The event calendar reminds me I’m supposed to give a detailed analysis of the current negotiating points in the resolution of the “fiscal cliff” crisis.

Crisis?

Are you kidding me?

When do politicians get to tell me that they’re lives are more important than mine?

Oh, wait, that’s right — the old argument that the government rarely makes permanent the cuts in taxes it had announced were temporary to begin with.

Property taxes, payroll/income taxes, sales taxes, and on and on.

I’m sophisticated, educated, informed and jaded.

I know what society/civilisation should be and isn’t.

Do you remember the first time that your ancestors lived off the land?

Take that last thought in whatever direction you want to take, assuming whatever your subculture has told you is the proper length of time to consider the lineage you publicly claim as yours.

You can go back to the early days of your belief sets and look forward to now.

In that span of time, what has been accomplished that we clearly say is different than then?

I’ll give you a few minutes to draw your family tree.  Use as much paper and time as you need…

Tick…

Tock…

Tick…

Tock…

Got it?

Good!

Now, let’s proceed.

When was the last time your family had to subsist on the land?

When was the last time your family had to depend on others’ subsistence?

Are you descended from a family of tricksters?

Farmers?

In this global society of excess, how much belongs to you just for being alive?

The air is free to breathe.

The sky is free to view, the rain to drink, the wild grass, trees and animals to eat.

But if you can read this and are reading this, there’s this bit of stuff we call infrastructure, the woven threads of social fabric, the safety net of civilisation that props you up in place to distinguish your sophisticated, educated self from the air, sky, rain, grass, trees and wild animals.

But if you want to live off the land, making your own clothing and shelter, growing/raising/harvesting your own food, property rights unimportant to your wandering lifestyle, then by all means let us not bother you with the concepts of taxes and fees to pay for what we deem are necessary components of our civilised social species.

We shall cordon off areas for purely self-sufficient subcultures and leave them alone to figure out how to live with local insect populations, changing weather conditions and whatever it takes to survive without technologically-advanced modern conveniences.

Otherwise, if you have used and in any way lean upon present-day developments such as dictionaries, mechanised labour-saving devices and transportation networks, then we have to figure out a way to share the costs of our local/global interconnectednessisms.

Is there a fair way to share?

Competition is never fair.  Someone always has more information to make a better decision about the value and costs of a connection.

The seller of a single deer carcass who’s asking an exorbitant price, implying it’s the only deer left, may or may not know there’s another herd out of sight of the potential buyers but the buyers aren’t always sure.

Or one buyer, who may know of a market where the deer is even more valuable because there are buyers with many extra labour/investment credits to spend on the luxury of an expensive deer carcass, becomes a new seller.

And on and on.

The value of a connection is relative, not absolute.

So, too, the fairness.

What is a fair share?

How do I know that the person next to me is paying the right amount for the free use of a public transportation network we agree to share, obeying rules of the road together, mutually ensuring the safety of each other during our travels?

How do I know that the doctor who’s treating me for a rare disease was a top-notch A+ student and is an energetic continuous learner who has a burning desire to treat me as if I was the most important patient to cure?

What if I don’t know but if I knew, it wouldn’t matter?

If you and I knew the rules, obeyed the rules and reaped our rewards for our hard work, is it fair that the rules are changed to make up for the rule breakers or those who didn’t work hard enough or in the right way?

Change is constant and what was right yesterday becomes wrong tomorrow.

The air in a tyre is part of a closed system.

A tear in the tyre wall causes a leak of air into an open system.

No matter how much we keep pumping air into the tyre, the tyre can’t hold the same air pressure as before the tear occurred.

Same for a subculture’s pool of resources.

Inputs and outputs, simple as that.

Politicians from the local, state, national and international level will have us believe that the United States of America must resolve the “fiscal cliff” crisis or we could see a worldwide recession.

Why do I feel convinced these are just hypnotic games of population control?

Two phrases I keep in mind here: “the emperour’s new clothes” and “what’s in it for me?”.

I look around this room in which I type and see all the stuff that exists because of publicly-pooled resources as well as stuff that exists because of excess beyond subsistence farming/hunting.

Pretty much everything.

Almost nothing is directly related to living hand-to-mouth off the land except for the air I breathe and sky I could out of the shuttered window.

Therefore, I must think about this subject from another angle.

How is the threat of recession bad for us (I can think of many examples where going over the fiscal cliff could be personally bad for me but I’m not selfish enough to plead my case here)?

Eventual anarchy?

Income inequality off the charts?

Exotic, complicated financial instruments too complicated for the many to understand and thus used to greatest advantage for the few who do — derivatives upon derivatives upon derivatives, yes, and on and on, like pricing a deer carcass beyond any value its meat could provide.

Bottom line: no one can convince me that their hot air expended over the dead deer carcass we’ve labeled the fiscal cliff crisis is a threat or great buy other than one people promote to inflate their self-worth.

The U.S. economy is not a tightly-sealed closed system and if it leaks more or less than it did, so what?

If I have less buying power or more expensive access to healthcare, does it matter?

What about restrictions on my free air or free sky or availability of wild grass, trees and animals?

I blame no one for my economic hardships on anyone but myself.

I take personal responsibility for determining if the people with whom I interact and on whom I depend for their college-acquired knowledge/curiosity/wisdom were or need to have been A+ students.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Hardships create acute awareness of what defines necessity.

Ultimately, only I can say what is necessary to make my life worthwhile.

Let us go over the fiscal cliff and see what happens — guess what, the world keeps spinning, the Sun keeps shining and people still have to figure out how to compete for our global pool of resources while sharing public space and respecting private rights.

In other words, the fiscal cliff is a sleight-of-hand illusion.  Don’t be fooled.  You will figure out how to put food on the table if it’s no longer handed to you from the public trough.

Enuf sed.