Biological Economics

Download Summary (PDF)
Download Entire Treatise (PDF)

Section I: What is Biological Economics?
Section II: Building a Case Against Hierarchal Economics
Section III: Components of Hierarchal Economic Ideology
Section IV: Follow the Money
Section V: Conclusions

Life has been methodically built from the bottom up through the process of Biological Economics. The human organism is a product of intraspecific unicellular mutualism; the principles of ‘micro’ economics utilized by the single cell remain unchanged at the multicellular (or ‘macro’ economic) level because, of course, they evolved from one stage to the other. The ‘economic growth’ achieved between these levels represents unicellular problem solving, as cells labored to engineer solutions which created the ‘feel’ of more certainty (balance or homeostasis) within the perceived uncertainty of the environment; solutions always center around strategies of connection, communication, and labor, fueled by the drive to make order (ease) out of the irritation (unease) of perceived chaos.

The human organism is currently in the process of establishing intraspecific mutualism (interdependence) at the ‘global’ (social / relational or societal) level of economics, to enable the next stage of its economic development (or ‘evolution’); this is a process that has not been without struggle. The introduction of parasitic and predatory elements has thus far thwarted the overall mutual interconnectedness needed to reach global economic interdependence.

The economics humans currently practice evolved from the forced submission of one group of people by another. The excuse for it derives from early shared beliefs that the world was created and held together from the top down, which provided the impetus for opportunists to institute an economic paradigm of violent conquest followed by hierarchal subjugation (‘top-down’ control). The fact that this was accomplished in the name of some god or some religion is irrelevant; violence is the only mechanism that can successfully sustain the myth of hierarchy.

Violence survives because of our ignorance of its origins, its intended purpose, and our intended purpose, which is mutual interconnectedness; the recommunication of violence will continue to resonate until we finally listen to it and decipher its very clear message: that something is disconnected and needs to be reconnected. The continued use of the “master’s tool” of violence to unseat the oppressor of the moment only establishes it as the foundation for the next generation of oppressor; externally imposed violence will never dismantle the house hierarchal economics has built.

There is a reality—biological economics—that continues to function beneath the façade of hierarchal economics; it is through this biological lens that all the flaws in hierarchal economics can be magnified, isolated, and eventually removed; now would be a good time to begin this process.

The United States became the first country founded on the notion that people choose their leaders, not some divine hierarchal entity. To declare this, the founders asserted that Natural Laws govern life from the bottom up, which is biologically correct. It is in the Court of Natural Law that we must put Hierarchal Economics on trial and attempt to non-violently dismantle it from the inside out.

Recommendations

A) Establish a Natural Law based on the biological economics that successfully produced the human species, B) clearly demonstrate where current economics deviates from Natural Law, C) citing principles of Natural Law—upon which the Declaration of Independence was predicated and the U.S. Constitution was prefaced (making it a living document capable of evolving along with the people it serves)—bring charges against the Federal Government for its failure to secure the ‘Equal Protection’ of everyone under its administration. The ultimate purpose of this maneuver is to D) regain the Money Powers for the people, where it can be repurposed as a tool of empowerment rather than subordination. This will serve, more than any other strategy, to deliver the promise of Liberty that after 250 years is still pending.

Currently, the only belief all Americans share (however tentatively) is the expectation that money holds value; it is also the only shared belief to which the People hold legal title, through their federal government’s Congressional Money Powers. To correctly practice the mutualistic—or ‘Positive’—Liberty our United States Constitution promised to secure, the recommendation is to center mutualistic connection around the People’s shared belief in money.

Where shared means and mediums of connection intersect basic human needs (which are essential to each person’s Life), they create a short list which perfectly embodies what the founders broadly referred to as the General Welfare; not only does the General Welfare serve as the only constitutionally allowable financial expenditure granted to Congress, but it is also the only constitutionally allowable excuse to tax the labor value of the American people. If this taxed labor value was instead turned into an investment in the very people who labored to produce it, then later returned to them (with interest, as investments should), it would no longer represent a tax on individual Liberty, but instead an investment in it.

The following infrastructure represents the means and mediums of connection most essential to the General Welfare: banks, transportation (roads, rails, and runways), energy, communication, education, government, agriculture, housing, and health care. The recommendation of this treatise is to utilize American tax money (real labor value) as an investment in all the essential means and mediums of connection, loaned out through local branches of a National Public Bank, whose main branch is housed within the U.S. Treasury. These ‘loans’ would be paid back by the American people, through their rent, utility bills, etc. These would not be ‘self-liquidating’ loans because the labor value is real, thus when the loans are paid back, the money does not need to be cancelled, but can be dispersed equally among all stakeholders and serve as universal retirement dividends (to replace social security).

