HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF GLOBAL COMPETITION THAT CRIPPLES US?

How do we move away from having many countries producing the same product? Where do we go from here? It is a question of rationalization.

Every nation overproduces something — except some nations of the developing world. Every nation will be asked to make over in trust for the world what they have in excess of their needs; from that common pool the needs of all will be met. The process of redistribution, and the rationalization of our economic structures, will itself rationalize the overproduction process. So we will not have 50 huge firms all producing ‘aspirin’, for instance, under different names.

This seems so far off. It will not be done tomorrow but we could do it tomorrow if we wanted to. A country like America could rationalize its production so that it was not creating, through competition, a multiplicity of the same things — and therefore misusing the resources of the world. Go to any big store and you will find the shelves loaded with goods. Where did the goods come from? From the finite resources of the world. Why are they all in this one big store? Why can we buy 50 different types of cleaning liquid, of screwdrivers, or whatever? We do not need that multiplicity.

In the US, because it is based absolutely on the competition of market forces, there is an emphasis on what they call choice. You are given infinite choice — which only wastes your time. The choice is there for this greedy, child-like population that wants, or has been conditioned to want, an infinite variety of products so that one day they want one thing and the next day something else. They feel that this is the great life, that this is ‘abundance’. America is about abundance. Every country — Europe, Japan, Australia and the others — have ‘bought’ this idea of abundance.

This is what market forces are about, but the toll in human misery is terrible. In the US alone there are 33 million people living under the poverty line. Hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping in the streets. The social cost of this ‘abundance’, this multiplicity of choice, is so great that you cannot take it in. Someone should do a study, publish it in a major newspaper, and show what it costs the world for you to have 50 different brands of cornflakes. We can rationalize that tomorrow . . . if we wanted!