The State we're in

“The association at Shoreline Towers, a 378-unit Chicago condominium, plans to use reserve funds to buy foreclosed units, rent them, then resell them when the market improves. The move prevents foreclosed units from being sold far below market value and allows the association to recoup some unpaid assessments, says Chris Sempler, vice president of Shoreline Towers' condo association board.”

www.usatoday.com

How can anything be sold “far below market value”? If a buyer and a seller agree on a price, that is the market in action; the parties to the transaction determine the market value by agreeing price. If the seller loses large due to a crash in the prices of the product he invested in at some peak price, tough. Everywhere there are signs of agencies and corporations engaging in any measure that prevents the free flow of creative destruction. Without creative destruction, you do not have capitalism, you have the early stages of fascism. Capitalism is being brutalized, and yet the people who attack it call its disfigured face capitalism still, and claim to be its defenders.

We have a system completely dependent on endless growth; the extension of ever increasing amounts of credit; that stokes the insatiable appetites of a consumer likewise addicted to credit; a culture that lauds material wealth above all things, that says taking care of number one magically takes care of everyone else too; an economics that has no notion of trust, no model for taking fraud into account, no sense of the power of advertising, a giant blind spot concerning the vulnerability and malleability of human psychology, and that seems incapable of caring about the environment, the very thing we all depend on! And this is the best that humanity can come up with?

If you ask me what I suggest, I say lets test, openly and vigorously, the idea of a resource-based economy.