Posts Tagged

capitalism

Economic Bug Fixes – Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

You might, for example, want to design a tablet to be pristine and platonic, without any physical buttons, but only a touchscreen. Wouldn’t that be more perfect and true to the ideal? But you can’t ever quite do it. Some extra physical buttons, to turn the thing on, for instance, turn out to be indispensable….

Read More

Richard Wolff Explains The Delusion of Regulation

  Broadly defined, the government intervenes economically by regulating the economic interactions among and between enterprises and individuals. It does this by taxing their activities (earning income, owning wealth, spending money, and so on) and by making rules governing those activities. However, the real contents and effects of government regulations depend on the interests that govern their design and implementation….

Read More

Doing Something So That Nothing Really Changes | Occupy Wall Street,The Matrix & a Vulgar Joke

In the good old days of Really Existing Socialism, a joke popular among dissidents was used to illustrate the futility of their protests. In the fifteenth century, when Russia was occupied by Mongols, a peasant and his wife were walking along a dusty country road; a Mongol warrior on a horse stopped at their side…

Read More

Alternative Hedonism

“…the market economy is providing the goods that we still do, I think, want to have, [e.g.] forms of exercise, forms of relating to each other, forms of leisure time in various ways. It is selling us back these goods that we have sacrificed through overwork.” This quote belongs to Kate Soper who, during an…

Read More

“Long live Gravity!”

Below is an excerpt from the poem Some Further Words, by Mr. Wendell Berry, one of my favorite writers. Berry critiques the land he loves with a wise reverence, and although this poem was written decades ago it is timeless and carries special meaning today. The world is babbled to pieces after the divorce of…

Read More