Surviving Progress Page #4

without causing the fish stocks to crash

but since 1980 we've been

using more than the interest

so we are in effect somebody who thinks he's rich cause he

is spending the money that has been left in his inheritance

not spending the interest

but eating into the capital.

The last time I visited the

New York Stock Exchange

was in 1980 and the mood

sure was different than.

Government with its high taxes,

excessive spending and over regulation

had thrown a wrench in the

works of our free markets.

With tax reform and budget control our economy

will be free to expand to its full potential

driving the bears back

into permanent hibernation.

That's our economic programme for next four

years, we're going to turn the ball loose.

The world is this big.

It's not this big and it can't be this big.

It's just this big, it's a finite sub.

Instead of thinking that nature is

this huge bank that we can just....

this endless credit card that

we can just keep drawing on.

We have to think about the

finite nature of the planet

and how you keep it alive, so

that we too may remain alive.

And less we conserve the planet there

isn't going to be any "the economy".

The ice-age-hunter is still us, it's in us.

Those ancient hunters who thought

that there would always be

another herd of mammoth other the next hill

shared the optimism of a stock trader, that there's

always gonna be another big killing on the stock market

in a next week or two.

If you are watching the earth over

the last 5 or 6 thousands of years

and you're speeding up your film

what you see is civilization

breaking out like forest fires

in one pristine environment after another

and after a civilization has arisen as it

burnt out natural resources in that area

than it dies down and another

fire breaks out somewhere else.

And now of course we have one huge

civilization around the world

which we have to confront the possibility

that the entire experiment of civilization

is in itself a progress trap.

"When will the economy

turn around?" "yeah."

"I'm not an economist, but I do believe we are

growing and I can remember this press conference"

"saying about recession as

if you were economists."

"I'm an optimist, I believe there is a

lot of positive things for the economy."

Faith in progress has become

a kind of religious faith

a sort of fundamentalism rather,

like market fundamentalism

that have just recently crashed and burned.

The idea that you can let market leap

is a delusion just like

the idea that you could

let technology leap and it will solve

the problems created by itself

in a slightly earlier phase.

That has become a belief very

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