AGENDUM FOR CHANGE
(continued)
CORPORATE WELFARE
Welfare reform should give top priority to getting dependent corporations off the welfare rolls. Corporate subsidies range from resource depletion allowances to subsidized grazing fees, export subsidies, and tax abatements. Such subsidies should be systematically identified and eliminated, with the possible exception of those needed to establish and nurture locally owned, community-based enterprises.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Information is the only resource we have that is nondepletable and can be freely shared without depriving anyone of its use. Every contemporary human invention necessarily builds on the common heritage of human knowledge accumulated over thousands of years and countless generations. This is the information commons of the species. The justifiable purpose of intellectual property right protection is to provide incentives for research and creative contribution, not to create protected information monopolies. Laws relating to intellectual property rights should be reformed to conform to this principle. Such rights should be defined and interpreted narrowly and granted only for the minimum time necessary to allow those who have invested in for-profit research to recover their costs and a reasonable profit. The patenting of life-forms or genetic processes, discoveries funded with public monies, or processes or technologies that give the holder effective monopoly control over a type of research or class of products should be precluded by law. As with any common heritage resource, when there is a conflict between an exclusive private interest and a community interest, the community interest should prevail.
As business is localized, it will be possible to localize government as well. It is big business that creates the need for big government to control its excesses and clean up its messes. Similarly, it is the interference of big business that renders government ineffective. Here's a good way to describe the dynamic :
Business assumes the role of guardianship vis-a-vis the ecosystem and fails miserably in the task ; government steps in to try to mitigate the damage ; business tries to sabotage this regulatory process and nimbly sidesteps those regulations that are put on the books; government ups the ante and thereby becomes a hydra-headed bureaucratic monster choking off economic development while squandering money ; business decries "interference in the marketplace" and sets out to redress its grievances by further corrupting the legislative and regulatory process in an attempt to become de facto guardian, if not de jure.
The bigger our corporations, the greater their power to externalize costs and the greater the need for big government to protect the public interest and to clean up the consequent social and environmental messes. The more we cut our giant corporations down to human scale, the more we will be able to reduce the size of government.
Addressing extreme inequality in the distribution of economic power is also important to decolonizing economic spaces. As our current experience shows, justice and sustainability are virtually impossible to achieve in an unequal world. Extreme inequality enables the economically powerful to colonize the environmental resources of the weak and thus consume beyond their environmental means. This commonly deprives the economically weak of their basic means of livelihood and delinks the economically strong from the environmental consequences of their actions. The excluded poor respond to their resulting insecurity by having many children ---the one thing they can call their own and their prospective source of care in their hour of need. As the rich expand their consumption and the poor produce more children, the human burden on the planet grows.
A more just and sustainable society with an equitable distribution of income would limit overconsumption and reduce the incentive to seek security through having large families. Measures toward this end will be discussed next time.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Information is the only resource we have that is nondepletable and can be freely shared without depriving anyone of its use. Every contemporary human invention necessarily builds on the common heritage of human knowledge accumulated over thousands of years and countless generations. This is the information commons of the species. The justifiable purpose of intellectual property right protection is to provide incentives for research and creative contribution, not to create protected information monopolies. Laws relating to intellectual property rights should be reformed to conform to this principle. Such rights should be defined and interpreted narrowly and granted only for the minimum time necessary to allow those who have invested in for-profit research to recover their costs and a reasonable profit. The patenting of life-forms or genetic processes, discoveries funded with public monies, or processes or technologies that give the holder effective monopoly control over a type of research or class of products should be precluded by law. As with any common heritage resource, when there is a conflict between an exclusive private interest and a community interest, the community interest should prevail.
As business is localized, it will be possible to localize government as well. It is big business that creates the need for big government to control its excesses and clean up its messes. Similarly, it is the interference of big business that renders government ineffective. Here's a good way to describe the dynamic :
Business assumes the role of guardianship vis-a-vis the ecosystem and fails miserably in the task ; government steps in to try to mitigate the damage ; business tries to sabotage this regulatory process and nimbly sidesteps those regulations that are put on the books; government ups the ante and thereby becomes a hydra-headed bureaucratic monster choking off economic development while squandering money ; business decries "interference in the marketplace" and sets out to redress its grievances by further corrupting the legislative and regulatory process in an attempt to become de facto guardian, if not de jure.
The bigger our corporations, the greater their power to externalize costs and the greater the need for big government to protect the public interest and to clean up the consequent social and environmental messes. The more we cut our giant corporations down to human scale, the more we will be able to reduce the size of government.
Addressing extreme inequality in the distribution of economic power is also important to decolonizing economic spaces. As our current experience shows, justice and sustainability are virtually impossible to achieve in an unequal world. Extreme inequality enables the economically powerful to colonize the environmental resources of the weak and thus consume beyond their environmental means. This commonly deprives the economically weak of their basic means of livelihood and delinks the economically strong from the environmental consequences of their actions. The excluded poor respond to their resulting insecurity by having many children ---the one thing they can call their own and their prospective source of care in their hour of need. As the rich expand their consumption and the poor produce more children, the human burden on the planet grows.
A more just and sustainable society with an equitable distribution of income would limit overconsumption and reduce the incentive to seek security through having large families. Measures toward this end will be discussed next time.
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