Here’s one of billions of examples that could be shared:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/06/hm-wal-mart-destroy-unsol_n_413234.html

Just completely deregulating the market will not achieve nirvana – not at all.

We need to stop this swinging between left and right, and recognise that without a resurgence in attitudes that place social values as paramount, we will continue the slippery slide into economic and environmental hell.

http://talks.referata.com/wiki/The_Money_Fix

The failure always was and is Government – not the market.

I appreciate your detailed responses here. I will try to read some more of your background writings if I get time.

It seems we probably disagree less than I first estimated. Yes, there is plenty of room for ethical/cultural improvement in our society. I think permaculture is one big part of that puzzle, especially insofar as it encourages us to hop of the consumer/taxpayer treadmill long enough to ask what we really want out of life. I see political freedom, by which I mean anarcho-capitalism of the Murray Rothbard sort, as necessary to allow us all to experiment with different life paths, share information, and find the ones that work best.

The mind boggles at how creative solutions to our problems could flourish if only the government didn’t meddle with or dicate virtually every aspect of our lives. For a tiny example: how many more fruit trees and windbreaks could I have planted this year if 30%-50% of my money hadn’t been stolen as taxes at all levels?

Free people from the choking yoke of empire, warfare, welfare, and bureaucrats and I have confidence that planty of us will make good decisions not based on blind “greed.”

Sigh.

Sometimes I allow myself to write freely, without having to qualify every single *%+#$! word, as otherwise it makes for extremely boring writing. If I apply checks and balances to every single statement, the regular readers who actually know what I’m trying to say, because they’ve heard me write about the unfree ‘free’ market many times before, would get tired of reading. I’m not writing a legal document here, and I am not a rapporteur.

I called it ‘free market capitalism’, not because it is actually ‘free’, but because that is the name it is known by. I normally put the word ‘free’ in this context in inverted commas for this reason. Please forgive this glaring omission….

You can call our system a lot of things: corporatism, fascism, corporate feudalism. But free market it is must assuredly not.

I agree fully that we can/should have a better system. Indeed, that’s what permaculture is all about – the intelligent design of systems for sustainable human habitat. This is why I’ve gone to great lengths in search of possible alternatives. Many permaculturists fail to bring politics and economics into their design thoughts, and so collectively our efforts don’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Without a systemic transformation of social structures, things will get so ugly that you’ll never have enough pumpkins and potatoes to survive through what lies ahead, no matter how well designed your back yard is.

My point is that even with the best design of ‘invisible structures’ (economics, politics, educational and other social institutions), they will fail if the people within them fail to work together, ethically and compassionately for the common good.

In regards to fiat money. As you’ll see from the two links in the ‘Further viewing’ section at the end of the above post, I’ve been trying to tell people the same story as yourself. Just we need to be conscious that a gold-backed money system is not a magic cure for problems that have root causes that run far deeper.

You say “In the economic world, greed is always there.” While this is true, in our world we’ve come to find this is acceptable. To accept this is to say that we are, one way or another, sooner or later, doomed to fail as a race. And we do accept it. We try to ‘manage’ it, greed, dealing with its symptoms, and even capitalising on it, rather than endeavouring to root it out through holistic, ethical education and the resulting revival of family and community values that could come from this.

It may sound wholly idealistic, but as we’re at a juncture in human history that is without precedent, and as the world is looking around seeking solutions, I think we need to aim as close as possible to the real target, as hitting anything but smack dab centre – the bullseye – ultimately only delays social and environmental meltdown, rather than avoiding it entirely and permanently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wKNc6pIWhc

When someone falls from the platform, we should look at the system and find the hole. We know that gravity (greed) is always there. Barring a suicidal worker, there must be a defect on the system.

In the economic world, greed is always there. The question is, what is it in the system that allows greed to run rampant? When you trace this, you will find that the culprit is the fiat money.

Fiat money is money that has no linkage to any physical good. The value is simply based on the declaration by government that it will be used for payments (legal tender). But there are no real goods backing the money value. The amount of money can be increased and decreased anytime. Most of the time the tendency is of course to increase the amount of money in circulation. This will lead to a decrease in the value of money, which means prices go up (inflation).

When the public loses trust in the money, a hyper inflation follows, and eventually the money system collapses. Like what happened in Zimbabwe recently. The only way to stop a runaway inflation is to relink money to a hard standard like gold. It can not be increased easily.

For anyone interested in the subject, I would recommend the book “What Has Government Done to Our Money” but Murray N. Rothbard, available online:
http://mises.org/money.asp
or as pdf version:
http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf