Oil is a prime example. The industrialized world set up the oil markets. Now that they are running out of domestically produced oil they are cheating like crazy to prevent their baby from turning into a monster. Unfettered markets follow a boom/bust cycle under most circumstances. That happens in part because technology development seldom follows a smooth development curve. Thus agriculture, for example, has followed a boom bust cycle in most nations. Governments have tried to smooth out the bumps in the curve with subsidies to the great benefit of corporate agriculture. That such policies have also sometimes helped the consumer has contributed to their longevity.

Food and water are also commodities that matter very much to people in industrialized nations and elsewhere too. Air is still free in most of the world but pollution is adding cost to maintaining even that precious commodity. Human life without any of the five commodities mentioned is far more difficult to sustain or even impossible in some environments. Air is necessary, water too cannot be done without. Food is essential too. On the other hand try living without heating oil in the northeastern USA in a cold winter. That will kill you if you are not really strong and adaptable. In the Midwest natural gas is the essential fuel for home heating in winter time.

The economy we have created in the world is based on trade in the four commodities I mention above. They are at the center of human wants and needs. Many other things enter into the wants column but those four basic commodities are all essential to maintaining life in the cities of the world. Cities are where culture is maintained and continuously added to in a healthy human environment. Boiling it down still further energy, water and food are the critical essentials of a good life for humans today. This is true of those scraping a living from land without any of the real advantages bestowed on those of us who live in the industrialized world. It is also true of the richest people on earth.

Something is breaking down in the world market system we have built at such expense and by using such a huge consumption of human life and effort. In order to assure the flow of essential commodities such as oil from the locations around the world where it is readily accessible we have created a market architecture that benefits the dominant consuming nations.

One of the subtle "cheats" in that market that benefits energy consumers here in the USA is the use of our paper dollars to pay for that oil. Those dollars are worth what they will buy in the world market and increasingly that valuation is shrinking. Of course we can print more dollars, and we do, but how long the world will accept them as a currency in exchange for real material goods is an issue. There are real signs that the world is likely to find another currency or set of currencies to use in international trade someday soon. In part that is due to the growing deficits here, both in government spending and the balance of trade between this nation and the rest of the world.

We consume one quarter of the world's energy to provide heat and light and transportation for one twentieth of the world's population. That is creating a phenomenal imbalance in international trade that we are the beneficiaries of at the moment. We consume .6 Trillion dollars more of the world's GDP than we produce. Since the world GDP is around forty trillion dollars; that is one and a half percent of the world's GDP we are borrowing every year to pay for our consumption imbalance. That is one hell of a lot of money when it is compared to any deficit ever run by any nation in the world prior to this period in history.

We are also borrowing .6 trillion dollars to sustain government spending. Much of that government spending is on maintaining the military forces we use to keep the world markets stable. That is another one and a half percent of world GDP we are using to sustain the world markets on which we depend for our undeniably good lives. Two hundred billion dollars of that money is coming from our payroll taxes paid for Social Security, the rest is borrowed on the world market. Our deficits are actually tying up three percent of the world's available capital every year. This is an unsustainable situation. It is largely caused by our unsustainable use of costly military power to support the world market structures. These are the same market structures that give us the advantage we need to sustain this imbalance.

Oh but security is such a worry in our world that we have to spend that money on military power. Do we? What if we didn't? I would be interested in seeing a projection of the sustainable growth in the world economy if the three percent imbalance caused by our maintaining those markets did not exist. Would the whole world economy collapse if we didn't maintain our military presence around the world? Could we do more with diplomacy and make do with less consumption of the world's resources for our own use?

Saddam Hussein was an example of why that tactic might not work without a lot of fine tuning. In 1992 he would have taken over the oil in the whole Persian Gulf area where most of the easily available and exportable oil in the world resides. That would have given him a gun to the head of the world economies; which is why the whole world backed us in the first war with Iraq. Their economies would have suffered if he had gained that level of control over the oil. We actually paid for that war with the contributions of other nations.

Today our military is under stress from the war in Iraq and our financial commitment to that war has hurt our future military budgets substantially. We have yet to pay for replacing the material consumed by that war. We are reducing our expenditures on research and development which have made our military the strongest in the world up to now. We are being forced to cut back on government spending in other areas and our national economic picture is growing increasingly fragile. Maybe it is time to rethink our role in the world economy.

Meanwhile Oil is growing as a consumer of GDP worldwide at the same time that supplies are shrinking in relation to consumption. Clean fresh water is in short supply in most of the world and that problem is getting more severe over time. Supplying clean water will continue to consume more and more of the world GDP over the next century. We need to create a sustainable world economy that is substantially less dependent on military force to sustain it. We need to do that soon or the system we have today will fall of its own weight.

Meanwhile I hear my wren starting up outside and the sun is creeping over the horizon. I look forward to spending this day with the people I love and hope you can do the same.