Prout - Q & A on Local Economies
Q. What will be the Prout approach to capitalizing development for developing a given area or facet of development? Will it come from cooperatives or planning bodies? Do they have scope to develop certain capital just toward infrastructure? Are there loan approaches?
A. There can be a main fund that that will sponsor viable programs. This fund can be fed in a local area, something the size of Sonoma County or two or three counties. There may be development of a master fund. Into it would go a percentage or taxes from the cooperatives. That would be fund growth and development of certain types of important services for the community.
Now the question will be who will determine what programs to support? That will be the primary problem. For that, you have the election of the local officials who have the main power over the finances of the area. You also have managers who will have authority. The money would be taken from taxing the collectives and spent by the system that is set in the local area to define the types of programs that will be funded. It is from such a pool that different resources can come if there is abundance. If there is not sufficient abundance to create such a financial pool because finances of an area are too scant, then such a fund is not feasible. It will have to be raised in an immediate way from the local population by different forms of fundraising and passing certain taxes or ordinances to gather the money.
Q. What about from the larger region?
A. Yes. Depending if it will serve the larger region or if the larger region has the wealth to have such a good fund that can service local programs. For example, even in the society today if there is a city program to improve the city library, it is unlikely that the federal government will pay for it. The state government may or may not contribute. That depends on the type of program and its relationship with the general state system. Local communities and the state both pay a percentage for many services when the service provides for the whole area but is also local. In that case, there may be local and area funds. When it is strictly a state program, funding would come at that level. For example, services for the disabled come from the state. The local community does not pay for those services. The larger body is more able to handle the degree of services needed and the amount of financing needed. Even federal government gives matching funds because the state could not meet the needs of the population on its own. It does not have the resources.
In this way, federal government and state government work together to give a service which maybe then has local projects, local-regional projects that distribute the funds. They are not funded locally because local funding would make services very inconsistent. It would make standards impossible to keep because one county may be organized, another not. One county would have resources financially, another not. Yet they both may have these people in dire need.
A larger system needs to be developed for dire needs that are expensive because they may require total care. An organized system must be there on a larger scale to meet the needs of that population. It cannot be handled locally or if it is, it may not be adequate and may be a terrible burden on the local community.
In olden days, when there was no such organization of services, for example, the burden to take care of the local mentally retarded persons would come on the family itself or, if not the family, the church and the community. When there were people who had adequate wealth and were benevolent, they might donate to the help of that person, but ninety percent would fall on the family. Terrible abuses occurred because families could not cope with the needs of the people. They would lock them in the attic or even kill them and it would be not looked at closely by the community because all knew that the family did not have the resources. So it is that only through this kind of cooperative collective approach that the resources of a larger area can be put to use to deal with the special needs of certain populations. There is a realism to this.
Q. But the way it works in the states at the moment is that there is a lot of power in the central government and a lot of money goes there. That’s not really your plan is it?
A. No. No. More would be local economic autonomy and these things can be developed in regions but they will not be in townships or in sections of towns. Otherwise, the standard of service would become highly inconsistent. Unfortunately, due to the hardship of many towns, they could not supply the needs.
There are other services that are much more likely to be handled very locally, even in a block paradigm. It depends upon the nature of the services, the amount of resource it will take, and the nature of the capability. As I have said, this requires analysis, a category-by-category analysis. One cannot develop these types of systems without analysis. To have local economic control does not mean that one breaks down organized political systems and the requisite services they provide. These systems provide services and those services cost money. Even in a Proutist system, there will be different degrees of bodies and those will provide different spheres of service and those spheres of service will cost money, so all economy will not be local.
Q. So it will really be appropriate to the analysis that is made about a given situation and how best to meet the needs of the people.
A. The primary difference is if you put human life and development and the giving of each person basic necessities as the first and foremost mandate of your society, then all that you do falls in line with that intention. Society today is dominated by capitalist interests, very self-centered ideologies. For example, in the nursing home and in many services that have been privatized, unlike services given by the state to the developmentally disabled where a certain standard of quality is maintained, in privatization, although it is highly regulated, the capital interests strive to give the worst food and the minimum care in order to maximize profit, isn’t it? So they make their profit margin by decreasing the quality of life of the individuals they serve to the lowest level they can without being in violation of regulatory statutes. There should be no privatization like this of basic human services. These must be given by the community, the region, the local community. When there are elderly persons, the services should be provided with the intent to give the best quality of life that can be afforded to the people rather than the least quality of life that can be maintained without being accused of crimes in order to make the greatest profit margin.
Q. Practically, does that mean they would be provided by some sort of key industry arrangement or some kind of regulated cooperative?
A. Yes. Rather than being a for-profit in the capitalist sense. For capitalism when it applies to human services does its very worst. Because then it is in the blood of human beings to minimize what is given for their well-being and welfare whether it is in healthcare or services to the elderly or other. If schools are privatized to corporations, it would be the same in schools. Can you imagine what would happen to education if they were run by companies? Capitalism does its worst and dirtiest deeds in these human services.
In a Prout system, these services are handled by cooperatives in accordance with the state programs or the regional programs or the local programs, according to the type of need and the level of organization required and the level of, sometimes when there is a joining of forces, there is more resource available for everyone. It depends on the type of service.
