Peer2Politics

JOATU is a web application that allows you to offer all of the things you want including services & products to sell, give or loan. For example, I’ll grow you a tomato plant, tutor you, lend you a power-tool for an equitable exchange.

Paul Solman: Worker ownership: When I joined the labor force in 1970, it was the dream of many an "alternative" business, including ones I worked for. Egalitarianism. Justice. Capitalism for all. A Boston weekly newspaper of which I was the editor, "The Real Paper," was in fact entirely owned by its staff.

"To benefit all of society, an economy needs to be based on service to all of society. In today’s economy, service is bought and sold as a good; instead goods must be provided as a service. An economy benefitting all of society should include service to ourselves, service to others and service to society at large. An elderly person who keeps themselves healthy and fulfilled or an addict working to conquer their addiction may be giving only to themselves but both are making society a much better place and lessening the work for others. To create a giving economy instead of a gift economy, currency is not exchanged between two trading partners but societal approval is awarded from all of society to the giver. Societal approval and trust then entitles each member of a society to receive benefit from that society, through a living and immediate social contract. As a reputation economy allows you to participate in trade, an approval economy allows you to become part of a society.

"TODAY IT IS POSSIBLE TO CREATE TOGETHER AN ECONOMY WITHOUT USING MONEY. Bioecon provides the necessary tools so that we can make it at local, regional and global scales."

The author argues that “incentives of entrepreneurs (whether they work for free, get consulting fees, or go public and become billionaires) and capitalists (who want to get a return on something they own) diverge in situations that are mainly coordinated through non-monetary incentives.”

"There have, certainly, been times and places when a kind of free market populism has emerged, where markets began operating independently of governments, at least to some degree – Medieval Islam is one famous example, and later, Ming China—but in such cases, they tended to operate in very different ways than the kind of markets we’re now familiar with, less about competition, much more about creating and maintaining relations of interpersonal trust, or for instance, profit-sharing operations instead of interest, etc etc."

Inclusive capitalism is a model for development which focuses on stimulating both entrepreneurship (for example through microfinancing), and extensive usage of IT, as alternatives to foreign aid.

"When the financial crisis of 2008 exposed, in all its depressing detail, the utter falseness of the free market doctrine, no one could be blamed for expecting some measure of reform to follow. So extensive was the damage done, and so extravagant the fraud and the greed that drove it, that the public demand for reform and retribution rose to a pitch not heard in generations. It seemed a moment of reckoning had arrived. Heads would surely roll. Yet neither oversight nor accountability ensued for those responsible for driving the global economy into a crisis from which it may never recover. If anything, the concentration of power and the influence of capital over public policy have grown.