Monday 20 February 2012

Memo to Al Gore

There is a lot of sense in proposals that seek to encourage long term investment and share ownership, as in your latest crusade: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/02/sustainable-capitalism?fsrc=scn%2Ftw%2Fte%2Fbl%2Fbloodgoreandcapitalism This is a potentially useful tool in moderating the worst excesses of capitalism, but I sense that it will be of only temporary use. That is for two reasons. Firstly, capitalism has a history of reinventing itself. It can move jurisdiction if need me to avoid rules that it does not like and it can punish those that try to do the right thing by taking its capital elsewhere.

For these reasons we would need to exercise great caution in trying to introduce any type of ownership control. In the Unofficial Big Society Green Paper (www.bigsocietygreenpaper.org) it is suggested that what is needed is not control to slow capitalism but social and community competition to make it try harder, and to give it an imperative to willingly submit to rules such as those in your manifesto. I think we agree on many things but essentially our approaches are very different. I have no confidence that capitalism can be controlled by law or re-trained by coercion. My instinct is that the only thing that will change it is a pure commercial imperative. Do this to compete or lose the battle is the thrust of my approach. It is a 'ground up' system which restores flows of capital across society and deliberately leaves capitalism to work out its response, rather than any type of legislative attack on the capitalist system.

This I think has a much better chance of success and a much greater potential to establish a truly sustainable economy, which is fair to all participants.

No comments:

Post a Comment