To foster the creation of a local, sustainable economy in the Willits area by partnering with other organizations to watch for opportunities and vulnerabilities, incubate and coordinate projects and facilitate dialog, action and education within our community.

For a start, let me say that I found myself somewhat confused as to whether WELL embraces an isolationist policy that focuses upon further exploiting remaining local resources or seeks to leverage local opportunities for attracting new sources of income from outside the Willits area. My confusion was increased by a recent presentation on economic opportunities that in some way was based on what sounded like the Chinese 5 Element Theory.

To be clear, a local, sustainable economy in the Willits area will either reach out to greater markets or turn inwards towards a subsistence model that will devolve to Medieval standards. A dwindling number of logging operations, a handful of ranches and a few vineyards produce much of what is now traded to the world beyond Willits for its sliver of the contemporary lifestyle.

By contemporary lifestyle I mean a daily existence based upon the interlocking triad of cheap energy, industrial metals and widespread electrical distribution. Currently, Willits is not partnering with any organization providing these, except as a consumer.

As the United States economic bubble continues to shrink, Willits will be challenged as a community to produce enough of value to meet the increasingly inflationary demands of a national policy of money debasement. This is the reality of economic collapse.

You see, the primary raw material in the Willits area was the timber harvested by the Rockefeller oligarchy and that is all but gone. The ranchers that followed occupied vast tracks of land in the effort to make beef production profitable. Compared to the vineyards and orchards of Sonoma and Napa Counties, similar local efforts seem meager at best.

The so-called fall of the Roman Empire resembled more a long term transition to what became known as feudalism than the series of catastrophes commonly presented in fall of the Roman Empire scenarios. As what passed for Roman economic policy debased Roman money, people fled the city of Rome to take up subsistence farming with the large land owners. These evolved into the feudal keeps so familiar to fans of the Middle Ages.

Those living through the transition from American Empire to whatever comes next will witness the birth of new institutions. One remarkable difference between the American Empire and previous empires is our unprecedented urbanization and integration with high technologies that are not land based but based upon the triad I mentioned above.

Unlike ancient Rome, most of the citizens in North America will not be able to return to the land to support their lifestyles. That option does not exist for the vast majority.

Willits is somewhat central to producing medical and recreational marijuana. This situation needs to be put into perspective.

Most of the large grows function as isolated and self-contained operations remarkably independent from local economic conditions. After a successful growing season, most of the product, as well as the profit, leaves the county.

Marijuana is not grown in the mountains because it is optimal for the plant. Marijuana is grown in mountainous Mendocino County because the growing scene there overwhelms local law enforcement.

It is grown by opportunists, in some cases the third generation of opportunists, who take advantage of local conditions and leave with their bounty, investing next to nothing in the local economy.

Can WELL keep the marijuana growers in the area long enough that some of that money gets spent locally? Can WELL develop new markets for local products beyond local borders, establishing contact with retail customers?

It seems odd to me that these issue cannot be found on the WELL agenda. Perhaps that is the source of my confusion.

Historian Michael Rostovtzeff and economist Ludwig von Mises both argued that unsound economic policies played a key role in the impoverishment and decay of the Roman Empire. That just makes sense to me, how about you?

According to them, by the 2nd century AD, the Roman Empire had developed a complex market economy in which trade was relatively free. Tariffs were low and laws controlling the prices of foodstuffs and other commodities had little impact because they did not fix the prices significantly below their market levels.

After the 3rd century, however, debasement of the currency (i.e., the minting of coins with diminishing content of gold, silver, and bronze) led to inflation. The price control laws then resulted in prices that were significantly below their free-market equilibrium levels.

While currency debasement is in full swing and inflation smacks you in the face with every purchase, price controls have yet to pop up. So far, you just have to eat the inflation.

According to Rostovtzeff and Mises, artificially low prices led to the scarcity of foodstuffs, particularly in cities, whose inhabitants depended on trade to obtain them. Despite laws passed to prevent migration from the cities to the countryside, urban areas gradually became depopulated and many Roman citizens abandoned their specialized trades to practice subsistence agriculture.

With a majority of United States citizens living in urban areas, most of the population does not have the option of going back to the land. This is very different from ancient Rome.

Thousands of years ago in Rome, as well as in our recent history, we can see a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation.

Abandoning Rome created empowerment for the lower levels of the former climax society, who escape from the burden of onerous taxes and control by exploitative elites. United States citizens seek nothing less.

So much the same, so much different. How are your subsistence agriculture skills? Do you even have a place to practice them?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Written in 1919, the lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” can be read as a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

The good want power, but to weep barren tears.

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.

The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;

And all best things are thus confused to ill.

Total Video Length: 1:48:39 in 8 segments, this is 1/8.

The film Inside Job takes a look at the financial crisis of 2008. It documents the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry, and the consequences of that systemic corruption.