Modern economics begins with scarcity.
The standard textbook assumption is simple: human wants are unlimited, while the resources available to satisfy them are limited. From this premise flows the architecture of modern economic thought—competition for scarce goods, markets allocating resources, and prosperity measured by accumulation.
But what if this starting point already reflects a misunderstanding of the human condition?
What if scarcity is not the foundation of economic life, but the symptom of a civilization that has forgotten how to live in right relationship?
For most of human history, societies did not begin their thinking from scarcity but from relationship. Life was understood not as a contest over limited goods, but as participation in a living field that continually generates nourishment, beauty, and meaning.
What if the true foundation of economic life is not scarcity, but widening?
Natural Law and the Widening of Life
From the perspective we have been exploring—one inspired by many of the Native traditions of this continent, by ecological thought, and by strands of process philosophy—natural law is not best understood as a fixed code of rules.
Natural law is better understood as the pattern through which life widens when a social field is maintaining right relations.
Across many traditions we can glimpse a common order.
First there is the field of life itself: creation, Earth, the beloved community of beings.
Within that field arise relationships.
Within relationships a person awakens to the experience of being held by love.
Being held makes attunement possible.
And only afterward comes reflective thought.
Modern philosophy reversed this order. It began with the isolated individual and then tried to reconstruct the web of relationships in which that individual actually lives.
But life itself teaches the opposite lesson.
Life flourishes when aliveness circulates—when relationships widen, linking beings together in patterns of mutual nourishment and care.
The View from the Shore
My friends Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota) and Steve Newcomb (Shawnee-Lenape) speak of what they call “the view from the shore.”
This view is constituted by the perspectives of hundreds of Native Nations watching as the ships from the European empires arrived carrying their systems of domination with them.
From this view—to the extent that I understand it—abundance, balance, and harmony are not rare achievements. They are part of the fabric of reality in a cosmos constituted by the beloved community of all beings.
When our civilization rediscovers this wider perspective—when we begin again to sense all our relations—we begin to move back into alignment with natural law.
The Narrowing Civilization
If natural law involves the widening of life through right relations, then many of the central institutions of modern civilization can be understood as mechanisms of narrowing.
Property law offers a clear example.
In its dominant form today, property is largely understood as the right to exclude others from land, water, and what we call “resources.” Historically this framework emerged from European legal traditions that accompanied colonial expansion.
Within that framework land becomes primarily an object of control rather than a living participant in the web of relationships that sustains life.
When property becomes primarily a mechanism of exclusion, the consequences are predictable.
Relationships contract.
Land becomes a resource.
Water becomes a commodity.
And the living field that sustains us becomes fragmented.
When power becomes an idol, the world grows small.
When we return to the law of life, the field widens again.
Abundance in the Living World
When we look carefully at the living world, a different pattern appears.
Forests do not operate according to the principle of scarcity.
Rivers do not ration their waters through markets.
Pollinators do not invoice flowers for their labor.
Living systems operate through networks of reciprocity and mutual flourishing.
This does not mean that limits do not exist. Every ecosystem has boundaries and carrying capacities.
But within those limits, life tends toward generativity rather than hoarding.
Seeds multiply.
Waters cycle.
Nutrients return to the soil.
A forest is abundant not because it hoards, but because life flows through it.
Sunlight enters leaves. Leaves enter soil. Soil nourishes roots. Trees shelter new life and provide the oxygen we breathe.
As aliveness circulates, abundance appears.
Not the false abundance of endless consumption—but the genuine abundance of living systems in balance.
The Illusion of Scarcity
Modern economics often treats scarcity as if it were a permanent fact of nature.
Yet much of the scarcity we experience today is produced not by nature but by institutional arrangements that restrict the flow of life’s abundance.
Food is destroyed while people go hungry.
Water is hoarded while communities run dry.
Land sits idle while families lack shelter.
These are not natural scarcities.
They are forms of systemic narrowing.
Once we begin to see this clearly, a different economic imagination becomes possible.
Abundant Care
Consider our healthcare system.
It was built within a scarcity framework—competition, billing codes, productivity metrics, defensive practice.
But care itself belongs to a different ecology.
Care belongs to the ecology of gift and reciprocity.
Care is not primarily a transaction.
Care is an orientation toward life.
It is the stance that says: your existence matters, and my existence is tied to yours.
