'Ecological .. free market economy'

At 17:33 15/06/99 +0200, Wim A. de Bruyn <WdeBruyn@mail.dma.be> wrote:
>Hello subscribers to the Deep Ecology list
>
> .. I .., .. a long since subscriber to the DE list, [believe that] your
recent .. e-mails [in their] precision, .. make you experts to evaluate
whether .. or to what extent the proposed way of living satisfies
requirements that enable the consumer to live in harmony with Nature until
eternity, while enjoying well-being in a pleasant or agreeable way

>[The proposal is that consumers] maintain the integrity of human Nature
with their income.
>
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[Wim de Bruyn's page: ]
     "Ecological version of the free market economy":
http://freezone.exmachina.net/ZERO/Ecovers.html
     has:

_ .. goods and services [and] money .. make up economic development.  Every
time consumers spend money on their costs of living they determine the
direction and sense [of] development.

_ .. the current version of the free market economy is: to consume more and
more forever.  Mankind does not sustain development by pursuing this goal.
.. Nevertheless, economic theories .. encourage higher consumption to
maintain growth in development.

_ .. economic growth and environmental management can be brought together
by harnessing the power of the consumer to choose the goods and services on
which [they] spend money. [This leads] to the proposition: consumers should
be able to deduct from taxable income the money they spend on products that
are ecologically sound.

_ Through this [method] consumers will be motivated to pursue as goal: to
maintain the integrity of human Nature.  Consumers' .. demand for
ecological products will favour production that is in harmony with Nature
and thus in accord with the goal of keeping the integrity of human Nature.

_ .. this proposition [uses] a principle of economic efficiency in the free
market economy: equilibrium between costs and revenues should be maintained
by the people who earn the revenues. .. By [this] principle, the efficiency
of the free market economy in sharing[/distributing] limited resources will
increase when equilibrium between costs and revenues is kept by the people
who earn income from the first drive to earn an income: to survive or to
sustain a way of living; consumers.

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now David:

**  I reject any suggestion that I am 'an expert' whose opinions can be
quoted as any form of 'proof'. (My being able to live {under specified
conditions} on less than US$900 per year however, _is_ one datum in a
complete description of how humans can order their lives.) Moreover, I
suspect that most/all on this list could well be unwilling to have their
opinions taken as proof, e.g. in a funding request to the European
Commission. 'Scientific proof' has a specified meaning which doesn't
include such things as the above.

**  I accept that current economic theories are wrong in the context of
today's (overdeveloped and over-populated) world, and therefore must be
changed. I further accept that a transition to a sustainable world will be
aided by economic methods 'harnessing' the power of consumer spending to
provide 'the market' with signals 'it understands', i.e. using (net) price
and demand to (i) get consumers to buy in better ways, and then (ii) get
producers to supply these new 'needs'.

**  I further accept that, after the transition, money and buying power
will have a place in a sustainable world, and that economic ideas will have
developed to the extent that they more nearly conform to the real world,
rather than applying to some cloud-cuckoo-land as mainstream economics does
now.

**  However:
(1)  The scale is wrong, by perhaps an order of magnitude. I refer to both
time-scale and amount of change required. So such tinkering with our
current economic system is far too little and probably too late to be more
than one small strand in the history we are creating right now. I'm not
saying it shouldn't be done, just that most people's efforts should be
directed towards a greater change, sooner, than can be achieved by fiddling
with net prices.

(2)  I doubt that this is the right list to try initiating such discussion,
since Wim de Bruyn's page above makes it clear that the main goal/criterion
is development, a subsidiary goal is 'keeping the integrity of human
Nature', and the backdrop for this is: 'production that is in harmony with
Nature'.
  This describes, to me, a light-green, shallow-ecology viewpoint that
views deep ecology as a means to an end: development. David Orton has said:
"Shallow ecology, a term also coined by Naess, means that the major
ecological problems can be resolved within and with the continuation of
industrial society."

(3)  The image that comes to my mind, about such attempts, is of a bunch of
fish thrashing around in the remains of a cracked and leaking fish-pond or
a drying-up pool in a river-bed during a drought. Their picture of the
world is faulty.

David.
(David MacClement) mailto:d1v9d@bigfoot.com 
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3142/Pg1-AD11.html#top
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