TF - Human nature can be changed. Freud said in Civilization and Its Discontents we could limit and end competition institutionally. Abolition of slavery recognized that human nature includes a right to freedom. Beyond Freud's basic instincts or drives to survive it's cultural.AK - Is ending competition which is in our very nature wise? Not likely. We adopt social programs because of the obsessive nature of how competition is used and abused in the name of greed. Again it's survival.
TF - In a syndrome of scarcity greed was immortalized in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations It's still about what's sanctioned culturally and socially as in Pacific Northwest Indian Potlatch cultures.
AK - Saying competition leads to greed is like calling marijuana a gateway drug. It takes a totalitarian police state to enforce bans on either one. Pacific Northwest Indians were not totalitarian.
TF - Not to say other major new world cultures get set aside as following that kind of thing (maybe Aztec or Inca) We want low level competition, just enough to get us off our butts once in a while.
AK - Schumpeter and Weber have a lot to say about innovation and the entrepreneur (to get away from Jefferson / Marx bashing you allude to)
TF - Weber's thesis in the Protestant ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is particularly challenging. Tawney refuted the thesis in the 1930s.
AK - Addictive competition, watching the Knicks lose is a good example of the pathology of competition, particularly as fostered by media, athletics, etc. Capitalism exploits labor and socialism exploits capital. Capitalism exploits everything.
TF - The nature of the beast. Utopian socialism is more about sharing, assuming sufficiency and surplus, which we might have enough regionally but not globally. That introduced the interesting notion the 13 original colonies saw when federating under the Constitution and abolishing state sovereignty.
AK - While I'm not arguing for socialism this is good reason why both economic methods should be employed, sans exploitation and bring in optimization. Efficient greed is not sharing, it's more effective exploitation.
TF - Socialists reduce economics to politics, thinking public ownership brings utopia. Our system by contrast reduces politics to economics (private ownership) producing rich and poor. One fundamental error is to confuse Jefferson's participatory agrarian democracy with Hamilton's merchant capitalism. Our Constitution isn't founded on the same philosophy as Smith's Wealth of Nations. It's wise to draw a wide berth around Rousseau's Social Contract when considering Jefferson, and Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government. We must balance politics and economics, each limiting, checking and informing the other. The place for socialism is on the political side with direct democracy based on local assemblies. The place for capitalism and labor for private enterprise is on the economic side with non-corporate labor-capital partnerships. Let's end old wives' tales that "War is good for the economy" and "War makes the world safe for Democracy."
AK - Whose economy and whose democracy? The political process sets down rules of government. Economic laws of postscarcity survival are more unmoved and limiting. Broaden your dialogue to include cultural and psychological paradigms as well as narrow beaten paths of economics and politics.
TF - The economic process operates in that context, with a healthy but not overwhelming spread of incomes and assets to reward success and innovation. Economics should be accountable to democratic public policy. Democracy should be based on enough personal wealth to secure individual self-sufficiency necessary to participate freely in the political process. Nice summation of objectives we wait for, a plan for implementation (Beatles: "We'd love to see the plan...") Partnerships larger than 25 - 50 people get unwieldy and can't be kept democratic. They devolve to monopoly capitalism as any group larger than a dozen splinters into subgroups or becomes concentrated at the top (see work in Operations Research and Managerial Psychology)
AK - We want large networks. If partnerships were democratized internally among capital and labor shareholders, partnership would democratize enterprise just as local assembly would democratize our current oligarchic system. Once globalization like the "pill" is unleashed from the bottle you can't stuff the genie back in to close the cap. Its all world markets and international trade and commerce. From here on in the free market will insist on keeping the largest collection of consumers for any product under the sun. That has a lot to do with wisdom or folly of such new socioeconomic vehicles in international law as the European Union and NAFTA. Over time you swim upstream to prevent, maybe in our lifetimes, global law and government abolishing national sovereignty and political boundaries. Economic and telecommunication revolutions practically assure that.
TF - Abolition of corporations should be a major Green objective. Sooner or later it's got to be done. When that happens it'll be done by law. I know multinationals are global pirates and the "bad guys" in redistribution of natural resources and global wealth but I'd be damn certain of what I replaced it with before I thought of eliminating them. That they must be brought to heel is gainsaid, as their ravaging of natural and human resource bases will drive the global village to bankruptcy before it's over if it's not stopped and soon.
AK - Commonality between pro-capital and socialist Greens should be where they align. Arguments should wait. Talk of Jefferson or Marx will always push buttons and separate us. Again don't mix apples with oranges. Marx socialism is not Jeffersonian politics. They needn't be exclusive. Nomenclature and symbols of each method is also a button pusher. The French Revolution proved the folly of renaming the months of the year and reinventing the wheel in social parlance. Nomenclature is a given. Learn to communicate with it and not paddle upstream, or you won't be understood.
TF - I hope historical references like Jefferson and Marx aren't downplayed because they separate us. They're flawed, like us, but we have much to learn from the past. Any human idea in and of itself is a flawed representation of "Truth" with a capital T. We'd best do as Einstein said and stand on the shoulders of giants rather than reinvent everything from the foundation up. Life's too short. Most of what I said here took me decades to assemble from scratch. Without cultural reference points it's impossible and literally unthinkable.
AK - The degree to which Jefferson and Marx work together in constant, checked agitation is likely the Green answer. Accountability, as a real item, is key to success or failure of the Green vision.
TF - Well put. Ultimately accountable to who? Community, self, global peer pressure? The role of individual and state from a Green perspective needs fleshing out.
AK - Accountability is democracy. Where do checks and balances end and human nature begin?