A word on greed. . .

I’ll just drop this in here to reference the larger picture of where are going in the current phase shift. The post capitalist economics that we are trying to figure out will, I think, incorporate free market economics where that works and that is, primarily, non-essentials. The background was clearly market forces to establish equitable pricing for scarce commodities. Sustainability requires us to move beyond scarcity for essentials. That allows protected free markets (the only kind that stay free) to establish value on creativity in a post scarcity, sustainable planetary economy.

The problem that has destroyed capitalism is greed. And this specifically in the extreme, uncontrolled capitalism of the last forty or so years. In short this has used greed to force scarcity on larger and larger percentages of the population driven by the need to fake growth. Tied, of course, to destruction of our atmosphere and climate by energy production that is, itself, unsustainable. The rather bizarre debate about children’s cancer illustrates the failure as delivery (not discovery) of new therapies is dependent on the size of the potential market not on the need of any one group. We have exhausted the trick of private vices, public virtues that allowed the takeoff into the full industrial revolution. We need to graduate to higher level of social management that both sustains our planet and meets higher moral and evolutionary ethical standards than greed.