Scarcity
Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market or by the commons. Scarcity also includes an individual's lack of resources to buy commodities. The opposite of scarcity is abundance.
 |
This article is a stub. You can help Wikiquote by expanding it. |
Greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament... greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified... the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive. ~ Bernard Lietaer
QuotesEdit
- The conflicts today with our fellow human beings are over opposing values and limited access to the necessities of life. If we manage to arrive at a saner future... rather than having conflicts between nations, the challenges we will face will be overcoming scarcity, restructuring damaged environments, creating innovative technologies, increasing agricultural yield, improving communications, building communications between nations, sharing technologies, and living a meaningful life.
- As we enhance the lives of others, protect our environment, and work toward abundance, all our lives can become richer and more secure... When education and resources are available to all without a price tag, there will be no limit to human potential.
- Greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament... , greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using. For example, we can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In factthe job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.
- What's nice about local currency is that when people create their own money, they don't need to build in a scarcity factor. And they don't need to get currency from elsewhere in order to have a means of making an exchange with a neighbor... As soon as you have an agreement between two people about a transaction using Time Dollars, they literally create the necessary "money" in the process; there's no scarcity of money. That does not mean there's an infinite amount of this currency, either; you cannot give me 500,000 hours - nobody has 500,000 hours to give. So there's a ceiling on it, yes, but there's no artificial scarcity. Instead of pitting people against each other, the system actually helps them cooperate.
- The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. But this archetype has been violently repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the Indo-European invasions - reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of Judeo-Christianity, culminating with three centuries of witch hunts...
In Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother, - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith... created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed... If a society is afraid of scarcity, it will actually create an environment in which it manifests well-grounded reasons to live in fear of scarcity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy!...Fear of scarcity creates greed and hoarding, which in turn creates the scarcity that was feared. Whereas cultures that embody the Great Mother are based on abundance and generosity.
