Ten Radically Simple Truths

1. Loans are not income! As blatantly obvious as this is, it needs saying in Icelandic society and in the halls of finance. Loudly, and often. Iceland has been a debt driven economy for far too long. Until very recently (weeks ago, months tops) easily 90% of the Icelanders I know were more or less living off their overdrafts. Taking out a loan in this manner has become so common place that many here don’t even consider paying for something with actual earned income. Hell, even the government can’t seem to grasp this concept, considering that they tax student loans as income…
2. A króna saved is a króna earned. Again, obvious. But oddly subversive nonetheless. We are told that our “duty as consumers” is to prop up the economy with constant spending. Debt is held up as a sign of prosperity, whilst frugality and savings are considered a “poverty mindset”. While 90% of the Icelanders I know have an overdraft, I think less then 5% have a saving account. The only people I know with saving accounts in Iceland are foreigners. Which leads us directly to:
3. Anything you can make, produce, grow, or create yourself is ALWAYS more economical than buying it. ALWAYS. The actual monetary savings involved in growing a garden may be low, but the increase in food quality, the sense of accomplishment, and the feeling of security that goes with the sure knowledge that you can feed yourself are priceless. It’s always more economical to mend your clothes, to fix broken furniture than buying new, to brew your own beer instead of buying from the store. ALWAYS! The same goes for sewing your own clothes, baking your own bread, or, in the extreme, distilling your own fuel. A good book from the library, a dinner party with friends, a movie night with the neighbors, or playing music with likeminded folk are all cheaper and more fulfilling than say, spending the better part of your weekend wandering around shopping center hemorrhaging money just to stave of boredom. This is equally true of nations. If you can produce it domestically, do so! As “old-school” as it sounds, a healthy economy should strive to balance imports to exports, and a truly thriving economy should try to import less than its gross exports. Any country that imports more than it exports is letting its mouth write checks that its ass can’t cash.
4. You cannot have infinite economic growth in a finite world! As soon as an economy grows beyond its actual productive abilities (in real goods and commodities) it becomes a sort of virtual reality, which while entertaining, is nonetheless a game, of the sort played in Vegas, a crapshoot where financiers wager the hard work and labor of the commonality for personal gain. Its bullshit. Everything they say, everything about global trade and interest rates and stock exchanges is bullshit. Its only wealth, only business because they’ve managed to convince us that it matters. It doesn’t.
5. Any man woman or child, society, community or nation only needs five things. They need food, they need shelter, they need clothing (provided they don’t live in the tropics), they need energy, and they need meaningful connections and activities. Anything else is, to use the American vernacular: “gravy”. Now gravy makes any meal a feast, but a gravy heavy diet will kill you quicker than you can say “cardiac arrest”. Iceland has been chugging down gravy for breakfast of late. The current kreppa is the inevitable result of societal arteries clogged with over-consumption.
6. A rising tide only lifts those rich enough to own boats. Everyone else either has to tread water or drown. Far better get everyone to high ground instead of forcing them to live on the beach.
7. You can’t eat gold, you can’t drink silver. Take a bag of each out into the lonely desert. See how long you last.
8. The further the gap between the richest and the poorest in any society, the more unstable that society will be. There will be more crime, more terrorism, more misery, and less unity, community spirit and mutual aid.
9. Sustenance has always been the foundation of any society. Food culture is the last facet to fall away from immigrants, even language falls before. Any society that gives up its ability to feed itself, that does not build its economy on a foundation of sustainable sustenance, is doomed from the start.
10. The meek really will inherit the earth. Because the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and lo how the mighty are fallin’. Usually out of the upper stories of Wall St. “Meek” in this case doesn’t mean “weak, obliging, and obedient”, it means “humble, realistic, stoic, and pragmatic”. Nations and communities that strive for a sustainable, low-growth to zero-growth economy aimed at creating a happy healthy society, instead of simply increasing the numerical amount of currency, are going to survive. Hell, they’re going to thrive. Those societies and nations that keep chasing a purely currency-based vision of human well-being, wherein all the “economically irrelevant” values like health, environment, happiness, equality, etc, are ignored, are fucked. Simple as that.