A Rant

competition can only happen on common ground. We must preserve certain commons.

A primary enemy of liberty is inequality. Inequality creates envy, and with it desire for wealth and power. Equality, on the other hand, inspires greater comradery(?). This is a great problem with the profit motive. It leads to inequality. Once some wealth and power is gained, it becomes easier to gain more, and more, and so on, and so on. The greater the wealth and power of any group, the greater the control they can exert over others.

Profit motive does increase efficiency because people will want to raise profits by reducing costs. This, however, could lead to a drop in quality of the product, or negative externalities as well as greater efficiency of production.

I question the profit motive, because it claims that we must at all times be growing. Growth without limit is what profit means. This is one great assumption of our social organization, that constant "progress" is necessary. I think that progress in certain areas is positive, but we should more harmoniously define progress and the areas in which we want progress. For example, I don´t think we need lots of progress in terms of innovation and expansion in the area of nuclear weapons. But I would like it in terms of medicine, for example. I think that at this point industrial and technological progress should probably halt while social progress catches up. We should stop increasing food production and with it our population. But we should shift our method of food production to something closer to local communal farming.

The point is that the correct direction for us to be moving in is not one of growth or expansion, but rather one of reflection and reorganization. In this direction, I think that the profit motive will serve us poorly. If we get rid of profit, we will generally reduce inquality and uncontrolled expansion. However, profit is an incentive for innovation and efficiency.

The solution is this. Find a new way to direct human desire for improvement, exploration, adventure away from profit, and probably money in general. The second is to provide new incentives and encouragements for production.

This is not to say that we outrightly prohibit profit. I think that would be impossible to do in a rfee society. However, I think that what needs to be done is to establish a communal/social framework in which profit seeking is a properly subordinated interest to other cultural needs. I think that our society is currently organized in a way that we have a framework of competition in which some cooperation is allowed to take place. What we need is a framework of cooperation in which some competition is allowed to take place. I think that this framework must come from cultural vision as opposed to top-down enforcement.