Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. This has been the clarion call of marketplaces around the world since the beginning.
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During the late Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, a culture sprang up through most of Europe called the Bell-Beaker culture. Extensive trade based on people’s desires, wants and needs crossed inter-tribal and cultural lines. Known for their distinctive bell-shaped pottery it was probably the world’s first example of an idea or product going viral. Used for everything from drinking vessels for beer or mead (a sort of wine made from fermented honey and water) to smelting vessels for bronze, copper and gold, and funerary urns.
The obvious point being, before I get too far afield with this, is that there was a marketplace for these goods and services that crossed cultural and ethnic lines. Trade for goods and services was established wherever the need arose apart from, or perhaps in spite of, tribal warfare and conflict.
Examples are many, flint nodules found hundreds of miles from any source, finished products such as arrowheads, hand-axes, flensing tools and baskets. There are many examples of that here on the west coast of America. There was extensive trade among the Native American culture here on the west coast of the United States.
So… inventing the better mousetrap is then only a part of the success story. You have to have: (a) a mouse trap that works and (b) someone who has the wants, needs or desire to possess that better mousetrap. These have been the bases for business and trade for thousands of years.
We no longer trade for hides, flint knapping tools or arrowheads, but the principles of trade have not changed. You have to have a market.
We have today in America a situation where the ‘governing elite’ have supplanted the marketplace with ideological tyranny. Governmental assault on all fronts against the people who supply the goods and services that people want. Using the ever-ephemeral mantra of ‘sustainable’ this and ‘sustainable’ that, they have completely reversed the formula. Using the communist-inspired so-called ‘Green Revolution’, they have created whole industries based on a liberal amount of junk science.
That there is no want, desire or need for these industries hasn’t seemed to matter. It’s like taking a square block and trying to drive it through a round hole. The best you can expect is a handful of splinters. So if the block doesn’t fit, destroy the the hole… an obvious reference to the Barack Hussein Obama regime’s assault on America’s energy sector.
Solar and wind powered energy technologies will never represent anything other than a fraction of our energy requirements, yet the boneheads of the Obama regime continue the lemming-like rush to the precipice of economic destruction.
Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, Spectra Watt and Mountain Plaza are the most recent examples. All were feeding at the government trough, your dollars and mine flushed down the stinking sewer of ideologically driven political expediency.
This regime has much to answer for.
Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis
© Skip MacLure 2011
