On Fri, 27 Jun 1997, William Meecham wrote:

> > At the same time, the main weakness of capitalism--its obliviousness
> > towards transcendent human needs--has yet to really reach crisis. Right
> > now it's operating on borrowed time, as it gobbles up new sources of
> > cheap labor and as-yet-untapped, non-renewable resources. Once those
> > luxuries are gone, one of two things happens: either we start exploiting
> > outer space (and hope we find some unskilled aliens willing to make
> > Nike's in return for a McDonald's franchise on Alpha Centauri), or the
> > residents of planet Earth assert control of the monster that threatens to
> > devour them. But doing so will have to exploit what I hope will be a
> > fully developed, anarchic, cybernetic system that somehow avoids the
> > Scylla of top-down state planning and the Charybidis of blind market
> > signals in making investment decisions. What shape that society will take
> > is beyond my event horizon, however.

Tresy,

Have you read a book called _Designing Freedom_ by Stafford Beer
(c. 1974 House of Anansi Press Limited) ?

I think you'll find it very appealing since it is a cybernetic approach
to the problems of governance and the economy. Here are the chapters

1) The Real Threat To " All We Hold Most Dear"

2) The Disregarded Tools of Modern Man

3) A Liberty Machine Prototype

4) Science in the Service of Man

5) The Future That Can Be Demanded Now

6) The Free Man in a Cybernetic World

And a quote...

"... The societary maps we need are in my view the cybernetic maps that I
have tried to set forth. And so you see why I have called this series
Designing Freedom. The contradiction built into this title is the figure
of speech called oxymoron. The freedom we embrace must yet be "in
control". That means that people must ENDORSE the regulatory model at the
heart of the viable system in which they partake, at every level of
recursion." p. 88

For what its worth, I also believe money is best understood as a system
that can be designed to produce certain desirable output but also run on
its own like any other system once implemented.


Harry Veeder