After well over 25 years I am re-reading Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher. It's clear to me that Schumacher predicted the current wall that we have hit. His basic thesis is that "you cannot have infinite growth in a finite world." In short, there are limits to materialism. When we disregard these limits bad things happen.
What confronts us now is not the false choice between socialism and the free market but rather what lies in between. A new approach that rejects unbridled consumerism and unsustainable growth as a kind of madness and helps create sustainable employment. Nothing else will do. If we cannot find a way to create jobs, both in the U.S. and abroad, then we are headed for a "no man's land" of unprecedented human misery or worse (READ MORE WAR).
I don't subscribe to gloom and doom, but neither is there any sense in ignoring what is painfully obvious and staring at us in the face, as it were. You can count me as one of the eternal optimists that believe we can innovate our way out of this mess, but the innovation better respect the jobs engine (i.e. small businesses) and sustainable economic development, or all our efforts will be futile.
It is time for people of conscious, across the political spectrum, to stand up and be counted, to embrace "ideas over ideologies." We need to do this for our own sake, and for the sake of our children and our children's children. The stakes couldn't be higher.
