[Coach]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

Just a couple quick comments on some of this...

With respect to people having to have money in order to invest money: Yes, sure, and no one said life is fair, but without that capital being invested, the economy as a whole, and each of us in particular, are less well off. Taxing most of it and putting it in the hands of the government, is the surest way to create equally (less for everyone).

As to market forces not always driving innovation in the right directions, I'll ignore the 'who decides the right direction' argument and just say this: random selection heads in the wrong direction most of the time as well. But overall, it moves things forwards. We can't know what is the right direction in advance. And we can't know what will turn into the right direction (or vice versa) in the future.

But in the end, things move forward. Compare that with humans trying to guide things - virtually always fails, is substantially less innovative, and creates it's own power issues.

The market system is definitely cloudy. But it works. Can any other systems make that claim?

See I don't think we can really say it works. Works better than other things we've done before? Yes. But when we have the possibility of providing something as small as food and clean water to everyone, but don't, the possibility that everyone could have access to using the internet, but don't, the possibility to provide everyone with equal opportunity for educating themselves in any field they wish to pursue , but don't, etc... I don't think you can say that it works. Again this is my personal opinion, and it is firmly based in the idea that the cost of something in dollars shouldn't really matter when compared to actual impacts on our species. We invented money as a medium of exchange. It's not real and holds no actual intrinsic value, and becomes less and less real every day. How many people actually hold physical money anymore? What is our money backed by? The things that made money actually hold value (ie. backed by gold), are gone. It's now just based on perceived value of a nation's currency. I think that the system we have worked, but doesn't anymore. Just like the barter system worked until trading got to a point that we needed something with liquidity to act as a medium. We moved on from that system, why can't we move on from this? I realize there probably aren't many people who agree with that, but again, it's my opinion.

It's not a matter of me thinking I have the answer, it's a matter of me just not being satisfied with what is going on now and wondering about how it can be altered to reflect the incredible advances in technology and globalization that have taken place since money became our chosen means of exchanging goods. There's nothing wrong with questioning it and thinking there may be different ways we could make it work. It's not like money was here when we got here and will never go away. We haven't even been using it for very long.

I did give fair warning this would get a bit crazy.