Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

From my Kiva.org profile:

People everywhere need resources to do things for others, which is the only reason any of us should 'get paid'. Unfortunately many very wealthy people accumulate vast resources not doing much or anything for others. Until this changes so that everyone has a fair share of our world's natural, technological, and human resources, the economy and everything that depends on it is going to be pretty rotten. Kiva provides a smart way to do something, directly and immediately, about unequal resources stunting human and societal development.

Note that I didn't use the term money.

Money, currency, a means of exchange, is I think useful and necessary to an economic system achieving the goal of meeting people's needs and dreams.

But it is not the fundamental issue.

Nor is it merely access. The free market fundamentalists (who fail to note the lack of anything much like a free market for most stuff*) would claim that access to all the resources anyone needs exists because of fluidity in credit markets. Because when you are two years old, you should secure a loan to finance your education. And a landless farm worker can get a reasonable rate of interest on a mortgage for office and supplies for the online services company he wants to start :-P

So (note to self) equality helps doubly. Not only will you be more likely to have the resources to start your own productive enterprise, but interest rates will be driven way down, making this alleged panacea of credit liquidity at least credible.

* I cannot for the life of me find the reference, but I think it was Seth Godin, apparently in an unguarded interview and not on his blog, heh (that audio/video piece?), who said that we haven't had anything like a true free market for the vast majority of products and services for a long time. The securities market (stocks, bonds, etc) come closest – otherwise stocks would be sold not at a price everyone knows and is updated based on supply and demand, but by promising you that owning this stock would make you feel young and sexy.

"free market" if securities exchange
seth godin if free market stocks 19th century
"free markets" seth godin stocks
if were "free market" seth godin exchange marketing
if were "free market" seth godin bonds marketing
"free market" in the 1800s stocks would be sold with
buy this stock it will
sell it will seth godin "free market"
would sell bonds with if "free market" long time
would sell bonds with if "free market" "for a long time"
would sell stocks "the way we" with if "free market" long time
would sell "the way we" with if "free market" seth godin

Could not find it. Here's another post though:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/02/food-fun.html
"Marketing, when it works, transcends any discussion of the benefits of the product or the service."

Which helps me put into words what has long been my gut feeling of how economies should work. I want to create things that destroy marketing.

In a lot of ways I am the free market fundamentalist. I want everything to be commoditizable. I want to eliminate barriers to entry wherever possible.

And my thesis is that an oligopoly of capital has the same effect on the overall economy as a monopoly in any industry has.