Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Wine of Circe
(1900)

"…I'm hopeful we might finally escape the scarce resources allocation quicksand."

Our economics foretell our fate. Those who arrived late lose to those who came earlier, before we were discovered and became a destination. Then, our economics devolved into focusing on allocating seemingly ever-scarcer resources rather than sharing communal plenty. Some jealously guarded their plenty lest someone less deserving try to wrest it away from their grasp. We became most masterful here at pinching pennies, at somehow pretending to make odd ends meet, at cinching up the old belt yet another notch, at essentially starving ourselves for our own imagined good. We regretted the uneven distribution of our common largess and hoarded the best against possible future turndowns, justifying our penury as evidence of an underlying righteousness. The cynical defense insists that in the long run, we’ll all be dead anyway, so nothing really matters.

Prospering demands a different perspective. Rather than imagining scarcity, the prosperous must use that same imagination to envision plenty. Neither foci actually exist. Both emerge as a product of the same facility, but it matters which one we choose. Here in this valley, a land of plenty if ever there was one, we were raised on the gospel of scarcity. We perceived true prosperity as just out of our reach, or the rightful property of only a few families of original settlers, or millionaires who came from somewhere else. Us natives knew our place. We worked the factories and farms through our teen years, and most migrated to someplace where Prospering seemed like it might be something other than a pipe dream. A few of us came back, fleeing the negative externalities Prospering sometimes brings, the sprawl and ridiculous real estate values. Taken to extremes, Prospering becomes its opposite, reverting to its more primitive roots: the allocation of artificial scarcity. Nobody ever wins that game except, perhaps, its losers.

After our incumbent was elected, I foresaw where our economy would be heading, for our poor little rich boy had shown his animosity toward prosperity. He seemed to believe that Prospering shouldn’t be the property of everyone, but should be possessed solely by a landed gentry, the extremely wealthy. He set about plundering our commonwealth, the better to justify allocating resources as if they actually were scarce. His imagination stretched no further than his own purse. I visited our county commission and city council, asking after their strategy for countering the impending economic disaster, but found no alarm, no concern. The stock market, rarely a reliable indicator of anybody but speculators Prospering, had been soaring beneath the biggest bubble ever, so it appeared that our economy might be growing stronger rather than rotting from the inside out. The rot has now reached the perimeter. Our local governments have been frantically cutting budgets and services. Main Street has more vacant storefronts than we’ve seen in forty years. Happy days do not seem to be impending here again.

Then, The Muse invites me to a ribbon-cutting ceremony on some formerly Port-owned property, out on the county’s industrial-zoned Western edge. There, we find a vast field graded flat, and piles of construction materials. Enormous mountains of sand and gravel, cranes and piles of steel, and a large white tent glinting in the bright, late April morning sun. Within that tent, the county’s movers and shakers have gathered to hear sermons of impending prosperity. The chairman of the corporate division investing in the plant they’re building here and the manager of operations for that plant share their plans. They speak of impending prosperity on a scale this valley’s never really experienced before. I can feel old balances wavering. The historical rulers of this realm, the farmers who were virtual slaves to their land and our weather, who reinforced their particular economic ethics on the land and people, and that always-impending scarcity mindset, would be losing its historical grip.

I’d seen it happen in neighboring counties as various industrial developments outpaced the traditional rancher and farmer base. Different values began to rule the place, ones less based on the often cruel allocation of supposedly scarce resources and more focused on more widely sharing their common good fortune. They speak convincingly of community, as if they already belong here. This factory they’re building out on that sandy field will become a community asset, employing more than a hundred and paying decent wages. They’d even invited the local United Way executives to the ribbon-cutting. They knew full well that they would shortly be subjected to their share of the largess. This factory has a license for manufacturing prosperity. They hold proprietary technology and enviable market share. The catered lunch screamed impressive margins. They have been Prospering and they see their responsibility as an opportunity to share the wealth they’ve engineered.

They’re only the first one here. More of their ilk are coming, relatively recession-proofed operations almost entirely unlike the traditional agricultural base upon which our familiar scarcities thrived. There was never going to be a resolution to the agrarian problem, for farms leverage tenaciously finite and limited resources. One might make a living, given that one can manage the scale of operations necessary to more than break even, and given relatively stable and generous export markets. Our orchards long ago reached their peak. Our vineyards have already begun an inexorable decline, after a reign of fewer than fifty years. Who knows if they’ll ever come back again? Our wheatfields grow grain once destined for the Far East, since undermined by illegal tariffs. Our future seems to stand along our industrial-zoned Western border, where Prosperity historically seemed least likely to appear. I don’t know if we’re capable of training our collective imagination to accept the challenges Prospering will bring. I’m no booster, but I’m hopeful we might finally escape the scarce resources allocation quicksand.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz