For most of the last decade I've devoted attention on mypersonal blog to the cycles of our political history.
What began as an examination of political trends moved to social trends and then, late last year, took a new turn to economics.
Each of our political cycles, I found, was driven by economic change. A fading industry used political ends to restrain the future, but when the conflict ended the way was clear for a new economic order.
The Civil War was a struggle between man and machine. Slaves' work created wealth. But northern factories could create even more wealth, and they won the war.
The Progressive Era saw railroad barons seeking monopoly rents, but ended with bankers like J.P. Morgan creating regulated utilities whose steady prices allowed Henry Ford and other manufacturers to scale up.
The New Deal began with the need to scale mass consumption so factories could maintain prices and profits. The Depression was deflationary, and the Roosevelt Administration deliberately created inflation, and our modern economy.
The 1960s saw the end of manufacturing and the rise of intellectual property as a store of value. Policies changed to favor Moore's Law over time-and-motion.
Each fading industry saw its growth becoming more scarce. Planters ran out of easily-exploited cotton lands. Railroads finished tying the country together. Factories ran out of customers. Technology changed and demanded its due.
Which brings us to today. What's scarce? Which industry has captured our politics in order to maintain scarcity and prevent the rise of a new abundance?
Oil. Fossil fuels. Texas Tea. The Koch brothers.
What this tells me is that all the issues DailyKos bloggers care about – the social issues, the national security issues, the fairness issues – are sideshows. They are secondary to the real bottom line, which is the "value of proven reserves." Our aim must be to turn those values down.
The real way to fight the oil power is by making alternatives viable. Technology is now making this possible. Instead of continuing to act like cavemen, killing each other looking for stuff to burn, we can now harvest the energy all around us. The Sun can power our economy hundreds of times over. The heat of the Earth can do the same. The wind, the tides, all forms of plant life – it's all there waiting to be harvested.
One more thing. Every change I listed above resulted in a new prosperity, a new abundance. Factories created so much wealth we had to turn economics upside-down to spend it. You and I can expect to live over 80 years in comfortable homes with the whole world available to us at the click of a mouse.
The coming abundance will create new value, new opportunity, and a better life for all our children. It will make Al Gore's descendents as rich as those of Gov. James Cox. It will save us from global warming and lead to a true terra-forming of our planet.
The work has barely begun, however. In terms of renewable energy we're about where computing was in 1971. Computers existed then, as solar systems do today, but they were expensive, they were kludgy, they were inefficient, and the first microprocessor markets had not yet been born.
Imagining those changes, creating those changes, is the real work of your children's lifetime. Harvesting the energy all around us is the only way forward. And along the way we're going to bury the Kochs, the Saudi Sheikhs who bankrolled Al Qaeda, we're going bury Putin's dream of a new Russian Empire and Hugo Chavez too. There will be crises, there will be problems, there will be wars along the way.
But what I've learned over the last decade is we can step confidently toward a better future. We no longer need to be cavemen. Let us be farmers instead.