This plan would tie our fates together (connection), reward labor value (by turning taxation into an investment that is returned) and help preserve the planet’s ‘ecosystem’ (through all the latest green and clean infrastructural innovations). Natural Law predicts that the communication of mutualistic connection will dissipate the negative externalities of external and internal violence (disconnection) by replacing the positive feedback loop created by disconnection with a negative feedback loop created by connection; this would bring down the cost of government, the cost of living, and the cost of violence to a much healthier (and sustainable) level.

Natural Law is economic law. The role of government is to manage economics; it has no other purpose. The size of government—measured in armies and prisons, health care and welfare—is indicative of the functional (or dysfunctional) nature of the economics being administrated. The United States Government was constitutionally founded on Natural Law and therefore pledged to manage its economics upon those principles. America’s founders specifically asserted Natural Law to establish precedence over hierarchal divine right (and thus its brand of economics) and thereby abrogate it. These points cannot be stated enough.

Understanding Liberty

The United States Constitution clearly affirms that federal government exists to serve its people; it is specifically committed to secure each person’s liberty. The founders reasoned quite correctly that Liberty can be defined through Natural Law; it remains for We the People of today to reason further and define specifically what reciprocal considerations this Liberty can reasonably guarantee.

What biological economics finds—and Natural Law asserts—is that there are two versions of Liberty that coincide with two emotional languages that cellular organisms speak: one is the language of belongingness—or connection—and the other is the language of violence—or disconnection. As cellular existence evolved to a societal (or global) level of economics, two ways to communicate Liberty also evolved.

Positive Liberty is about creating positive value, which can only be done through labor; Negative Liberty is about consuming the positive value of others, which can only be done through violence. In a society based on Liberty for all, only mutualistic exchanges are acceptable, where labor is given by choice; this would necessarily eliminate the parasitism and predation of Negative Liberty as a viable option.

To secure the biological Positive Liberty encapsulated within Natural Law, each person must be allowed to own—and take ownership—of their physical self, along with the beliefs and choices that define individual Liberty. Liberty cannot be secured if Life is not secured, therefore each person, through ownership of their physical self, must also own the value of their labor, which represents their only means of existence.

Because existence (Life) is predicated on economic exchange, which is not possible without connection, and biological liberty affords each person the binary choice to connect or disconnect based on their beliefs, each person necessarily owns their ‘share’ of whatever shared beliefs, shared institutions, shared labor, and shared means and mediums of economic connection they choose to embrace or utilize.

Taxation is a logical mechanism within a paradigm of Negative Liberty (to extract from the Positive Liberty of others), but in a paradigm of ‘liberty for all,’ the taxation of labor is a direct extraction of positive value, and thus Positive Liberty. 

Similarly, taxation of Positive Liberty also occurs through the arbitrary attachment of inflated value along the disconnected supply chain of hierarchal economics. As people agglomerate around shared beliefs, choice, connection, and the essential needs that secure their Life and embody their Liberty, those who control excess monetary wealth use the people’s Liberty against them, to inflate prices and further extract from the Positive Liberty of the laborer.

Ironically, hierarchal money is worthless unless it is attached to labor, meaning those with wealth are holding the value of other people’s labor and nothing else. Further, this extracted labor value has no place to attach itself except to the very mechanisms that continue to drive the inequality—the various property that serves as the mediums of production (importantly, labor is the only means of production, therefore those who own the mediums necessarily own the means). The process of feeding the excess extracted labor value back into the further ownership of the labor logically generates the positive feedback loop of wealth inequality that America is currently experiencing.

Liberty is part of Natural Law. Natural Law is economic law. Because Liberty is an economic term, governments purporting to secure Liberty are thereby instituted to manage a country’s economics. Currently, government is mismanaging the people’s Positive Liberty by instead securing the tenets of hierarchal economics, which include 1) violence, 2) property rights, 3) taxation, 4) Negative Liberty, and along with it 5) the invention of a ‘negative’ (or debt) version of money. There are workarounds to remove the oppressiveness of these tools; all of them center around ‘re-inventing’ money.

Money is the perfect metaphor to capture the essence of hierarchal economics; like hierarchy, money also does not exist. What really fuels hierarchal economics is what also fuels biological economics: labor.Furthermore, the concept of money only exists because of a shared belief in it. Beliefs are what drive choice, and choice is what defines Liberty, therefore the first two steps in re-inventing money is for A) all people to hold an ownership ‘share’ of this belief that money holds value, then B) attach the value of money to the only real ‘gold standard’ that has ever existed: labor.

