Living The Good Life With Helen And Scott Nearing

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Life's necessaries are easily come by if people are willing to adjust their consumption to the quantity and variety of their products. Difficulties begin when the subsistence advocate enters the market with its lures and wiles for separating the unwary and the dull-witted from their medium of exchange.

Never forget that from the private ownership of the means of production, through the monopoly of natural resources and patents, the control over money, the imposition of the tribute called "interest", the gambling centers which trade in commodities and "securities", to price control and the domination by the wealthlords of the agencies which shape men's minds and the machinery of government .. . the entire apparatus of a competitive, acquisitive, exploitive, coercive social order is rigged and manipulated for the rich and the powerful and against the poor and the weak.

Keep, out of the system's clutches and you have a chance of subsistence, even if the oligarchs disapprove of what you think and say and do. Accept the system, with its implications and ramifications, and you become a helpless cog in an impersonal, implacable, merciless machine operated to make rich men richer and powerful men more powerful.

We have not solved the problem of living. Far from it. But our experience convinces us that no family group possessing a normal share of vigor, energy, purpose, imagination, and determination need continue to wear the yoke of a competitive, acquisitive, predatory culture. Unless vigilante mobs or the police interfere, the family can live with nature, make themselves a living that will preserve and enhance their efficiency, and give them leisure in which they can do their bit to make the world a better place.

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