Evolution to a New Paradigm

It's time for a revolution. No, make that an evolution--an evolution to a new world order, a new paradigm. It's not the end of history; it could turn out to be the beginning, or at least a turning point. In any case, it seems to me it's time to stop thinking in isms. As J. Fagg Foster used to say, it will be better when all isms are wasms. (Pronunciation: say "was" and then add "ms" like at the end of "isms." But never mind; the important thing is not the pronunciation but the idea.)

That is to say, we should not be using capitalism, or socialism, or communism, or any other ism, as a criterion of judgment. Of course we can use them as useful patterns for organization, but not as our one and only model as we have tended to do in the past. Instead we should be planning a new model, not one patterned after a particular institutional structure but one guided by a judgment of how an economy should organize itself the better to serve people. And not just a national economy, but a global economy, divided up as much as desirable into political subdivisions. And one with the Internet as a tool, maybe the greatest thing that's come along in centuries.

Then what should be the guideposts if not isms? We don't know the answer to that question, but we do have a pretty good sense of changes needed, of the kinds of problems that need to be solved. We know we should be doing better about poverty. That's a huge, and obvious, problem. We need to organize our economy, or economies, to produce enough goods and services for everyone, and most of all, to distribute them to everyone. We actually have the technology to do that. The huge inequities in income at the present time, I submit, are the major reason we're in something like a recession, or a slump in the economy. And of course we know about other things we need to do, or to provide, such as education, health care, war and peace--we could go on. In other words, we need to provide for human welfare. It's that simple. As Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said, what could be simpler, and yet what could be more difficult.

But to go on, it might be apparent that one thing we need to get us going right is an Adam Smith, or a Karl Marx, or an Alfred Marshall, or a John Maynard Keynes, or a Milton Friedman. As far as I can tell, we don't have that.

So where should I go with this? Yeah, right now I'll go political. We need to choose the candidate for the presidency of the United States who can take us into a new paradigm. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John McCain. I'll leave it at that for today.