i was thinking today about economics in general. If you think about economics, you understand that there is regardless of any economic system an implicit base assumption that people are to work. There is in fact no question whatsoever as to why people should work, what is the direction of their work, or anything as such. There is just this concern that people should work, meaning expend time producing some sort of product or service that others will trade for this artificial donation of value called money, because each party is better off.

We have really only two systems and a number of ways of managing the systems. Communism says that the whole game should be centrally planned. That there should be masters who should decide what should be produced and how much and the people will work somewhat and then enjoy the fruits of their labors. The communist system completely leaves out the will to power, or keeping up with the Joneses. Market capitalism in the American sense takes the position that it's too difficult, time consuming, and unpredictable to control what should be produced, so instead it opts to control the money itself which is the driving force behind the economy. But adjusting interest rates and perhaps the media it can control how much people consume, not what. In the capital system adjustments may be made to keep the system running, but it's up to people and marketing to decide the winners.

I personally think that the centrally planned economic system in a time of cheap computing power is not only possible, but rather easy. If we can crunch chess moves to beat humans, we can crunch decision making to resolve production problems for at least commodity items necessary for survival. I also don't think that the Soviets actually played the game fairly and that their resources to play the game were severely limited. I think centrally planned economies could be as functional as free market economies if managed properly both administratively, psychologically and socially which is possible through media and perhaps AI overseers.

The reason I think that economic activity needs to be curtailed is because I don't think that we can play this game for an unlimited amount of time. I think eventually it does catch up with us in terms of economic externalities and resource depletion. Even if we try to deal with the problems as they arise, it's not a proactive system it's a reactive system. We just screw the planet to the extent that it becomes a problem and then we deal with it. The oceans currently are almost empty, the rain forest won't exist much longer, and global warming and cause an environmental catastrophe -- yet no one seems all that worried. That to me is neither responsible nor sustainable. So I do think at some point we will return to central planning and limited economic activity. The problem is what will people do with the remaining free time that they have.

I think getting to know each other better, be more social, physically and psychologically active might be a good start. Helping other human beings reach their full potential, not suffer unnecessarily might also be helpful.

By the way we don't have a free market economy in the world:

Sept 19th daily show:

Jon Stewart: Many people are free-market capitalists, and they always talk about free-market capitalism, and that is our economic theory. So why do we have a Fed? Is the free market – wouldn’t the market take care of interest rates and all that? Why do we have someone adjusting the rates if we are a free-market society?

Alan Greenspan: You’re raising a very fundamental question. … You didn’t need central bank when we were on the gold standard, which was back in the nineteenth century. And all of the automatic things occurred because people would buy and sell gold, and the market would do what the Fed does now. But: most everybody in the world by the 1930s decided that the gold standard was strangling the economy. And universally this gold standard was abandoned. But: you need somebody to determine –or some mechanism – how much money is out there, because remember, the amount of money relates to the amount of inflation in the economy. … In any event the more money you have, relative to the amount of goods, the more inflation you have, and that’s not good. So:

Stewart: So we’re not a free market then.

Greenspan: No. No.

Stewart: There’s a visible – there’s a benevolent hand that touches us.

Greenspan: Absolutely. You’re quite correct. To the extent that there is a central bank governing the amount of money in the system, that is not a free market. Most people call it regulation.