Apart from the nonsense he has bought into about CO2 emissions this is a thought-provoking and inspiring piece.
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The following is the eighteenth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books. You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here.
First they
ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. --Mohandas
Gandhi
Before I
explore more deeply the shift in personal economic thinking and practice that
is part of sacred economy, I will summarize its key macroeconomic elements.
Some are coming into place already; others are still outside the purview of
acceptable political discourse and await a deepening of the crisis for the
unthinkable to become common sense.
The transition I map out is evolutionary. It
does not involve confiscation of property or the wholesale destruction of
present institutions, but their transformation. As the following summaries
describe, this transformation is under way already, or incipient in existing
institutions.
The reader may notice that, except where they
are off the map entirely, most of these developments fall on the left side of
the political spectrum. That is because they gradually redistribute wealth from
the rich to everybody else. Whereas the moneyed classes have always desired
higher interest rates, and labor lower interest rates, this book foresees them
going negative. Whereas liberals are fond of social welfare programs, this book
foresees their universalization in a social dividend. Whereas corporate interests
advocate the gutting of environmental and social protections, this book
foresees the reclamation of the commons. The single major exception to the
foregoing is the elimination of the income tax, which will actually benefit
that small subset of the wealthy whose wealth comes from entrepreneurial
productivity rather than control of money and property generating economic
rents.
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