It feels like a summer Monday night. I keep exploring off in different directions looking for the compelling good idea for the day but can’t seem to settle into any single area. I wanted to find an online version of “Sustainable Times”, a pulp newsprint ad-rag I found on the east side over the weekend, but there is nothing in the digital realm. I was ready to dissect the article urging us to buy second hand clothes since the “U.S. ships tons of clothing overseas where it can disrupt local markets”. I wonder if she means the local overseas markets that make all the clothes worn in the U.S. in the first place.
The same paper has a long article about Socially Responsible Investing which begs the question can an anti-corporate socialist invest in the stock market and still be a socialist? The more I work through the thought process of the left, the more it seems they have real issues with the concepts of wealth and money. In general wealth is bad if it belongs to the wealthy and good if it belongs to non-profits or the government. It’s as if large sums of money cease to be wealth outside of a corporate structure. I do like this post over at Coyote Blog which concludes:
“And that is the heart of socialism's failure. For the true source of wealth is not brute labor, or even what you might call brute capital, but the mind. The mind creates new technologies, new products, new business models, new productivity enhancements, in short, everything that creates wealth. Labor or capital without a mind behind it is useless.”
