“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Milton Keynes

So across the world the banks are being part nationalized this week. Gordon Brown of the UK led the charge.

One difference between this moment and the Depression is, we have the internet to make us see how things connect globally.

I never thought I'd live to see the day, honestly, when Milton Friedman's theologians ran the economy so hot that it ran off the road and had to be saved by John Maynard Keynes!

William Blake said it best: “If the fool were to persist in his folly, he would become wise.”

And all this just in time for massive government intervention to avert global warming.

Hooray!

1 comment:

Laura said...

Although things are different between now and the Depression because of the internet there are similarities. During the Depression farmers were faced with the consequences of poor soil management , wasteful water usage, and erosion(in some areas of the United States we lost almost all our top soil in less than a hundred years). All one need to do to see the effects of these very same approaches on the crop returns in the global south to see how we are headed in just the same direction on a bigger scale. How many famines need to happen before we prioritize long term land use over short term profit based on oil fertilizers? In the long run, the economy will recover if we protect the very productivity of the earth.