On 5 May 2014 20:19, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: > On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 11:46 PM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On 5 May 2014 07:38, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: >> >>> Yes, and this already happened. I would add that capitalism is not >>> catching up with anything because it doesn't even exist at the moment. The >>> money supply itself is not under the control of the market, so the system >>> is non-capitalist at its core. Bitcoin is an attempt at real capitalism, it >>> remains to be seen if it can survive. >>> >> >> This is true, however real capitalism - free market capitalism - doesn't >> work because it doesn't pay the full (i.e. environmental) price of >> production. At least it hasn't to date, which means so far it's just been a >> bubble / ponzi scheme. >> > > It is fair to argue that free market capitalism provides no mechanism to > create some concerted effort to reduce environmental impact. However, > neither does the current system. This is one problem one faces when > defending the free market: one is usually cornered into comparing it with > an *idealised* version of the current system. It will never live up to that. >
I'm not comparing it. I'm saying it doesn't work. I don't say anything does work, but I would hope our best minds would be trying to work out what might work, rather than defending a system that doesn't. > > What makes something a bubble / ponzi scheme is the implicit necessity of > infinite growth for sustainability. This is precisely the requirement of > the current system, in which countries can run public debts that are larger > than the total money supply. We just saw one iteration of the ponzi scheme > explode in 2007. Or the current european pensions scheme, where workers pay > the pensions of retired people -- which require infinite population growth > for it not to collapse. In fact, my generation is the one in whose hands > the system exploded, we are likely not going to have any pensions, and > there are already aggressive cuts happening even for the currently retired > (who payed for full pensions all their lives but now only get a part of it, > they would be better off had they been allowed to just save that money). > > A free market where the government cannot issue money is the furthest > possible thing from a ponzi scheme: you cannot lend money that does not > exist. The opposite of ponzi scheme is an economy based on deflation, which > also has another nice property: your money tends to increase in value with > time, so it also solves the pensions issue in a sustainable manner, which > is directly indexed to economic activity. It can only increase in value > insofar as there is a matching increase in resources. > I agree, I have long said that the problem with the current system is the religious desire for economic growth, which leads to the production of baubles while elsewhere people starve. (But "unlimited growth" is the mantra of free market capitalism, at least in its current form...) Unlimited growth = ponzi scheme, environmentally if in no other way. If we can exploit the resources of the solar system, at least, it would make more sense. We have a long way to go to "Kardashev One". But no sign of that happening and the Earth passed its carrying capacity in (it's estimated) the 1980s. Since then we've been running on empty. > > Also, the environmental costs don't make it a ponzi scheme because the > savings they enable are reflected in the cost of goods: provided there is > free competition. > > They do, because if no one pays (ie cleans up, restores the atmosphere, replaces the fossil fuels etc) we are forcing future generations to live in a degraded world, and possibly even die to pay our bills. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
