ThirstyFish

This photo was taken on 86th Street, Brooklyn, where small businessses are lined up throught the street.

Capitalism, the private ownership of goods and the means of production, and the creation of goods and services for profit, in itself is not such a bad thing. But the way pricing, competition and capital accumulation is implemented and/or regulated leads to different outcomes - think Greece. The established global capitalist system of finance and money generation, especially fractional reserve banking system, seems doomed. The days of value based economics are over.

Without going into extremely complicated economic theories, it is not unreasonable to say that in the current global system, money is generated through debt. But when interest and bad loans are factored in, debtors are mathematically unable repay their debt, therefore growth must be sustained continuously - for which debtors have to burrow more money. As economist Kenneth Boulding, the environmental adviser to J.F.K., so eloquently put it: "Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist". *

Song of the Day: Water Into Wine - Cold Chisel (1998)