Understanding Hierarchal Debt Money

Hierarchal Economics is based on divine rights (as there are no naturally occurring rights). Religious temples were the first marketplaces, managing to peddle the comfort of the people’s own shared beliefs in exchange for their labor; inflation soon hit, as hierarchal economic beliefs such as property rights, taxation, and debt money came along to begin a fifty-century tradition of parasitically extracting the maximum possible amount of labor value from each person. Through this process, a hierarchal form of liberty—negative liberty—was created, to reinforce the main principle of hierarchal violence: that the world is free for whoever is strong enough to take it.

Through hierarchal property rights, disconnections are placed between the laborer and A) the land, B) the value of their labor, C) the products of their labor, D) their economic liberty, E) their shared beliefs, and more. Between every disconnection, financial paywalls are placed, where intermediaries parasitically extract from the labor value generated by the laborer.

From a biological economic perspective (where equally created organisms form mutualistic relationships), labor is the only source of value creation, therefore every added cost beyond the labor value needed to produce a good or service (measured in wages) represents a form of value-added taxation on the laborer, which is extracted by hierarchal beneficiaries on the consumer (or ‘demand’) side of the economic exchange. The measure of wealth inequality is clear evidence of this parasitic (or ‘one-way’) connection, where positive value is being drained—not ‘cancelled out’—as the peddlers of hierarchal debt money would assert.

Hierarchal Debt represents a financial hole into which each person must shovel the positive value of their labor. All hierarchal money is derived from debt. The concept of debt evolved to soften the direct threat of hierarchal violence, but still represents a negative value intended to coerce or extract from the positive value of labor. Hierarchal Debt Money is valueless until it parasitically attaches itself to labor; it is floated out into the economy from many sources, where it gets ‘laundered’ through this attachment. Infused with positive labor value, the debt money—now a “store” of positive labor value—is subsequently extracted from the economy through various disconnection points, which are obfuscated by hierarchal economic rationalizations (profit, inflation, economic rent, price gouging, elastic currency, inelastic demand, agglomeration theories, supply and demand, economic scarcity, et al.); this action is accomplished long before the original debt (which triggered the initial release of debt money into the economy) is paid back and allegedly “cancels out.”

Inflationary ‘demand’ prices snatch away the laborer’s ‘supply-side’ wage (labor value) and leaves the debt money behind for the laborer, in the form of personal debt or National debt. This practice has raised the cost of living by 2,972% since the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913; currently, average household (personal) debt sits at $143,636, and National Debt—at $32.1 trillion and counting—represents a $250,000 share owed by each U.S. taxpayer; the sum of this debt perfectly measures the amount of Liberty extracted from the American laborer over the last 110 years.

For the record, taxation is pure labor value. Customer deposits, from which private banks leverage the creation of imaginary hierarchal debt money—is also pure labor value. When federal government pays its bills with National Debt Money, it is the U.S. taxpayer who pays the interest on this debt, using their pure labor value (the ever-increasing interest-only payments currently stand at $606.7 billion per year). All money is not created equal; to locate the real value, follow the labor.

Natural Law was originally posited by ‘enlightened’ philosophers as a ‘natural’ reaction to the unnatural economics of divine right, though they had no biological foundation to substantiate it at that time. Nevertheless, the founders of the United States had enough of a shared belief in Natural Law to cite it in their ‘declaration’ of independence from hierarchal rule, and with the establishment of the U.S. Constitution, Natural Law theoretically abrogated the arbitrary laws of hierarchal economics. The ‘federalist’ founders also managed to interpret many of its principles correctly: they sought connection (‘united’ states), fair labor (not slavery), no income taxation (extraction of labor value), and a single currency (a shared belief that was meant to be owned by all the People—through the Congressional Money Powers). First Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton replaced the hierarchal religious temple with a national public bank designed to collect pure labor value and disseminated it toward the General Welfare.

Public Banks (and publicly created money) have subsequently been used many times throughout U.S. history: the First Bank (1791-1811), Second Bank (1816-1836), National Currency and Legal Tender Acts (1862-1864), the War Finance Corporation (1918), the Home Owners Loan Corporation (1933), the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932-1957), and the G.I. Bill (1944), for example. Importantly, property rights, gun rights, and states’ rights (that protected slavery for a time) were enumerated within constitutional amendments only, because they represented the compromises made to secure everyone’s allegiance under one flag. Through this compromise, hierarchal economics became woven into the fabric of American society, where the United States (compared to all developed countries) currently ranks highest in health care costs, incarceration, gun violence, years at war, wealth inequality, waste, and more; our economic policies have propelled the human species into the unique and unsustainable category of the world’s only super predators.

