Robert J Morton
Robert J Morton |
6,000 million human beings collectively share this planet's 130 million square kilometres of habitable land. Natural justice suggests that this bounteous heritage should be apportioned to each of us in a way which would ensure that the needs of life were provided in fair measure to all.
Introduction | Land | Food | Clothing | Shelter | Water | Energy | Software
This Early 21st Century world is made of nation-states and power blocs whose economic influences are progressively dissolving into a single unpartitioned global economy of private commercial interests. In this world, the individual is increasingly alone and vulnerable in a vast economic ocean. The secure life-long nine-to-five job is history. Every individual in every country on Earth will soon be in one single super-competitive labour market.
A highly skilled professional in the Third World is - or soon will be - just as good as any in the wealthy West. Present communications technology makes distance no longer a barrier. His high living costs relative to his Third World counterpart leaves the Western worker unable to compete and survive in the global market. He is destined to become sidelined into poverty, a cog no longer needed in the great machine of global capitalism.
But the future does not have to be this way. Chapter 11 of my book The Lost Inheritance ventures a suggestion for a better and fairer way of turning work into wealth, based on an alternative concept of family and community which is neither capitalist nor socialist. It is based on a fundamental birthright of every individual to the lifetime economic use of his fair and sufficient share of terrestrial resources to turn his labour into his needs of life.
This project is a practical view of how a family microeconomy could be implemented within the kind of social order proposed in my book. It is a working example of how a family can apply their hythe of land to the purpose of transforming their knowledge and labour into their needs and luxuries of life.
The projects gets its name from an ancient measure of land called the hythe which varied in area according to its productive potential.
If Planet Earth's 130 million square kilometres of habitable land were shared out amoung its one billion human families, each would, at the present time, end up with the following.
This is far more than is necessary for each family to produce all its basic needs. Besides, if industry and business were directed away from war and competition towards more constructive endeavours, it would not take long to make the desert "blossom as the rose" and "the rough places plain". There is far more than enough land on this planet for each family to be able to inherit their rightful hythe, while leaving plenty for common usage.
All the families of Planet Earth would, within this proposed social order, have their hythes merged and redivided every generation to ensure that the division of land remained fair. Not everyone would wish or be able to apply their labours directly to land. Nevertheless their economic ownership of their fair inheritance would ensure they had the means to secure their needs of life - at least indirectly.