Land of the Free. David A. Bedford

about the Hanseatic League but have been given only a fuzzy notion of what it was. Centered around the German city of Lübeck, from the 12th century on, it consisted of numerous cities on the Baltic Sea voluntarily cooperating to bring about commerce, much of it the purchase of raw materials from the eastern Baltic for use in Germany. Note that the German airline Lufthansa contains the word hansa, with clearly deals with large commerce. You see, back in the Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League was engaged in major commerce with trade agreements among various city states. They invented modern banking as we know it. A merchant who needed to travel a great distance on business would be reluctant to carry the large sums of money he might need as his convoy could meet with well armed and organized robbers or lose the cargo in rough seas. A procedure was developed in which the merchant would deposit the needed cash in a business that had a branch in the city where he was going. The business issued the merchant a letter saying “Please pay the bearer the sum of X” (X being the amount of money he had deposited), addressed to the head of that business’ branch at destination. That is, they had invented checks and fund transfers.

      The Hanseatic League was a major development, among others (such as the creation of universities, the invention of eyeglasses, the compass, and the sextant, the use of wind mills, and in the 1450s, the development of a printing press with movable type) which so radically changed the reality on the ground that the medieval world view, hierarchical, static, and land based, vanished and gave way to the modern world view, which is individualist, dynamic, and money based. The very stability achieved by the Feudal system was its undoing, because it allowed money and goods to circulate again, allowing serfs to save up enough money to buy their freedom and join the ranks of city-dwelling artisans or merchants. The nobles, on the other hand, found it increasingly necessary to accept money in return for freeing serfs from their land because wealth had come to be measured in money and no longer in land or cattle.

      The modern period, which lasted (according to the Encyclopedia Britannica) from the 1450s (printing press) to around 1900 (World War 1, 1914-1918), was dominated in its first two centuries by a burgeoning global system of commerce and the idea that money is the highest good. This means that globalization of commerce began nearly 600 years ago. The establishment of nation-states powerful enough to control commerce through mercantilist policies (a purely modern phenomenon) saw an attempt to slow globalization or at least control it to the advantage of the rulers and the merchant class. The latter was favored in the nation-states as it alone was capable of lending money to the crown. In the light of this history, the constant struggle between protectionism and “free trade” becomes understandable. What is not clear to most of us in the US is that commerce and government are not strictly related: a capitalist system can flourish in a variety of government types: monarchies, democracies, and autocracies, even in “communist” China. What was new starting in the mid-20th century was consumerism, that is, the availability of a bewildering variety of products to most people at an affordable price. This abundance, which is moving increasingly out of the reach of more and more people, has lulled us all into thinking that capitalism and business are an unmitigated good.

      I believe that we are all quite capable of discerning what is good and what is negative about our love for business and to do something about it. But will we? It will require our transcending our usual way of thinking and examining our values.

      III. America the Unsustainable

      According to what my parents told me as I grew up in Argentina, the US was a great place to shop. You could get all kinds of machines, clothes, shoes, gadgets for the kitchen, fabrics, and so on, all at reasonable prices. They were of course absolutely right about this. Argentina also had wares aplenty to offer, but many machines were expensive and not of the same quality available in the US. The people always complained about what was available, deploring its cost and quality. It was an article of faith there that anything foreign made had to be better than anything Industria Argentina, the label put on all Argentine manufactured goods as required by law.

      When my family spent a furlough in the US in the early 60s, I was impressed by the quality, size, and comfort of the cars, the air conditioning available everywhere, and the entertainment on television. We returned to Argentina at a time when it had reached its highest economic level before or since, with a burgeoning middle class, traffic jams, and slick advertising. The quality of life for many people was not appreciably less than that of the US. Living space was smaller and so were the cars. The currency was not as strong or as stable as the dollar, but in general life was similar in most respects.