posted 02-13-99 07:04 PM ET        

This is a chance for you to begin again. A chance for you to live to the fullest. A chance for a world of comfort and wealth such as most of you never knew on Earth. We must all face the futures, and decide which of them we want. Do you want to be a bureaucrat, living your entire life in a cubicle? Do you want to be a worshiper, blindly obeying all the edicts of a church? Do you want to be a nerve-stapled drone, living or dying by the decree of a dictator? Do you want to be a lab technician, living a life of lonely desperation next to your beakers? Do you want to be a soldier, with people trying to kill you all day? Or perhaps you want to be a farmer, gently tending the earth with your backbreaking labor so that you don't hurt any precious fungus? Or, do you want to live a life of quick advancement in the world of business, with opportunities around every corner, and comfort and luxury as your rewards.

We here at Morgan industries are quite simply the last best hope for humanity. We are the ones who have the best chance at expanding humanities standard of living to it's fullest and having perpetual growth. We shall do this through the only economic system that has worked in history, capitalism.

All attempts at other systems (substituting some other mechanism for market pricing signals as a means of allocating capital and labor) have, universally and without exception, failed badly. Prior to 1917, there was some justification for holding Marxist views; it had never actually been tried as an actual ruling ideology, rather than as a critique.

Today, we have plenty of examples, and every single one of them was a disaster. First time may be coincidence; second time may be chance; third time, it's enemy action.

Marxist economics is a like square wheel, Ptolemaic astronomy, or the four-humor theory of disease. It just does not, and from its nature cannot, work because it's fundamentally in error about the nature of reality. Marxism was unwise enough to make specific predictions about what it would do and how it would work. After a while, the cognitive dissonance undermined the faith of the Party vanguard. The collapse of the Soviet Union is a perfect example of the ultimate emptiness of mere physical force as a tool of government. When the time came, all the armies and secret police were futile... because even the KGB soldiers and policemen didn't believe any more. Stalin could murder millions because a significant minority of the society he governed _believed_. (And in WWII, he was forced to appeal to the beliefs of a broader section of the populace; belief in Holy Mother Russia, for instance.) Yeltsin could face down Stalin's successors, virtually unarmed, because nobody believed in Marxism any more... and they weren't willing to kill and die just to keep the system going as a source of patronage and graft.

Market economies, whatever their shortcomings, have now been proven by repeated trial to be the only sort that work at all. It's probably impossible to have a market economy without private property, and limited-liability "legal persons" are the best way to mobilize large amounts of capital.

Nationality has become irrelevant to out situation. Each of us must make his decision based not on race or language, but on their own hope for the future. At Morgan industries we welcome everyone. Our doors are open to all comers who seek to improve themselves.

Our long-term prospects for immigration are also very good. We can look back to earth's history and see that the new elite was not just international, it's utterly cosmopolitan. Its primary ties were with others of the same kind of people, anywhere. Geographic location was irrelevant, and if local conditions become unfavorable -- or less favorable than elsewhere -- they just move. They were almost as mobile as money. What matters are individuals, firms and capital flows. The efficient ones had no nationality, no commitment to any one place. This shall be truthful for the future as well, and when the Spartans tax their moneymakers to the brink of poverty to pay for the latest scramjet, or when the Gaians decide to send millions out of work to protect their precious fungus caterpillar, they shall flock to us.

A competitive market system produces optimum results for individuals -- they can make their own economic choices. E.g., if they want to remain peasants, they can. Nobody does, though. It's a crummy way to make a living. For all practical purposes, virtually everyone wants to be an affluent urbanite, and here at Morgan Industries, everyone can become as affluent as their ability allows them.

We seek to make money (or energy if you will) first and foremost. During the late 1990's the Asian dirigiste-capitalist economies thought they could grow, and continue to take market share, without paying much attention to vulgarisms like profit and shareholder return. They then came crawling, cringing and begging while American businessmen prowl through the economic ruins of East Asia, buying up their assets at fire-sale prices and dictating how they're to run their economies in the future. One (a Singaporean trying desperately to sell a chip-making plant in Malaysia) complained to the American executives he was negotiating with: "This is a very one-sided transaction." "Not at all," they replied. "We could squeeze you even harder." And then they cut the offer by another 10%. Sic transit gloria _keiretsu_ and _chaebol_. On the whole, the ruthless economists like Thatcher are a good thing, although not necessarily good people. Sons-of-bitches (and bitches-direct) often make better leaders than good-spirited white-haired "inveterate peacemongers".

The lessons are obvious for the future. While the other factions continue to ignore the profit margin for their ideological goals, we shall buy them out without them even knowing it.

Now some may question our ability to continue to advance without ecological catastrophe. It is balderdash. Technology _creates_ resources and demand creates technology. That's why the "Club of Rome" and other Eco-doom predictions of the 1960's and 1970's were proven so spectacularly wrong.

The best way to raise environmental standards is to make everyone rich. Rich countries have far less pressure on the environment than poor ones. Rich economies can spend billions developing more efficient car engines, and indulge themselves in "environmental" legislation that would cripple a developing economy.

An example of this differential based on efficiency is farming. Factory farming is infinitely more efficient, both in productivity and manpower demands, than peasant agriculture. It's also less environmentally damaging than many primitive practices like strip-and-burn. This doesn't mean it has no impact; just that it has far less impact per unit of turnover than the equivalent practices which are usually found in poorer countries.

Add another issue: population. If you're lucky enough to live in a country with a pension system, you don't expect to need lots of children so that some will look after you in your old age. Nor do you need to have lots of children so that some will survive; you expect them all to survive. On the other hand, raising children properly is a costly business, what with the expenses of education that goes on until they're 22 or 23, rather than 8 (and old enough to go into a factory or the fields). Ergo, conditions in wealthy countries tend to discourage large families.