Posted by BlackMask on 01/26/09 12:12 PM   [Newer: The Anti-Tax Protests Will Fail] [Older: Haleness to you Liberty]

There is a great interview on todays episode of "Democracy Now".

http://www.democracynow.org/

What is great about it, is how David Korten calls out that the old economic dichotomy was, socialism versus capitalism.

centralized government ownership versus centralized private ownership.

What needs to come about is public ownership. The right of people to own the place they live, the things they produce, and the value that they create with their work.

It is centralized ownership of any kind that promotes injustice and exploitation, because the owners have no connection to what they own.

The soviet union is one of the most polluted places on earth, because no one owned anything personally there, and thus they had no personal responsibility or interest in their ecological health.

Conversely, when the world bank lends to a third world country in order to help them develop, then forces them to privatize their social systems, corporations with no interest in the well being of the local people buy up the resources, and then abuse the populace.

Ron Paul's argument for the free-market is not the promotion of capitalism, profit measured in abstract dollars, but in real value, the goods and commodities produced by individuals and traded freely.

This is an economic model which can be embraced by both the left and the right, because it promotes fairness through personal-responsibility.

Posted 01/26/09 2:56 PM constraint Columbus, IN

I think you may be confused. Public ownership would imply government ownership. Private ownership is when people own things for themselves. You're right about the personally responsibility issue in the USSR, but everything in the USSR was publicly owned. For example pulling from the wiki entry on the The Decree on Land: Written by Vladimir Lenin, was passed by the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies on 26 October 1917, following the success of the October Revolution. It decreed an abolition of private property... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_on_Land Also you can see in Chapter 4 of "The Revolution" where Ron Paul states that the protection of private property rights is the best way to protect the environment.

Posted 01/27/09 10:08 AM BlackMask Eugene, OR

It's just a matter of semantics. I meant, ownership by the people. It's actually kind of funny because government is a sort of monopoly, just another kind of economic actor, much like a corporation. There's not really any difference between the "private" and "public" sector. My point was that economic centralization of any kind is hazardous and destructive.