Understanding the Main Principles of Biological Economics

Biological economics is the process of energy conversion, or communication; cells are organic transduction conduits that not only must let the energy of the universe move through them to exist, but they must convert this energy into a chemical language each can understand. This process of energy conversion requires labor; thus, labor is the only source of positive value creation, used to secure individual existence, as well as further shared connection and communication.

Communication is important to maintain a healthy balance within a variable environment, or homeostasis; to stay within a healthy homeostatic range, positive (and negative) values must be constantly dispersed, or ‘recommunicated.’

Cells exercise their liberty through taxis—the binary choice to either gravitate toward (and connect to) sources of positive value (positive response), or away from sources of negative value (negative response). Prior to choice, a belief in the positive or negative value of the choice must exist, to drive will or purpose. The will to exist, the will to connect, the will to communicate; good arguments can be made for all three motivations (or that all three motivations are, in fact, the same motivation), but cells—like people—need motivation, which drives each binary choice and defines individual Life, Liberty, and Happiness.

Whatever the underlying motive is for cells to exist, it is the ‘constant;’ environment is the ‘variable’ in this economic equation. Beliefs and choices vary because environments vary. To maintain existence, cells must remain in balance with the environment inside and out (homeostasis); the reactive short-term navigation of cells to maintain a tolerable homeostatic range necessarily turns cellular organisms into the products of their environment, as they must recommunicate what they receive to maintain equilibrium in relation to their environment. Multicellular organisms were likely able to connect because of an uninterrupted womb-like environment (stasis), where all beliefs, needs and purposes were perfectly aligned.

With every connection, an economic ‘relationship’ is formed (e.g., mutualistic, commensal, parasitic, predatory) and various values (positive and negative) are communicated. As positive values can only be derived through individual labor, negative values represent the parasitic or predatory extraction of individual labor by an outside agent.

Only mutualistic relationships are equally beneficial to all parties, where exchange of labor is freely given, and ‘relational equality’ is established. Multicellular organisms, such as humans, are organized exclusively around mutualistic relationships; only foreign agents seek parasitic or predatory relationships; occasionally, cancerous relationships form among cells within organisms, when they become disconnected from the multicellular community, usually through systemic abuse (internal violence). Intraspecific violence is a societal level manifestation of cancer, and most assuredly, the two are related; eventually, a causation for internal cancer will be linked both directly and indirectly to the constant chemical communication of violence generated by navigating the current hierarchal economic environment.

Eukaryotic cells are not simply ‘building blocks.’ Each cell represents A) a fully functioning, self-contained micro-economic system, B) an organic transduction conduit—a communication device—that converts the energy of the universe in order to transmit the message of its existence across the medium of Time, and C) an individual life form, that purposefully exercises its liberty through taxis—the binary choice to either gravitate toward (and connect to) sources of positive value (positive response), or away from sources of negative value (negative response).

Like the single cell, the single human organism is not some macro-economic building block born to enact someone else’s hierarchal—or negative—version of liberty. How can we be sure of this? The violence needed to secure this hierarchal paradigm. If violence was a pleasant or positive experience, generating positive results, then we would naturally embrace it as the purpose of our existence, except that whether the violence is externalized (through war, oppression, murder, suicide, rape, pollution, incarceration, etc.) or internalized (through cancer, obesity, drug and alcohol abuse, stress, etc.), it is a decidedly negative experience, generating negative results. Intraspecific Disconnection is not the formula for Life, Liberty, or Happiness.

Intraspecific violence has unicellular origins as the chemical / emotional communication of disconnection (a negative response); from there, it evolved into an intricate multicellular defense mechanism against harmful interspecific relationships. The ‘nature’ of eukaryotic cells is constant; the variable is always the environment each organism must navigate, thus the intraspecific communication of violence at the social / relational level, however paradoxical, stems from unicellular mechanisms of self-defense (self-protection) and perceived disconnection within the surrounding environment.

Intraspecific violence became interwoven with religious hierarchal ideology at the social / relational economic level 5,000 years ago, where it generated a positive feedback loop of economic kleptoparasitism antithetical to the biological economic paradigm from which the human organism evolved. The chemical / emotional communication of violence is a stopgap defense mechanism and not meant to serve as long-term economic strategy; its misapplication has resulted in measurable negative outcomes at all economic levels (cellular, societal, planetary).

The biological economic principle of homeostasis keeps organisms floating within the narrow parameters required for continued existence. The human organism is no different; it is genetically predisposed to adapt to the environment (‘go with the flow’) rather than to fight or flee it. Adaptations that generate measurable negative (fight or flight) outcomes communicate that the environment itself is toxic to the human organism. If that environment was artificially constructed, then the human species would do well to alter it; logically, humans would look to the Natural Laws upon which organisms came to exist to make those alterations.