Daniel,

I probably over emphasized the point, as there is certainly overlap between medium and store. Often stores, like warehouses, are a slower form of medium, as the merchandise is rotated, but the essential point remains. Our economy has become geared toward the production of money, as an end goal, to the detriment of other benefits, such as the health of society and the environment. Why is that, other than that it functions as a status symbol and class signifier for our current culture?

The real question is whether it is sustainable and if not, why not and what comes next?

My view is that it is not sustainable. That it’s like cheating on the foundations, in order to put more gold in the penthouse. Eventually it does more than trickle down. So do we continue into real oligarchy, as those with the most treasuries find ever more ways to privatize public goods and properties, as the government’s ability to issue ever more debt becomes constrained.

Or do we have a debate about how the system works? In reading your essay; Capitalism and Property, I’ll try to extend the conceptual issue to a more basic level;

We are mobile organisms and evolved the decision making process to filter our sentience into a sequential order, in order to navigate. We then learned to narrate our journeys to each other and future generations, building civilizations out of the cumulative knowledge.

This creates two basic biases. The first is of time narratively flowing past to future, when the reality is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. It’s an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. Energy is conserved, thus going from prior to subsequent forms. The present is not so much a point between past and future, as it is the configuration of this energy. Some at the speed of light and some unchanging for eons. Many clocks working together, like frequencies and metabolism.

The second is an ideals based culture. That we have some destination and that ultimately everything coalesces into a singular whole, just as our feelings and impulses coalesce into a singular course of action.

The problem is that singular nature, say materialism, for example, is better understood as a tension and balance between opposing elements. From postive and negative charge, to liberalism and conservatism. Consider galaxies; There is energy radiating out, as mass gravitates in and this reality we experience amounts to a cosmic convection cycle, between these forces.

What we experience as material is friction.

The singular is simply a node in a network. The energy bubbling up out of the background needs that feedback with context to establish form.

The essence of liberalism are the social energies bubbling up, while the essence of conservatism are the civil and cultural forms that coalesce out of this dynamic. Youth versus age. Energy versus form. Which explains why liberalism tends toward the global, as energy radiates until it crests, while conservatism tends toward the local, or national, as form both defines and limits.

So when we try to figure out the relationship between the public and the private, neither is fundamental to the other. We are organisms in an ecosystem and there are ecosystems within us, as well as that our ecosystem exists as a broader organism, constrained and defined as the planet.

As organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process the energy driving us, along with the central nervous system to guide its direction. Motor and steering functions.

Tribalism is a community functioning as a singular organism. Necessarily in the context of the larger ecosystem.

So when we try to understand economics, there is no ideal situation. It necessarily fluctuates between poles and when it goes too far in one direction, that simply creates energy to eventually effect momentum in the other direction. All among the multitudes of definitions of the private and the public.

If you want to avoid doctrinaire socialism, don’t let extreme capitalism dominate for too long.

Henry Ford paid his workers twice what he needed to, because he observed those building the product had to be able to afford it, for the system to work. The value had to circulate, for a healthy economy. As my father, a cattle auctioneer, used to put it; “You can’t starve a profit.”

Yet Jeff Bezos is going to squeeze out every penny possible and use that power to squeeze more. The result will prove to be a desert, not a jungle, as the circulation dries up.

So don’t assume there is no option to the present course, no matter how driven it seems.