Thursday, April 10, 2025

This is the nineteenth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Currently the wind is blowing toward the topic of scarcity. For more posts about this, check here.

Everything is scarce. This is the mentality that the world as a whole tries to get you to have. Basic economic theory is founded on the principle that one party has something the other wants, and not only do they need to make them want it, they need to make them believe that they can't get it anywhere else. Their product or service is not just the best solution, but the only solution. And, the value used to buy those products can be stored and stockpiled in large quantities.

Many Native (North) American tribes didn't use money for exchanging of goods, they used a bartering system where things were traded for other things of equal value. That required them to have a lot of things, though. If you had to trade a goat to the grocery store for your weekly supplies, you would need a lot of goats. You could also only have so many goats, depending on the amount of space you had available. Money makes that unnecessary, since you can theoretically have an unlimited amount of value. Even if you're paranoid and keep all of your money as cash, it still takes up a certain amount of space.

And so the scarcity mentality continues. There's been a lot of talk lately about the tariffs that America is putting on China, and the trade war that's essentially going on between them. I don't think it's going to send us into another depression, because we aren’t going to be running out of goods any time soon. There are warehouses across the country full of stuff that we’ve already imported from China and other places, and all of it can still be sold at the same price. You only have to walk into a Costco to see how much there really is for us to buy. My favorite home improvement/general store, Menards, always sends out emails about how they bought a warehouse full of folding patio chairs and they’re selling them at a steep discount. That means there are buildings full of nothing but folding patio chairs out there in the world!

That means that whatever we need, we can make do with what we already have. Scarcity is a powerful fear, but hopefully over the next few days, we’ll be able to expose it for what it really is. No promises, just stories, like usual.

This newsletter is definitely abundant, and there will be more tomorrow.