You could say the American dream is to both “make a living” and “have a life”. Definitions first. To “make a living” is to work at something that yields enough income to provide for our needs and some savings. Notice I didn’t say wants. This would include food, clothes, shelter, utilities, health care, dental & eye care, enough to replace things that wear out and enough to save for a rainy day and old age. To “have a life” is to do what we love, have family and friends, community, social involvement, enough resources to cover necessities and have some flexibility. I would guess that more than half of Americans do not have both. Further I would guess that at least a quarter of us have neither. How many of us have given up having a life to make a living just to have the great job disappear. How many have refused to sacrifice their life to make a living only to have their health fail and have neither. I have neither. I spend 27 or so days a month on the road working 60 hours a week and don’t make enough to get dental or health care much less replace my dying car. We need a safety net to decrease the number of hazards to our financial viability. We need a carbon tax to raise the money to finance the safety net. I would actually go for a resource depletion tax. Those using up the commons would be paying to support those who are disenfranchised by its loss.

The financial system as we know it is based on the saving and lending of money. Before the 80’s thrifty citizens deposited their money in a financial institution with an expectation that the interest they received, compounded, would at least keep up with inflation. The institution in turn lent the money with the expectation that the interest they could charge would pay the depositor and pay them for their trouble and risk. Savings would earn 4 – 6% and you could borrow for 8 – 12%. Eighties inflation discouraged both savers and borrowers by removing their profit motive.
Ever since, the interest rates for savings have gone down and interest rates on loans have increased. The system has tried to squeeze an ever larger profit from a dwindling supply thus effectively killing the market. Now savings earn 1% and credit cards cost 29% with ever increasing default rates. Someone got greedy.
National usury laws would help resolve the problem, making lending for more than a 10% annual interest rate illegal.
CD’s with their return pegged to the cost of living index would assure that savings would keep up with the inflation that the usury laws would discourage.

It is spring, as I drive this truck, adding to planetary unsustainability, I see eroded fields, with small plumes of silt in the ditches and stream beds, muddy streams all over (except a couple in KY TN) and silt covered banks of the larger rivers. Our national wealth, top soil, going out to sea. Some of it the result of producing corn ethanol that requires 8 gallons of petroleum for every gallon of ethanol produced. I read the NY Times article on Transition Towns http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html and my impotence hit me in the face once again. At the same time I’m reading “The Power of Sustainable Thinking” by Bob Doppelt. “When will we ever learn?” So I rewrote my resume – how many people have both plowed a field with a horse and written XHTML for a webpage with 20 years of solar construction between? Maybe I can get a Transition Town to adopt me. Now to integrate the principles of those two sources.

Utopian Vision
There is a historical marker at one of the rest stops on Interstate 35 in Iowa dedicated to the settlers who came to the area to establish their utopian vision. I went to Paraguay SA to establish a community in 1972. Upon arriving I found that I was only the latest in a long line of immigrants seeking a similar vision. That marker in Iowa found me as I was then, and still am, struggling to define my position for my Masters thesis. Shortly thereafter I came upon an article in the March – April 2009 Futurist by Edward Cornish, who was president of the World Future Society 1996 – 2004, titled “What I Have Learned”. He states:
“But during the years ahead, I believe that social technologies will be even more important that physical, chemical, or biological technologies. I certainly don’t mean to discount the importance of technological inventions – they are obviously important – but I do assert that investing in social inventions may do even more than physical or biological inventions to improve the human condition. A social invention is a new law, custom, organization, or procedure that changes the ways in which people relate to themselves or to each other, either individually or collectively.” (56)

My studies have centered around the social technologies of community building. I have recognized that the challenges of living in community are probably as old as humanity, at least dating from Cain and Abel. In an effort to utilize historical experience and incorporate future thinking I decided to read some case studies of past utopian efforts as well as “Imagining America in 2003: How the Country Put Itself Together after Bush” which is a utopian scenario of the future written by Utopian studies scholar Herbert J Gans.

As I have begun reading the utopian case studies it is apparent the Owenites and Fourierists of the 1830’s and 1840’s were striving for many of the same ideals that the communal movement of the 1960’s and the current cohousing, community development corporations, and a multitude of other urban renewal efforts are. It’s an interesting journey.