Hi Elliot
Thanks for the clarification on your utopian ideas and of your aversion to
social imposition. I do agree with a substantially moderated version of your
vision.
Rather than address your comments point by point, let me just get to the
substance of my concern with your full fledged idea...
In brief, I am concerned that your utopia where people work for fullfilment
rather than wages would destroy the invisible hand of the market. Wages and
prices are consensual agreements of value set (imperfectly) by the parties
most directly impacted by the voluntary transaction. In their pure sense,
prices/wages act as an efficient means of establishing value and
communicating and rewarding the optimal allocation of resources and
productivity within a society.
Please don't get me wrong, I fully understand the limitations of free
enterprise and how the the actuality is often quite different than the ideal.
However, despite all its faults, extremes and limitations, it is still
better than the other alternatives at focusing the effectiveness of
social-level production. The free enterprise system is simply the most
knowledgeable way to efficiently and effectively allocate resources, to
signal proper distribution of labor, to concentrate and foster creativity and
to control quality. Best yet, because it is a decentralized, distributed
control system, it does its magic with minimal control or authoritarian
influence.
I am concerned that your ideals will destroy this system, leaving us with
ineffective social productivity -- and potentially undermining society in
entirety. Without the market system, you need an alternative to sustain
society's economic engine. The alternative throughout history has tended to
be authoritarian control and exploitation (after society gets beyond one or
two hundred people -- smaller societies can and do cooperate in a much more
egalitarian fashion, but large societies can't.) My fear is that your utopia
is actually another one way ticket to the authoritarian exploitation and
central command of socialism.
One other thing... you ask "must we forge ahead blindly into progress
without
questioning it first?... lets decide what we want, then find the technology,
the
current way is backwards."
My suspicion is that progress works just the way you fear -- especially in a
decentralized system with millions of actors. It isn't really controlled by
anyone, it spontaneously emerges out of the interaction of the complex
system. In other words, manifestations of Dynamic Quality are by necessity
creative, exploratory and unpredictable. This doesn't mean that we don't
influence the direction of progress. In fact it implies that so many of us
affect it in so many ways that it is no longer a static system. Progress,
whether biological, social or intellectual, is inherently dynamic and even
risky.
Let me know your thoughts...
Rog
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