Bonnie's website is getting a major update finally, after 10 years, a little at a time.

June 4, 2011

Sustainability has three major elements - economic prosperity, environmental health, and social equity. As a number of sustainability researchers have discovered -

If you get equal treatment right, the rest is easy.

Police Powers allow government to tax and regulate, on condition that they provide public health, safety, opportunity, taxes, and regs EQUALLY, as far as it practical.

The function of Planning in government is to anticipate future needs in order to equitably provide health, safety and opportunity at the least possible cost and most benefit.

Reading The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket

My take: Quality and quantity of human life are both determined by level of equality in society. The difference between more equal societies (like Japan and Sweden) and far less equal U.S. creates magnitudes of 2 to 10 times greater homicides, birth rates, death rates, expensive diseases like diabetes and mental illness in the U.S.

Birth rates go lower when people view their society as secure for them so they invest more upbringing in fewer children. If society feels unsafe the biological response is to produce a lot of offspring.

The interesting thing is that socialism doesn't seem to matter. Sweden redistributes unequal incomes, socialism, while Japan just has far less distance between lowest and highest pay scales, not socialism. It doesn't really matter how you do it. But there is no way to avoid the horrendous social and medical effects of inequality, and it doesn't just effect the people at the bottom, the bad effects of unequal society go right on up through the middle class to the very rich.

Think looting. It ain't just the poor that loot in the US when the opportunity presents itself. Witness the finance sector. Or the current Ayn Rand madness for looting social programs and education to buy more weaponry. Ayn Rand scorned religion and all charity toward anyone. In other words a sociopath. Quite the opposite of any religion, quite the opposite of the golden rule.