God the profit, job, and holy growth. Too habituated to recognise addiction. Doing it backwards: horses dragged behind runaway carts. Ever-present poverty amidst plenty. Ecological vandalism. Greatest market failure ever. Recipes for cooking own goose: greenhouse steaming, ultraviolet baking, nuclear barbecuing, chemical stewing…
Too big to fail market knows best!?!? Law of $upply and Demand! Hooked on L$D, deafened by hallucinatory sound of money talking, pursuing profits and cash flows not needs. Figments of hyperactive imaginations. Money mistaken for wealth, energies frittered. Mercedes for Mercedes-less not homes for homeless. Weapons of mass destruction destroyed at fifty times cost. 70% of work producing no real wealth, 40% cleaning up mess made by rest. Subsidizing of business by government exceeds profits. Externalised costs ditto.
Loaves-and-fishes banking. Fickle paranoid/manic depressive markets. Too-clever-by-half exercises in self-deception: glorified IOUs, bets upon gambles, conjured up cash flows as easily lost, fluctuating values based on perceptions. Creative accountancy: bankruptcy transformed into pretence of profit. Automated sleight-of-hand.
Relentless runarounds, chasing phantoms, swirling liquidity, vortices sucking, gushing – diluting, evaporating. Spend less: shed jobs/profits, repay less, bankruptcy, collapse, recession, economy disappearing up its assets.
Economy must grow, to avoid collapse. Idée fixed on thickness of economic flow, keep treadmill ever rolling. Obsessive-compulsive game without finishing post. Growth requires profits and debt, therefore work. High grow, high grow, with lots of work we grow. Spend ever more, buy, repay, spend, buy, repay, spend, more, more, more, you can do it for me, keep going, aaah, aaaaaahhhhh… uhh… eh?! I know what your invisible hand has been doing.
Systemic problem: none can win competition without others losing… Circular flow: out from producers to consumers – back in same, not enough for all to profit! Aim to receive more than expend – asked-for prices in exceed costs out. Some profit, others necessarily lose – regardless of efficiency. Lottery. Purchasing power added via exports/government spending only redistributes. Credit merely delays – interest augments problem. Instability in-built.
Pssst. New system for sale. It’s got the lot. One-day working week. Afford anything deemed appropriate. No financial hardship, unemployment, job insecurity, mortgages, rent, corporate tyranny. Save work without fear of losing income. Competition subservient to cooperation. Local stewardship, environmental care, international security, unfettered aid, sustainable development, political self-determination, change… You know you want it.
No profit/interest, shared work: prices equal costs. If less done, average hours reduce, costs/prices by same proportion. No more boom-bust. Automate – build to last not obsolesce – work really needed/wanted.
Total costs equal total prices, but individual prices not: some free food, clothing, housing, health care, education, welfare – any worthwhile work afforded, ‘absorbed’ into prices of non-free consumables. A free lunch.
Start: producer accounts’ credit covers expected expenditures, consumer accounts credited with wages earned.
Purchase: purchaser account debited by price, producer account credited with cost.
End: some producer accounts balance, others not (record/assist future planning) – reset to zero; consumer accounts not (cumulative).
Next: producer accounts re-credited for re-planned expenditures
Hard worker: frugal account in credit. Big spender, lazy burden: debit. Final balance: pride/shame epitaph.
Home stewards: usual rights except can’t sell/buy – responsible move up (more responsible, greater options).
Labour standard dollar: five minutes carpentry, three minutes medical care… Fixed not floating.
Fair trade: international imbalance alters working hours for more/less exports to compensate, poorer nations’ discounts credited by/to exporter.
Plurocracy: participatory, Internet-based, bottom-up, decentralised plurality of views. Market surrogate. Small self-governing electorates stacked progressively larger, decisions with agreement of constituents: localities of (say) 250 people – 20 localities, a town – 10 towns, city – 40 cities, region – 20 regions, nation…
Locality represented (not facelessly) by member, town by constituent locality representative, city by one of theirs… Representatives coordinate, inform, disseminate options/proposals, communicate – directly answerable to electors who propose, deliberate, make up own minds from bottom up: decisions by majority approval of electorate’s voters and majority of electorate’s constituent electorates, approved by majority of their constituents – all the way down.
Responsibility not abdicated by voting: votes for all levels’ representatives online – change any time, power with the people. Electronic communal noticeboard: any vote, any decision, any change of mind. Democracy from comfort of favourite armchair.
Semi-autonomous: final decision over internal affairs, definitions of ‘majority approval’, voting or rostering representation, consensus. Right to secede from ‘parent’ electorate. Self-determination.
System to serve us not vice versa. Fosters (not thwarts) responsibility, creativity, decency, vigilance. Right to choose as see fit, if doing duty not to harm others in process. Must distinguish harmful from disagreeable, shocked sensibilities, outraged ‘morality’, laziness – no absolute solutions, no hard and fast realities. Each moment involves choice/chance. Control not possible, only trust, care, forgiveness, understanding when mistakes made.