Photo by Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash

Billionaires Are The Bane Of The Global Surplus Society

Some of them want to go to space before the world blows up. When their ships spring a leak, what will they do?

ScottCDunn
5 min readMay 17, 2022

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We live in a surplus society. That means that after the day is done, we have enough resources left over to create and enjoy the conveniences of modern life. A tiny fraction of us actually works on a farm to produce the food we eat today. The rest of us are either making stuff or servicing the stuff we make. The labor that is available after we made all the food we can eat is the surplus.

I got this idea from a book by Michael Hudson called, “…and forgive them their debts”. In that book, he discusses the origins of money and who invented it. We learn that it wasn’t those freedom-loving barterers that created money. The first governments created money so that taxes could be paid.

We also learn from his book that in those days, our populations were small. All they could do back then was hunt and forage for food, and hope that they could make it another day.

Through Hudson’s book, we see how early cultures evolved from hunter-gatherers to adopting agriculture, to then have enough left over to loan some of the surplus food to someone else at interest. And it wasn’t to get paid back. Back then, the…

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