We very badly need a messaging strategy that calls the people profiting off these unpaid externalities what they are… which is freeloaders. If your business depends on there being desperately poor people you can pay less than the cost of living a normal life (whatever that happens to be that day) you don’t have a business you have an angle you’re shooting. If your business is extracting oil and you’re selling vastly more of it than people would buy if they had to pay the downstream cost you don’t have a business you have an angle you’re shooting. And so on it goes for a large number of things.
Externalities should be paid for full stop. There will always be externalities, but the only way I can think of to actually minimize them is to make the cost of them be paid by the people producing them full stop. People can call that whatever they want.
I generally think that using old ideological terms is a mistake. The words anarchist, communist, capitalist, etc are all from the 19th century and have tons and tons of baggage. Better to leave them in the past and get the population a fresh palate. It also lets you define your own terms instead of letting those terms define you. For instance a lot of people on this board seem to think that they’re allowed to redefine the meanings of the words capitalism and anarchism to mean whatever the fuck they want them to mean. Those words have specific meanings and historical context and you can’t change it. Make up new words IMO.
It also makes the other guys start from square 1 again on attacking you which has a lot of value when you’re an anarchist or a communist LDO.
Fair market does have a nice ring to it… but that’s probably because we’re left of center. These are the kinds of things that the PR/marketing people really are good at. I suck at naming things.
There isn’t much of a mechanism. A market socialism-anarchism might be less consumerist. Probably would. That would help. Hopefully it would foster greater responsibility and less exploitation of the developing world and lead to less destruction and a quicker transition to cleaner energy. That part is where internationalism, as opposed to corporate globalism, comes into play. It shouldn’t hurt that decision makers would be responsible for what harm they cause and not just have a fiduciary duty to stockholders.
Seems like capitalism is burning out anyway. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. More and more ridiculous percentages of the “money” is circulating in ridiculous speculation because? No return in production? All the people with enough money have too much stuff? People with no money are of no use? Like all the surplus value created in the world is being siphoned off and wasted. /rambling uncertain conjecture.
But, anyway, no, not much hope of ever dealing with pollution/externalities very well.
I think that there’s some truth to this, but part of the dynamic is that we also just take for granted a lot of the “boring” capitalism that just happens in the background while we’re all distracted by the bright shiny objects of stuff like the stock market, billionaire injustices, etc. A lot of the (literal and figurative) nuts and bolts stuff that makes our society functional is completely dependent on reasonably efficiently run production and distribution chains embedded in a global broadly capitalist system. It may be substantially exploitative but it’s not really burning out. What’s burning out IMO is the marginal value of more capitalistic growth. This is probably an oversimplification, but it feels like at some point in the 20th century there was an inflection point crossed where the capitalist society stopped producing stuff that people naturally need (food, shelter, etc.) and ramped up the production of luxury goods supported by manufactured demand through increasingly power psychological marketing campaigns. In a certain sense, modern capitalism may be “too much of a good thing” rather than an inherently bad thing.
Yeah. All the return is in speculation in stocks or real estate. All the money printing (even negative interest rates in some countries at times) and there’s still like 0.1% return on putting money in the bank and it being used for commercial lending. We’d probably be in a huge deflationary spiral if money weren’t so loose for so long.