[Kolzene]

Scarcity is the lack of goods and services that economists say exists in all economies. Economics itself is a means to try and "solve" this problem, although it acknowledges that it never will; no matter how socialist you get, or how much GNP you produce, there will always be poverty. This cannot be avoided (and it never has).

In the 1920's a well respected non-profit research group called the Technical Alliance noticed after years of researching industrial and technological progression in North America that it was technology itself that could not only solve the problem of scarcity, but indeed already had. North America no longer had a natural scarcity, but instead became the first area on Earth to acheive a state of natural abundance. The real problem now was that both these countries (Canada and the US) were still using economic systems designed for scarcity environments, and were thus imposing an artificial scarcity on the area. This, they concluded, would cause severe economic problems as technology replaced workers, creating more products (supply) and lowering purchasing power (demand). Since both these factors lower price, the result would be an economic crash (a small example of this can be seen if you ever tried to sell normal air to someone; you can't, it's too abundant). Hence they had predicted the Great Depression within 6 months of when it actually happened (they predicted early 1930).

Having all this data at their disposal, they were in a unique position to develop a completely scientific solution to the problem, for they found that if the tools of scarcity (politics and money) were to try, the results would be harmful, even disasterous. Their plan was one that enabled all North Americans to live at a quite high standard of living, with no poverty, very little crime, no waste, no pollution, no economic instability, no "social classes" and more freedom than encountered in even our so-called democracies.

However, since economic and political domination and exploitation would no longer be possible by anyone (their tools having been taken from them), the leaders of the day decided that Technocracy's plan would not be acceptable to them. They instead implimented several plans to rejuvenate the economy and take people's minds off of what would end their collective rulership. What resulted was a lessening of the symptom's of the problem, while the underlying factors that caused the initial collapse remained to grow, and continue to grow today. Their plans required things such as continuous and exponential growth, horrendous waste of natural and other resources and other environmentally destructive habits, an ever-growing impovershed class of citizens, ever-increasing debt, imperialistic interferance with other countries, as well the the occasional war. (Any of this sound familiar?)

Now, with the rapid depletion of technologically critical resources (and many basic ones, such as water, air, and food), our current system appears to thrive but is only accelerating us towards a wall that will be quite unpleasent when we hit it. At any time we can step off and adopt this plan developed 70 years ago and enjoy a life even better than the ones we have now, but if we wait too long, we will not longer have the "abundance" of natural resources that is one of the three requirements for a Technocratic society, and the door of opportunity will have been lost.

Of course, this is just the history. There are two main parts to Technocracy: it's scientific analysis of our situation, and the developed "blueprint" if you will for how to operate a high technology society. You could think of this part as the operating system of your computer, or the operating instructions for a VCR. They don't dictate how to run your life, just how to use the equipment to get the maximum gain out of it. Or, as in the first analogy, the logical and automatic operations that keep the machinery going so that you can do what you want with it.

Also see: What is Technocracy?

http://www.technocracy.ca/simp/begin.htm