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"There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.
The trouble is that the fellow travelers of Atlas Shrugged have been helming government for decades. As of 2008, their attempt to make the world into some imagined paradise of prices and egotism has come unstuck. Millions suffered the consequences during the course of the attempt, millions more when the experiment exploded, and possibly billions will suffer if our only way of dealing with the combined social, economic and environmental crises simply repeats the mistakes of the past.
Over the past 30 years, he accelerating pace of enclosure, and the increasing scale of the theft, have brought our planet to the edge of destruction. Internationally, environmental costs have been shunted from rich to poor, most notably though not exclusively from global warming. A recent report offers a very conservative estimate of the number of people harmed today by climate change at 325 million, every year. The number of deaths from weather changes alone is set to exceed 500,000 per year, and most of these deaths will happen among those who have had the least to do with causing the pollution, people whose countries were colonized by he very same powers that have caused this new catastrophe. This does not mean the polluters shouldn't pay and that carbon dioxide has to be free because there's no good way to price it. Handing the matter over to capitalism is, however, likely to prove as good an idea as asking the iceberg to fix the Titanic. These are conclusions that come from the two investigations into "free" goods in the first half of this book, where we looked at what happens when corporations provide free goods, and what happens when governments do the same. In both cases, the rigid property schemes, profit-driven markets and corporations we've allowed to flourish create a deeply flawed system for valuing the world.
So where do we start to rebalance market society? Once we decide that exchanges are governed by the rules of the market, it is incredibly hard to put the genie back into the bottle. Neuroeconomic and sociological studies about the irreversibility of monetary-transaction relations confirm that markets can be a social toxin: After all, the day someone leaves money for a lover in payment for sex is the day that relationship ends. We face a far harder task, not just of removing the taint of money from specific transactions, but of removing corporate rapacity from government, and the bleak weight of consumerism from our political imaginations."
- from The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel
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