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One major reform will be land use whose owners resists change while they are buying more land world wide, betting on the rise of food prices. Private property in land used to exist along with public spaces such as national parks, local civic centers, sidewalks, and country roads used to lead past fields. No one complained if you walked or picnicked. The cost now of entering a “public” park is a real limitation to the life possibilities of ordinary people. Same with the art museums that in my youth were free and now maybe $25. In Catholic countries the poorest person had the right to enter the cathedrals and experience the high end of the art, sculpture, music and architecture of civilization. Today, in most places, no such access exists.
Rethinking land use is in our future and we should see it as an opportunity. Land use is one of the key issues for the future, driven by new population, climate breakdown, and changing sources of energy trending toward local energy production – which requires land for solar (good) or biofuels (bad). The Democratic and Republican leadership never mention this issue. Even “housing” goes unmentioned in discussions of climate. The hope of those well adapted to the present is that technical and regulatory solutions will emerge – and we will not have to do anything. But the reality is that increased population and climate breakdown will force the need for stronger and uncomfortable action. We face solutions that are likely to feel more like Shumpater’s “creative destruction” than happy expansion into the green economy. The participants are not looking for repetition but for the new innovation that tears apart the old. Creative destruction is what capitalism, despite the mainstream economists, does.
At the simplest, simply turning downward the rising curves of inequality (taxes) and environmental degradation (strong regulations) would be sufficient for a vast increase in hope, but still leave lots of disruption to cope with. Such a hope creating reform may be necessasy to create the morale to take on fossil fuels.
The merry-go-round economy,
working for those who are on it,
but marginalizes those who are on the side lines, .