Me: Personally I believe a new dark age is coming due to our inability to solve the problems I describe. When a species reaches the point at which no Evolutionary Successful Strategy is available it becomes extinct.
Bruce: I don’t think that there is no solution(s) to society’s problems! However, I don’t think the solution is in one of the ‘isms’. At minimum, we are going to pick and choose from what is available from various ‘isms’ to cobble together a solution that works. It will be a situation in which no one will be completely happy with the process, but most will be happy with a successful result. Rome will not be built in a day.
I also believe that capitalism (and by extension libertarianism) has definitively failed because the insoluble problems are mainly directly caused by free markets and invisible hands.
Yes, the invisible hand is definitely giving us the finger. What you say is true if you mean that capitalism/libertarianism being the economic system. Capitalism is good at solving certain types of problems, and poor at others. The main problems today tell us that having capitalism’s drivers in political control is very bad. That keeps us from experimenting with different type of solutions to the various problems in society. My view leans toward postponing trying to solve all of our problems today. Instead, we should concentrate on building a functioning democratic system with accompanying freedom and personal liberty that will allow all of us to express ourselves to others, as opposed to the phony, perverted democracy we have today. Then we will have a way of political decision making that will reflect the needs and wishes of the population, instead of the 1%.
I moved way to the left in college, but immediately started seeing problems with it. Ever since, I’ve been trying to build a larger, personal ideology to help guide myself. I’ve made a lot of progress. One of the turning points was when I returned to college in the mid-80s to finish my degree. In a comparative economic systems independent study, I wrote long paper about the Soviet economic system, to try to clarify my ideas up to that point. It also helped as a base for my thinking thereafter.
The USSR did a certain amount of experimentation with capitalism, but it was able to keep it under control because the capitalists had no political power. Still, the USSR was never able to solve its 2 main problems: the lack of democracy so that it could discover and supply what the population really wanted, and the lack of computing power to handle all of the possible economic inputs and outputs in its central planning system. We still don’t have that amount of computing power. Like trying to model and predict the weather, it is too chaotic, with too many variables, to do the necessary computations the time for it to be useful.
Saying that solutions are pie in the sky means that we are too screwed up to solve the problems we cause.
Well, I didn’t mean to say that all possible solutions are pie in the sky. I’m sorry for any confusion it caused. I was focusing on your suggestion of moving the decision-making process politically upstream from today’s nation-states. Doing that just introduces more variables and more possibilities for disagreement. That would, in times like the present, just replace some kinds of unfairness with other kinds of unfairness.
Bruce