4. OCKHAM'S RAZOR FOR INFLATION: TIMISM

Increasingly, the widely distributed advice for beating inflation generates more inflationary suffering. Some people advise pursuing inflationary income instead of production profits. This advice is self-destructive. No civilization arose and lasted from pursuing inflationary returns. Reichs rise rapidly but fall precipitously.

The functional and pragmatic origin of the term "currency" indicates why a society runs out of time and collapses because of inflationary income. Inflationary income divorces currency from its namesake, time: specifically, time at production. As inflationary returns increase, less and less production occurs. A country ends up like the irresponsible young newly weds who think they can survive and pay their bills with love. Whether money or baubles, currency should constantly represent production time. As inflationary income displaces production profits, a country runs out of the real time, real currency and real production needed to survive.

On a personal level, one errs if one assesses income solely in terms of the easily mutable numbers of money and not production. Gains on paper are not gains if there are fewer products behind the paper. The figures on money don't count. Money that buys 10 hours of production time is worth more than money that will buy only one hour. To heck with the scribbled-on numbers.

Currency, as a financial instrument of trade, arose to measure and reward one's time at production. Currency is compensation for what one's busytime is currently worth. Unfortunately, this semantic and pragmatic relationship between production time and currency has become estranged. As a result, societies seem to be wealthier as the number of temporal symbols increase. Yet, the symbols undermine society. It gains more symbols of time while losing the real time that counts.

New economics needs a remarriage of currency to time, in principle and application. Rising inflation, unemployment, taxation and violence index the present failing economic models, which are dying the death from a thousand qualifications. The human system of production--civilization--follows them to their grave.

Biased and greedy persons (necronomists) shape the present models of economics. They promote one sector of the economy over the whole. Greedily, they maximize the divorce of currency from production. What can one expect from an economic policy-maker bent on quarterly income or biannual reelections? Greedy decision-makers will not formulate models which compensate fairly.

A better economic model would be one grounded in time. Viewed on one level, humans are producers exchanging their time within a system of production. Exchanges occur directly through bartering or indirectly through currency. The laws of this environment should define and promote the most efficient exchanges of human time. A quantifiable and qualifiable framework for spanning the human environment (ecos) is timism. It describes, explains and conceptualizes a chain of time. Timism is not without precedents in fields more reputable than traditional economics, e.g., physics.

Relativity and productivity are statements of the same phenomenon at different levels of existence when time is the reference point*. Both underlie the accumulation of or the saving of time through increased speed. Both are part of the timistic periodic table of life.

If one's productivity doubles, one arrives at a certain point of production in half the time. One saves half the time that had formerly been spent to arrive at the production point.

Analogously, one can accelerate one's speed of travel to a level where time is passing at half the rate of the reference point. One will arrive at some future point using only half the time to get there. One has saved half the time that he would have had to spend had he been travelling more slowly.

Accelerating toward the speed of light and accelerating productivity toward some undefined speed have common time-saving properties.

If one appreciates this congruity of time, one can do more than give his economic models, predictions and prescriptions. Oppositely, one can provide better comprehension and resolution of the problems facing the physicists.

A jigsaw puzzle has a singular underlying pattern obscured by an overlying veneer. Jigsaw puzzles consists of two patterns: a picture and a cut. Jigsaw puzzles are not cut based on the picture but on the basis of a jigsaw pattern. Nor are the puzzles held together by the picture pattern.*

Jigsaw puzzle makers do not make a new pattern for the different pictures on the surface. Rather, one jigsaw pattern sets the basic relationships that lock together many different pictures. Similarly, time is the basic pattern that holds the different levels of existence together. The strength is not in the readily apparent picture but in the cutting pattern.

Picture puzzles compose the thin arbitrary veneer on the surface. As in the disciplines of life, the veneer attracts people's attention to buy or study a particular puzzle. When buying, people don't consider the jigsaw pattern itself. In fact, pictures frequently obscure the common pattern of cuts that hold all the pieces together.

As with jigsaw puzzles, we have many different disciplines painted with different collections of descriptions, definitions, explanations and concepts. The disciplines appear distinct but are not. The distinctions are shallow if one has the good fortune to get closer. Time cuts the basic pattern which holds man's pictures and his life together.

Timism is a two-way street between the macro and the micro. It reveals inconsistencies at the macro level of human existence for correction. It also reveals new approaches to understanding and manipulating the micro. Nuclear weapons show that basic physical knowledge can too rapidly outpace man's ability to productively manage such knowledge.

Timism is a veritable "Mendelevium Periodic Table of Life"* that can remove the irrelevant factors composing the problems of life that waste our time. The time-saving benefits of democracy and capitalism are needed before investigating the time-saving benefits of more efficiently tapping the time of atoms. Timism states that all entities produce or consume time in a manner that is quantifiable and qualifiable.

Of the four-letter words, time, not gold, is the immutable commodity for basing currencies. Currency should be legally married to the commodity of life for which it is logically named: time.* Otherwise, inflationary evils disrupt and destroy the economy. Politicians will be the last persons to peg currency to what something or someone is currently worth. Such laws would necessitate that they pay damages for each day that they disservice the country.

In summary, an economic analysis using time provides a simple framework to understand the underlying human interactions. Rather than being a model based on a biased ordering of reality, timism evolved through a constant questioning of the relationships encountered in the human environment. Perhaps ahead of its time, timism offers a structure to cut the conceptual clutter behind countless time-wasting problems. As a clutter cutter or Ockham's razor, timism can remove the extraneous fat from our thinking.

Warning: Anyone found stealing lifehours will be forever banned from participation in and rewards of Better Democracy and Capitalism.

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