[GJM] Budgeting is cruelty to humans

[Steve Consilvio]

Dan and Radu,

I think you are both missing the fact that "budgeting" is what people  
do to others, but not to themselves.  If you budget yourself, it is  
only because someone has already budgeted you previously.

As far as Jefferson goes, he was the typical intellectual fascist.   
He was quite willing to budget who should live and who should die,  
and he budgeted his slaves carefully I suspect.  I did not say that  
there needed to be a class of wise-men as rulers; I only implied that  
people needed to be wise.  In contrast, Jefferson believed that the  
people were wise enough to choose leaders to rule over them, and then  
wise enough to kill them.  That strikes me as a political absurdity.   
I doubt he would agree that I should kill him because he was unwise  
according to my standards, only that he should kill me if I was  
unwise according to his standards.

If we have zero trees and zero clean rivers, then that is the result  
of budgeting, because they have no value in anybody's budget.  In  
Massachusetts there are zero clean lakes, excluding the reservoirs.   
No fish taken should be eaten.  Should we blame Hamilton and not  
Jefferson for this situation, or the forces that drove men to  
pollute?  The Europeans brought their troubled minds to the American  
soil.  These lakes were not polluted before their arrival for  
thousands of years.  Pollution and raping the land did not begin with  
industrialism.

How we treat people and how we treat the environment is a reflection  
of how we think about numbers, and in that order.  We will never  
treat the environment fairly if we cannot treat one another fairly,  
and we will never treat one another fairly as long as we are living  
under the fear or fascination of numbers.  If we must choose a  
number, zero fits best.  It represents both nothingness and  
somethingness.

A better world is not possible until people think differently.  Only  
when people think differently can they act differently.  Killing  
people, hoarding wealth, stealing from the rich, suppressing the  
poor, using fear to gain political power, creating a new currency to  
supplant the old currency; none of these are new ideas.  These  
techniques have been tried over and over and over again.  History is  
scattered with the remains.

It isn't enough to just change; the correct path must be followed.   
Change can be for both the worse or the better.  The assumption that  
we can budget our way safely into the future is what is preventing  
the better world.  We are on the wrong path.  From federal budgets to  
state budgets to business and organization budgets to personal  
budgets.  Nobody is living in the moment; everybody lives in fear and  
with false hopes for a safe numerical future.

Join me in the present.  It's a beautiful day, with zero troubles.

peace,
steve consilvio
www.behappyandfree.com


On Oct 1, 2007, at 2:00 PM, discussion- 
request at globaljusticemovement.net wrote:

>   1. Re: Budgeting is cruelty to humans. (Dan Parker)
>    2. Re: Budgeting is cruelty to humans. (radu Seserman)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://globaljusticemovement.net/pipermail/discussion_globaljusticemovement.net/attachments/20071001/03309723/attachment.html