Living in a verifiably insane world

I take a daily medication for hypertension. Sam’s club recently placed the type of medication on their $4 list, and I decided to give the medication a try. Yesterday, I noticed the pills are manufactured in India. India!!! I have no issues with importing products from India or any other country --- providing those products meet US standards are in direct competition with US made products, not replacing US products.

What surprises me here is the amount of energy required to move those tablets from India to Indiana. Aside from the annoying fact that the Indian workers who manufacture those tablets must be paid next to nothing, the use of dwindling world oil resources makes the logic of transporting tablets literally halfway around the world can only be called insane. I don’t use that word lightly. Greed is an insanity, no matter how many so-called capitalists wish to call the pursuit of unbridled profits desirable. When the obsessive pursuit of a goal or objective creates a harmful environment for the community and the individual the mental state created by that obsessive pursuit can only be called insane.

Using dwindling world oil resources to fuel a so-called global economy is short sighted at best and suicidal in any sense. We hear repeated predictions about how few years are left in the world’s oil reserves at present levels of consumption (about a generation) and how present levels of development in Asian and Latin American countries exacerbates the dwindling supply problems. We are now experiencing a vicious downturn in the economy arising from dwindling credit reserves that came about by the obsessive pursuit of wealth. What kind of crash can we expect when the fuel that drives the present forms of industrialization dries up?

As globally oriented humans we need to focus on developing strong, stand alone, energy efficient national economies. Global trade has existed for millennia. It won’t end regardless of what economic theory is prevalent among government planners at the moment. Any amount of thought given to the situation recognizes that until ALL national borders fall and ALL areas of the globe are administered by a single, central government a global, free market economy merely shuffles the geographical site of the exploitation of centers of wealth and poverty stricken workers from one hapless society to another.