction comes from the moon and asteroids).
Existence proofs given in the '70s for the possibility of self-sustaining Earth-like habitats in space must be reduced to engineering practice.
Financial resources must be diverted from conventional and worn-out, inefficient defense strategies to the military and economic high ground.
Not a Natural Condition Governments will not favor this approach because it does not serve the highest, most urgent, and sole purpose of government, which is its own continuity.
Frontier formation fragments and defeats the ambition of government to dominate all life.
In America, a land of wonders and unprecedented liberty for 509 years (1492 - 2001), we have been asked to sacrifice our freedom in return for safety, and we have largely complied.
We are watched, we are searched, we are robbed by taxation, inflation, and involuntary debt, and we are disenfranchised by legal sleight of hand.
Gravity is a chain.
Break it.
Slavery is not a natural condition as Aristotle maintained.
The story of life needs a better ending.
It's her call who gets what, and the increase is not uniformly distributed.
If you knew about this in advance, would you feel cherished because of your higher-than-average raise? Would you grumble your resentment at a lower one? Perhaps you would fret that your bounty comes at the expense of another employee.
That's why you may not know.
Your company has decreed that the department "head count" remain constant.
Nevertheless, your boss needs to hire someone with a specific skill set.
He figures he can get another employee to double up on what you do.
Good bye.
The university you wish to attend has an affirmative action policy.
There are only so many openings.
Your qualifications are top-drawer, but you do not belong to a protected group.
You get a skinny envelope of regrets in the mail.
As a director of marketing for a major widget manufacturing company, you know that you are looking at a market of fixed size.
There are three other widget manufacturers in this country and a half-dozen overseas.
You have tried to penetrate some of the foreign markets, but that turf is protected for native widget manufacturers.
Your only option for future growth is to increase your market share.
By definition, that means another company has to lose share.
Earth in the Balance Your income, your job security, your ability to secure an education for yourself and your children, and your success in the marketplace are all profoundly affected by conditions which, in the absence of a frontier, have acted to eliminate choices for individuals and businesses.
What's wrong? Nothing.
This is zero-sum economics.
In its strictest sense, the zero-sum game is defined by the sum of wins and losses.
If you add them up, you get zero.
There are no winners without losers.
Al Gore, in his 1991 book Earth in the Balance, proposed a global Marshall Plan that would have the developed countries pay for population control, deployment of environmentally benign technologies and enforcement of social justice, among other goals.
Gore blames the world's current ecological predicament on what he calls our "addiction" to consumption, which amplifies the impact of industrialized populations on the environment.
In a perfect example of zero-sum thinking, he wants to use the Marshall Plan mechanism to transfer wealth from the First World to the Third in an attempt to ease the burden on a finite resource, the earth.
What Does It Mean? In 1993, Business Week blamed the end of the Cold War for the emergence of a new, cutthroat world economic order.
The head of a major European steel producer hurting from foreign competition told a Business Week reporter, "To the extent that you raise the standard of living of developing countries, you must have a corresponding drop in the living standard in the West.
" Says economist Herman Daly, "The equilibrium wage under free trade will be the Third World level".
According to professor Michael Cox of the London School of Economics, a reckoning of the planet's largest economies will shortly not include the United States at all.
Goldman Sachs, possibly the world's most proficient brokerage firm, predicted in 2001 that the future would belong to the emerging economies of Latin America and Asia: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
Their timeframe: 50 years.
By 2008, it had become obvious to many that the economic destruction of the West would proceed much faster than expected.
On a less global scale, we can observe a lot of nast.
y behavior in ordinary citizens that could be termed "Zero-Sum Syndrome.
" A study by the Amerian Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety reports that violent traffic incidents, which the papers call "road rage," have increased "through the term of all cited studies.
" According to the report, they are "rarely the result of single incidents.
Rather, they seem to be the result of personal attitudes and stress in the motorists' lives.
" Could these include career setbacks, job loss, and the struggle to make ends meet in multi-job, multi-kid, or low-income households? We have the single-minded pursuit of group advantage, as typified by affirmative action.
Asian immigrants to the U.
S.
have faced face violent, sometimes lethal, attacks fueled, at least partly, by the fear that they are taking jobs away from Americans.
A fuel-testing laboratory falsifies records to the benefit of a client.
A blending and packaging company is sued for substituting base oils in the lubricant it was manufacturing under contract.
An exporter, negotiating a large contract for delivery of motor oil to Saudi Arabia, insists that each bottle should be underfilled by at least an ounce.
Says one businessman to a reporter.
"The most important business asset in the 21st century will be a lack of moral ethics.
" How's It Working For You? What are they thinking, those who believe that, while grocery stores and gas stations and individual labor should have competition, governments and social systems should not? They are thinking that the world should be divided into slaves and masters, and that they should be the masters.
We say, some of us do, that competition is more than a fundamental attribute of a free market.
It is nothing less than the right to leave a supplier, an employer, a city, a state, a country.
Such a simple thing, yet it is the most fundamental right of all, the right to leave.
Here is the hard part: the realization that only a frontier creates competition for governments and social systems by its remoteness, its resources without proprietors, and its anonymity for immigrants.
Without a frontier, and the last ones on Earth vanished more than 100 years ago, there can be no competition, no right to leave, and no freedom, economic or political.
We've tried a frontierless world for a century now, with Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolph Hitler, and Mao Tse-Tung leading the way.
How's it working for you? "Is frontier formation even possible anymore?" you ask.
The oceans are too close to the seats of power, which covet them.
Every place on Earth can be eliminated on the basis of proximity, accessibility, resource depletion, and social baggage.
Only space satisfies the criteria of isolation with ready availability of raw materials and energy.
Risks must be taken.
Old nuclear pulse rocket technologies, buried in the '60s to permit détente with the Soviets, must be revived and employed to drive 100,000-ton payloads into orbit as a bootstrap (the serious mass for space construction comes from the moon and asteroids).
Existence proofs given in the '70s for the possibility of self-sustaining Earth-like habitats in space must be reduced to engineering practice.
Financial resources must be diverted from conventional and worn-out, inefficient defense strategies to the military and economic high ground.
Not a Natural Condition Governments will not favor this approach because it does not serve the highest, most urgent, and sole purpose of government, which is its own continuity.
Frontier formation fragments and defeats the ambition of government to dominate all life.
In America, a land of wonders and unprecedented liberty for 509 years (1492 - 2001), we have been asked to sacrifice our freedom in return for safety, and we have largely complied.
We are watched, we are searched, we are robbed by taxation, inflation, and involuntary debt, and we are disenfranchised by legal sleight of hand.
Gravity is a chain.
Break it.
Slavery is not a natural condition as Aristotle maintained.
The story of life needs a better ending.
Source...