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Economic Integrity: Integrity Stimulus Plan Key #3

We have collapsed financially because we have pursued a false recipe for life fulfillment: It is time to outgrow our illusion that financial wealth is the primary source of happiness and to embrace our three core drives responsible for sustainable happiness and integrity-centered life fulfillment. (These are described in the Life Fulfillment Integrity section of the Integrity Stimulus Plan.)

We live in a false economy: We have been pretending to generate profitability by borrowing against the future in order to create the lifestyle we want today. This is the illusion of profitability, not true abundance. This isn’t capitalism, it’s Debtism. In truth our current economic contraction isn't contraction at all. What's really happening is that we are emerging from a decades-long illusion of having more prosperity than actually existed.

Toward Sustainable Abundance

It is time to refocus our economic priorities toward Sustainable Abundance. No economic recovery plan that continues the economics of Debtism can succeed. Financial integrity includes abstaining from Debtism, shifting to socially responsible business profitability, insisting on balanced government budgets, and focusing citizens on building financial independence rather than on living beyond their means.

• Consumers must focus on fulfilling themselves through their three core drives of authenticity, connection and impact. Deriving life fulfillment in this way frees us to build toward financial independence rather than pursuing unsustainable lifestyles that won’t fulfill us anyway.

• Businesses must develop more mature visions of sustainable prosperity around attention to the triple bottom line of true profitability: Cash Capital (keeping a healthy bottom line), Natural Capital (keeping our planet sustainable), and Social Capital (keeping our employees passionately productive and our communities happy).

• Government must be required to stop promoting Debtism. It must become devoted to a balanced budget and drawing down debt. It must also stop pushing economic growth and home ownership at all costs, and to shift from rewarding irresponsible over-spending toward rewarding productivity (income production) and investing (building toward financial independence).

Economic policy must steer the financial, business and consumer marketplaces toward eliminating Debtism and promoting financial integrity. It must transcend the destructive split between capitalism and socialism, evolving instead an integrated and probably new economic system that ushers in a new era of prosperity in an age of a global economy.

• Government spending must not exceed its income. Government must institute effective mechanisms for eliminating financial wastefulness and "entitlement abuse." Government projects must be limited to those that most serve the common good (rather than funding special interests and pet projects). Government should only implement the common good projects it funds that it can administer more cost-effectively than private business.

• Government regulation must shift toward rewarding socially responsible profitability in businesses and financial independence in citizens. Government can reward better citizens for making money by shifting from income taxes toward consumption taxes. It can reward citizens for building toward financial independence by reducing related to saving and investing money. Government must make peace more profitable for businesses so the profits of war become less alluring. Government must reward health building rather than health destruction because health building strategies cost far less than the astronomical costs and extensive damage created by our over-reliance on pharmaceuticals, surgery and health-destroying excuses for food. (See the Health Integrity section of this Integrity Stimulus Plan.)

Will Our Real Economic System Please Stand Up?

The question isn't whether socialism or capitalism is good or bad. The United States has always blended capitalism and socialism to one extent or another. The question is what the right balance is between the two. Beyond that, an even bigger question is whether our level of interconnection has reached a point that capitalists like Adam Smith never planned on, necessitating the birth of a new economic system. Here are some examples of time-honored forms of capitalism, socialism and hybrids in the United States (click here for more details):

• Capitalism: Most businesses.
• Socialism: Social security, Medicare, unemployment, military, police, fire, paramedics, public education, infrastructure construction and maintenance such as roads, disease prevention such as sewers, garbage removal, water purification, space exploration and other research programs, consumer education programs, various forms of insurance.
• Capitalism-Socialism Hybrids: The weapons production, banking, and home mortgage industries.

The time has come for all of us to commit to personal financial independence and to demand that government, the financial sector, and businesses, transition to a financially sustainable economic system that is less obsessively dependent on voracious or illusory economic growth in order to be profitable.

Financial Integrity pays close attention to debting, spending and growing:

• Spending is about consuming goods and services and is tied to current lifestyle.
• Growing is about investing and is tied to building toward financial independence (known to most people as retirement, this is actually about paying some or all of our bills through investment proceeds and other passive income rather than work).
• Debting is about loans we take, such as mortgages, car loans, educational loans, business loans, and credit cards.

It is possible to have a neglectful relationship, an indulged relationship or right relationship with each of these financial integrity aspects. Every citizen and business, and our government, has a responsibility to remain in right relationship with all three.

What Will You Include in Your Integrity Pledge About Economic Integrity?

Becoming the Change

Which of the following three dimensions of integrity-centered financial independence do you tend to neglect or over-emphasize: debting, spending, growing?

What specific commitment will you make, for the sake of your life fulfillment, to develop right relationship with these aspects of personal financial integrity?

Impacting Your World

Select a specific action you will take to help America shift toward economic integrity? Here are some possibilities:

• Family: I will raise my children with financial integrity, through role-modeling to them the financial integrity habits I want them to adopt, and by providing them with a more complete education in creating financial independence.
• Media: I will lobby the media to report more objectively and more regularly about all dimensions of financial integrity (through writing letters to the editor, contacting show producers, calling in to talk shows, etc.).
• Schools: I will lobby schools in my community (from elementary through graduate school), or that I work at or am otherwise connected with, to include full-spectrum financial integrity education in their curriculum.
• Places of Worship: I will get mine to sponsor financial integrity education workshops.
• Service Organizations: I will get the ones I am affiliated with to champion the cause of restoring economic integrity in my community and our society.
• Businesses: I will get the businesses with which I am connected as an owner, executive, employee, vendor, stakeholder or customer to adopt business models that support economic integrity.
• Government: I will demand that my local, regional, and national governments balance their budgets, draw down their debt, and never again indulge in Debtism. I will demand that they take a more active role in discouraging Debtism in the financial, banking and mortgage sectors, and to intervene whenever financially unethical strategies are being used.
• Internet: I will use the internet to increase people’s understanding of individual and societal Economic Integrity issues. (You can do this by e-mailing people you know, providing information on your website, blogging on other websites, and/or posting information on social networking sites to which you belong).
• Other: You specify.

Decide who you will contact, what you will say or do, how this will happen, and when you will do this. Then do it.

Revisit your commitments every six months to decide whether it's time to modify them.

Click on this link when you are ready to go on to Integrity Stimulus Plan Key #4: Citizen Integrity.