On Sep 3, 2009, at 6:39 PM, <email obscured> wrote:
> As for Bill's response, I think my point was that many of us find it
> as difficult to conceive of alternative economic systems as we do to
> conceive of our knees bending the other way or imagining what a
> chair would look like in those circumstances. But then sometimes
> when I read what I've written, I say, "Chuck, what was your point?"
Hey, I've been there; getting chastised by Neala over cooperative
economic systems, whatever they might be, means perhaps I'm there now.
I think my point was that you can't really come up with a global
cooperative economic system right now, but what do I know? I barely
passed college economics. North Dakota is pretty darn small population-
wise though, and the world is much bigger than ND against mean old
Minneapolis; perhaps the scale of national systems is workable, but I
sure don't know. I would tend to think that the larger cooperative
experiments happened in the USSR, and we know what happened there.
Some really great biological research came out of Siberia, though, far
from the influence of human social engineering with stuff entirely
relevant to who and what we are, through work with foxes, mink, and
other beasties by people who cared little for Marx, Lenin, or any
other communist or socialist ideologues; although they did pay
attention to Charles Darwin and pioneers of the new synthesis of
biological evolution in the century plus following his work.
The only application of an economic paradigm that made any sort of
sense to me was in ecology, in the inflows and outflows of various
stuff through living systems of which each member was a product of
evolution by natural selection. Applying that paradigm anywhere else
is an exercise in futility for me. In my view, every attempt to give
meaning to our existence is a concomitant effect of our evolution,
i.e., we may be the only living entity that cares about any sort of
economic systems, whether we understand them or not, because we have
entwined our lives so inextricably to them.
We just have to make the best of a, thanks to us, steadily worsening
lot; we can't afford to do anything less. Perhaps things can improve
for us if we abandon all that we can verifiably determine as false,
but there are so many who cling to the comfortable lies that I don't
have much hope (these clingy folks find themselves, luckily,
increasingly unable to win election to office). We need more than
hope, though; we need real solutions, and those don't come from
flapping your jowls in admonition--they come through hard work.
Myers-Briggs type for me is INTP, for what it's worth, which means,
believe it or not, that I'm far more reticent than Kevin; I've heard
these types change for individuals, depending on what they are doing
at any given time, though maybe participation from an introvert says
something more than that from an extrovert. Just one more area of
ignorance for me, I guess.