Will you pay to live on Earth?

Do what thou wilt.

There's a statistic that's been running around for a while in my head, that one percent of the world's population owns ninety-nine percent of the world's wealth.


We're talking about six billion people on planet and an estimated thirty trillion dollars. For sixty million of the world's cream-on-top, that makes $495,000 each. For the rest, fifty bucks. Go get a pizza and spend your change on a latte.

Now besides the question of my math skills, how do you put a value on the earth's economy? For this example we just added up all the combined GNP's.

These guys have another idea: calculate in economic terms the value of the entire biosystem that supports our fat and lazy lives. The point of this is to give a scientific means to support legal claims that say, for example, a factory polluting a river is doing economic damage to us all. Because otherwise, the law sees no property being damaged by pollution, therefore no crime being committed, therefore no legal incentive for the polluter to stop.

Property is the essence of law (how's that for some uninformed opinion?). Riot police don't come out over politics, they come out to protect store front windows. Why is rape so under-reported? Look at the legal system's valuation of the female body for your answer. Meaning: female body is the property of the attached male authority. (see marriage)

So far, courts have refused to assign any value to undeveloped areas, or places showing no signs of human work input. This goes back to the Biblical mandate to go forth and multiply, etc. It's all there for YOU. Raw land is free, as free as the air.

Well we see how far free land went. After snatching up California the US declared the "exploration" phase of human activity to be over, and went into taking over markets. This is like when you're playing Monopoly and all the properties are bought up. The game jumps levels and turns into a trading and lending thing. I usually used to quit after the properties were purchased because that was about the point in the game when my cousins would start cheating. Funny how that works.

Now that the land is all grabbed we're closing in on the next tangible resource: water. Ever paid $4 for eight ounces of bottled water in a club? I remember when I first saw gallons of water for sale in the grocery store for 99 cents. I wondered what idiots would pay for water? How long until we're paying for air, and how will the sale be controlled?

For millions of years any mammal could slurp from the stream, jump in the lake, drink from a river. Just check upstream to make sure there's no dead moose laying in the water and you're good. Imagine going up to a pre-agriculture earth person and telling them this story:

"Once upon a time there was a place where the community was so messy that it was not safe to drink from the river. You had to exchange valuable treasure to get water to drink, and the people who collected your treasures kept them and never gave them back."

They would think you were out of your mind, but that's our reality now.

There was an article in the Economist a while ago, saying that no one will be interested in doing anything for clean air and water until they can be owned and protected as investments. Put this all together and see where it goes. Here's my sci-fi projection:

The Earth is going to continue being polluted by an expanding population. Humans will build protective shells around our living environments and hide in them. Something like bubble cities. Pollution and mutants will be the new terrorism. No one will go "outside." Everyone inside the "clean zone" will pay a service fee to cover the costs of the common water and air filtration systems. Quality of life will be in the fucking toilet. Walking on the grass will be a jailable offense.

It will be like being at the mall for life. Like if there were apartments upstairs from the mall, and your job was in some building attached to the other side, and all transportation was connected inside, etc. It's technologically quite feasible to seal windows up. HVAC etc.

Aaaand, there will be a management company in control of the air, water and light inputs to the city. They'll do it for profit in the name of the public good, like the Federal Reserve bank (which is no more federal than federal express. really. The bank printing US currency does it for profit! US govt' debt is MONEY IN THE BANK for the Fed, literally.)

Start telling yourself "I AM A FREE HUMAN BEING ON PLANET EARTH." Do it as many times as you can all day long and these problems may eventually be avoided. Unless you actually like the idea of living under a mall security guard.

Love is the law, love under will.