Believe it or not, the solution is to raise prices and awareness of our effect on the future. The problem is that people have become disinformed Consumers knowing the (deceptive) prices of everything and the value of nothing, not human beings integral to their own worth. All have become pawns in a game where isolated consumers (individuals) are fooled with myths of freedom that they can ‘buy’ if only they go into debt, happiness they can ‘buy’ if only working another shift, and that they have no value to anyone if they don’t fanatically compete for a place on top of the pile of dead bodies, available only on weekends or retirement or in Heaven for a tithe.

We can have a better system. We just have to realize that it has to be OUR system, not our master. It should be paying us, not the other way around.

The opposite of unfettered capitalism is not socialism. It’s sales taxes. Double it and add a bigger prebate. People need to know what everything actually costs, and be supported for being self-useful, rather than for being exploited to no useful end. The collective work of the human race should be to improve the places we live, not to mine and cut and pollute them for shiny noisy crap (and cars).

Stop taxing usefulness (income and hard work) and start taxing consumption. Stop rewarding marketers and lobbyists for brainwashing people (the income tax code and its toadies in Washington). The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the poor are working for them and buying their stuff, not working for themselves and making their own better place in the world, for the world their children will need. We have to stop stealing the world’s (and the people’s) resources and sending that wealth off to some magical Invisible Hand Job to be chewed up and spit back at us with plastic wrapping.