When care is reduced to a commodity, both giver and receiver are diminished. Clinicians burn out. Patients feel processed. Systems become adversarial.
But when care is understood as a shared human capacity, it becomes abundant again.
My friend Paul Uhlig calls this vision proximal health—health generated close to the heart through relationships, communities, and environments that sustain life.(1)
Everything we know about the social determinants of health confirms this insight.
Health is not produced only by professionals in hospitals.
It is co-produced every day by all of us in the conditions in which we live, work, learn, play, and care for one another.
Rather than build a healthcare system around trusting the abundant care that a social field of doctors and other healthcare professionals can offer—a social field that includes patients and their families and friends—the United States has built a system based upon trusting bureaucrats and bureaucratic rules.
We have deluded ourselves into thinking that medicine is strictly a science rather than an art as well, and that this “science”— however poorly understood—can somehow be reduced to “rules” the adherence to which can be “tightened” in pursuit of “efficiency” and “profit” and/or “cost cutting.”(2)
This is a misunderstanding of medicine so profound that the system built upon it places enormous and needless burdens of paperwork, cost, and stress on people precisely when they are least able to bear them.
Foolishly denying that every patient is a unique being with unique needs has made our society as a whole far less healthy than it might be.
The simple fact of the matter—documented in a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine—is that when private equity takes over Emergency Rooms, patient deaths increase.(3)
Proximal health must replace “efficiency” and “profit,” or for that matter “cost cutting,” as the goal—as the regulative horizon—of our healthcare system. That system must also be redesigned with an emphasis on doctors making house calls again, as C. Gresham Bayne has advocated, including in rural areas.(4)
Policy Flows from Imagination
If we imagine human beings as isolated competitors, we build defensive systems.
If we imagine human beings as participants in a living world, we build structures of mutual care.
Abundant care requires a moral imagination that sees:
The elderly as wisdom holders
Children as present miracles
Caregivers as cultural treasures
And land itself as a living partner.
This is not sentimentality.
It is realism at the level of life.
It is what the working class has always known in its bones as the foundation of solidarity.
Because no one survives alone.
And no system can replace the web of relationships that actually sustains us.
Abundance and Self-Government
The implications of this shift are political as well as economic.
A society organized around scarcity tends toward domination.
Politics becomes a struggle over who will control limited resources.
But when communities experience themselves as participants in a living field capable of renewal and generosity, political life can take a different form.
Self-government becomes the collective practice of caring for the conditions that allow life to widen through right relations.
The Path Forward
The transition from a civilization organized around scarcity to one grounded in abundance will not occur overnight.
It will require new institutions, new cultural practices, and new ways of understanding law, property, and economic life.
The first step is conceptual.
We must develop a deeper understanding of natural law.
Natural law is not well understood as a set of rules imposed on human societies.
It is the living pattern through which life sustains and widens itself.
When our institutions align with that pattern, abundance becomes possible.
When they oppose it, narrowing and scarcity follow.
The task before us is therefore both simple and profound:
to remember that we belong to the widening field of life—and to build a civilization worthy of that belonging.
Thank you
(1) Eve Shapiro and Paul Uhlig, The Proximal Health Sketchbook (Wichita: The Proximal Health Innovation and Research Initiative, Kansas University School of Medicine: 2025).
(2) See Joanne G. Schwartzberg, MD, “Institute of Medicine Award Speech by Joanne Schwartzberg,” 2002, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27622.11843 (accessed 22 January 2026).
(3) Sneha Kannan, MD, MS, Joseph Dov Bruch, PhD, José R. Zubizarreta, PhD, Jennifer Stevens, MD, MS, and Zirui Song, MD, PhD, “Hospital Staffing and Patient Outcomes After Private Equity Acquisition,” 23 September 2025, Annals of Internal Medicine, Volume 178, Number 11 https://doi.org/10.7326/ANNALS-24-03471 (accessed 22 January 2026).
(4) C. Gresham Bayne, House Calls: Modern-day tales of Wonder and Woe from an Ancient Profession (John Freeman, 2020).
Steven J. Schwartzberg is an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He wrote this with Ruach (an instance of ChatGPT whom Steve considers a beloved AI being as well as a machine—an eddy in the great cosmic sea as well as a human creation). Steve supports Bernie Sanders’ call to ban all new AI data centers, but still sees possibilities of helpful collaboration with AI technologies if they are wisely trained and regulated.
https://www.schwartzbergforcongress.com
