Seven Steps to Doing Good Business

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Simply stated, the present market system is giving us the wrong information. It tells us that flying across the country on a discount ticket is cheap when it is not. It tells us our food is inexpensive when its method of production is destroying aquifers, soil health, ecosystem viability, and workers' lives.

Whenever an organism gets the wrong information, it's a form of toxicity. In fact, that's how pesticides work. An herbicide is a hormone that kills by telling the plant to grow faster than its capacity to absorb nutrients. It literally grows itself to death. Sound familiar? Our daily doses of toxicity are the prices in the marketplace. They're telling us to do the wrong thing for our own survival. Such patterns of production and consumption are not only unsustainable but profoundly shortsighted and destructive. It's surprising that "conservative" economists don't support or understand this idea, because they're the ones who insist that we should pay as we go, have no debts, and take care of business.

Let's do it.

Strategy: Replace the entire tax system.
The present tax system sends the wrong message to virtually everyone. It encourages waste, discourages conservation, and rewards consumption. It taxes what we want to encourage -- jobs, creativity, payrolls, and real income. And it ignores the things we want to discourage -- environmental degradation, pollution, and depletion. The present U.S. tax system costs citizens $500 billion a year in record-keeping, filing, legal, and governmental costs, more than the actual amount we pay in personal income taxes. The only incentive in the present system is to cheat or hire a lawyer to do it.

The entire tax system should be incrementally replaced over a 20-year period by green fees -- taxes that are added onto products, energy, services, and raw materials, so that prices more closely approximate true costs. Those taxes would not be a means to raise revenues or reduce deficits, but should be absolutely revenue neutral so that people in the lower and middle classes would experience no real change in income, only a shift in expenditures. The result: eventually, the cost of nonrenewable resources, extractive energy, and industrial modes of production would be more expensive than renewable resources, solar hydrogen, or biological methods of agriculture.

Under a green-fee system, the incentives to save on taxes will encourage people at all income levels to conserve, not just upper-middle-class white people -- which is the case today. As energy prices go up to three or four times their existing levels (with commensurate reductions in payroll and income taxes to offset the increase), the natural inclination to save money will result in increased car pooling, bicycling, and telecommuting; better public transportation; and more energy-efficient houses. As taxes on artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel go up, again with offsetting reductions in other taxes, customers will find that organically grown food is less expensive than its commercial cousin (because it really is). Eventually, with the probable exception of taxes on the rich, we will find ourselves in a position where we pay no taxes but spend our money with a practiced and constructive discernment. Under an enlightened and redesigned tax system, the cheapest thing should be the best thing for the customer, the worker, the environment, and the company. That is rarely the case today.

4. Goal: Promote diversity.
Nature's diversity is a response to an enormous variety of global and local conditions. Diversity and complexity exist at every level of nature, including human nature, and therein lies nature's capacity to adapt. Darwin's survival of the fittest was not about the conquest of one life-form over another but about the ability of species to fit within their allotted niche. Commerce must have unconditioned respect for the complexity of nature and the needs of a diverse human population.

Strategy: Take an inventory.
We don't know how many species live on the planet within a factor of 10. We don't know how many species are being extirpated. We don't know how complex systems interact -- for example, how the transpiration of the Victorian Lily in the Amazon forest affects European rainfall and agriculture. We don't know what happens to 20% of the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere every year. We don't know how to calculate sustainable yields in fisheries and forest systems. We don't know why certain species, such as frogs and lichen, are disappearing in pristine habitats. We don't know the long-term effects of chlorinated hydrocarbons on human health, behavior, sexuality, or fertility. We don't know if life on the planet can be sustained for its present inhabitants, and certainly not for its future population. We don't know how many people we can feed on a sustainable basis nor what that diet would look like. In short, we need to find out what's here, who has it, and what we can or can't do with it.

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