Q. But it fits a little with our model of the key industry, would it not? Where some governmental body would contract with cooperatives to provide services of a certain standard.
A. Yes but they must be not as a capitalist, for profit margin.
Q. Right, no profit, no loss.
A. Yes. So the problem with the present system is that services that can be provided locally are not provided locally but out-sourced to various places and the workers travel long distance to their jobs. It is simply waste from poor management, isn’t it?
Q. This relates a bit to a question regarding block-level planning. It is a bit easy for me to envision for a place like Sonoma County, say, but for a place like the Los Angeles basin where you have some ten to twelve million people crammed together with no resource base, how will planning go on in these huge metropolitan settings? There is scope for manufacturing, administration, and services, but a balanced economy that is distributed through different spheres is …
A. Yes. In the present situation, there will need to be modification. But the world is changing. The tendency for migration of population into large cities has been due to the industrial revolution, is it not?
Q. Yes
A. In the industrial revolution, there was a need for the factory workers to come to the city, for the production workers, isn’t it? The need for that has grown much less and the need to be in one place as opposed to another has grown less. Yet this tendency of less also depends on being able to traverse distances because when you decentralize, you increase the need to go from one place to another. So the city is very condensed. It reduces the need for long distances of travel but it increases the density and dependency of the population on outlying areas.
In feudal times, the town would be surrounded by farms, would it not? They would support the town because they would not be importing their food from long distances away. With industrialization, certain towns grew very, very large. They cannot be supported by outlying fields and a whole different type of economy has developed, related to theses metropolitan areas but it is an economy based upon industrialization that is quickly slipping away. There is a need for these industrial capitalists to exist in order to sustain certain industries. But since technology is increasing, many centralized functions can again become decentralized and the small townships will again grow. A different time is approaching in this planetary configuration in which there will not be these large population centers and so distribution will work better. But at this stage, these large centers of population continue to be the norm. In times of disaster and crisis, they are difficult places as can be seen in the New Orleans situation. Regarding Prout economic development, one will always have to look at a large area like this in terms of the entire area it services. San Francisco Bay Area services all of northern California, isn’t it?
Los Angeles services a large area but the main problem is to feed these metropolitan areas. Food must be shipped long distances and water is a concern. Cities are more sustainable with hydroponic gardens and areas of food production within domed containers in the city. In this way, fresh foods can grow within the city. In modern city planning, of course, there will be different layouts so that there will be whole regions for growing food right within the city itself but grown in intensive environments, not in farmland.
So technology will bring the capabilities. Really, they are already there but they will only grow. It is possible to take the water from the salty water from the ocean to feed the population and to have large entire fields, blocked fields, domed with special intensive growing, development for intensive gardening purposes, to have high production of food. These things can be done with relative ease should they be desired. That way more autonomy in terms of water for drinking and in terms of food production can exist in an urban area. It would again require blocks of buildings or half blocks being converted into intensive domed gardening. So even if the winters are cold, year around it can be grown in the intensive greenhouses to feed the population. With a number of these, a design can be worked out to have a great deal of autonomy in terms of fruits and vegetables. Grains require larger growing areas but fruits and vegetables can be gotten in this way and then outlying fields can grow the grains. With a new type of development for the using salt water for farming and for drinking, with the purification plants of waste products, through these types of healthy developments the larger urban centers really can be changed into much more sustainable types of urban environments.
Q. A lot of people are drawn to the cities, not just for the industrial jobs, but because of cultural interests.
A. They come because they want culture; they want excitement; they want life that is pleasant and there are good points to these centers because they don’t need to travel so much, everything is there isn’t it? For the person who lives in the small community, if they have cultural interests, if they have interests in different things, they will have to travel for those. Then there is much more need for transportation. If it is a little larger town, like here, a few hundred thousand, then the needs of most people can generally be satisfied but in the very small community, they will want to go out to get needs met.
Q. What is a good size for communities in the future?
A. It will be based on population. It cannot be said now. But it may be that some amount of focalization of population is not bad. These very large centers are very hard to manage and in crisis, they are very dangerous places. Eugene or Santa Rosa are not so large. They are small but they are large enough to hold a great deal of cultural interest of the people.
Q. It seems to assist a bit with decentralization. It will also be good if more can go into the development of culture in the more rural areas and the smaller towns.
A. Ashland is a very cultured town.
Q. Yes.
A. But still people become restless there because it is small. But generally in a town such as Eugene there is not so much restlessness like that, is there? It is large enough to satisfy the people. But even in Eugene or Santa Rosa, these types of gardens could be developed. Again, desalinization processes can provide much water in areas that would otherwise be relying overmuch on groundwater and on rivers, such as all of California and the Southwest.
Q. My other question is about a farming cooperative or cooperatives in rural areas. Say you have some area where there is some agricultural land with forest in proximity and possibilities for developing many kinds of agricultural and forestry potential. Many products that can be gotten and I wonder how agriculture along with silviculture in a cooperative would work in that setting. Would different farmers produce different crops and would they share some marketing and research or how big would they be? Would they all be localized around a certain town?
A. I am certain it would vary from one cooperative to another. They would develop their own system that would work for them. But mainly they would feed into a central community, which would, in turn, support them.
