Imagine a world of healthy happy children, strong families, caring communities, and a vibrant natural environment in which everyone has a meaningful and fulfilling means of livelihood and young people grow up confident in the prospects for their future. An impossible dream? It is within our means.
While he was president, Bill Clinton kept a note taped to his mirror to remind him every morning “It’s the economy, stupid!” Perhaps we should all do the same. It would remind us that the institutions that define the economy effectively determine whether a living wage job will be available to everyone who needs one, whether families can put food on the table without running up credit card and mortgage debt, whether a quality education and health care will be available at an affordable price, and much more.
Economic instability, a grossly unjust distribution of wealth, environmental devastation, and endless wars in distant lands are all symptoms of a failed economic system. Of course, not everyone agrees that it is failing. It works fine from the perspective of Wall Street bankers. They are, however, a tiny minority. It is a devastating failure from the perspective of those who struggle with the realities of an economy that pays substandard wages, keeps jobs scarce, puts education and health care beyond reach, and forces us into perpetual debt slavery to generate hundred million dollar bonuses for Wall Street bankers.
The only legitimate purpose of an economy is to produce the goods and services people need for a full and healthy life. If existing economic institutions fail to fulfill this purpose, it is the democratic right of the people to change them. I’m not talking socialism here. I’m talking real markets and real democracy — the economic alternative both to a capitalist system that subjects people to rule by unaccountable financiers and to a socialist system that subjects them to rule by unaccountable bureaucrats.
It is entirely possible to design economic institutions that value life more than money and distribute power democratically to ordinary people who have a natural concern for the health and vitality of their children, families, community and nature. Although the political barriers are substantial, the basic concepts are simple common sense. You evaluate economic performance by life indicators rather than financial indicators, root the power to create and allocate money in locally accountable financial institutions, and favor public policies that support equitable compensation, community-based cooperative forms of ownership, cost internalization, fair elections, and bio-regional self-reliance.
Declaring our independence from Wall Street to create democratic, market based economies accountable to the people they are intended to serve is a challenge comparable to that faced by the early North American colonists who declared their independence from a powerful king in 1776. The leadership in that early independence movement came from below, not from King George. Likewise the leadership in our contemporary independence movement will come from ordinary people mobilizing from below, not from Wall Street or Wall Street owned politicians.
Tuesday 3 August 2010
Agenda for A New Economy ☀
A GNT creation ©2007–2011
