The decoupled standpoint of the monetised market, in contrast, does not recognise life need. It only finds value in proportion to money-demand equivalence, which is consistent with the world being awash with money demand�as now�and yet quality of life degrading for most people and the planetary environment coming apart at the seams. Such a concept of �the economy� is culturally insane. History is sewn with these commanding idolatries, but philosophers have not often seen past them. Intellectual worship of lifeless Forms (Plato), universalisation of state right and law (Kant and Hegel), human productive force development (Marx), and, most of all, aggregates of market money-demand for more commodities (market philosophy), have become deadly false absolutes.

A universal money medium may have important value in enabling life�s more comprehensive horizons of being, but never more than as a subordinate ally. From the life-ground standpoint, conferral of absolute value on such a standard of worth is the profoundest philosophical confusion possible. It turns what properly serves life into a master of it. Once life is reduced to an instrumental value of �the economy��read the monetised economy�life at every level is continuously sacrificed on its altar. The demonstration of this is all around us, as we see today at almost every level of civil and ecological life across the world. We are now deep in a sacrificial spasm of late planetary capitalism. The world can no longer afford it.

There is another way, the true economy of producing and distributing needed goods in short supply. This is the opposite of marketing ever more unneeded commodities for extremes of glut and want - a mad absolutism which is more totalised in rule than any previous idol of the tribe. The �economy� which is now assumed is, in fact, a dis-economy.

Selection for life-value by an economic system, rather than selection against it as an �externality�, is the commitment of a sane economic standpoint. Its guiding principle stands against the pervasive disaggregation of ecosystems for selective use of dead parts for profitable waste. It stands against the world of life itself being overrun by the false idol of monetised growth. Only understanding of the economy - the ekos, the world�s home - by life-ground principles can lead the paradigm revolution the world cries out for.

John McMurtry

1 In the land of the Third Way, for example, a recent survey by Entec found that 45% of directors and chief executives of major businesses across the U.K. had never heard of �sustainable development� (Notes, The Ecologist, March 2001, p. 11).

2 I use the better-known title, the Brundtland Report, referring to the U.N. study, Our Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

3 See, for example, ibid pp. 39-41, 276.

4 E.O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 1.

�from Economic Reform, May 2001

The Super-Meltdown of the New Economy

William Krehm

A year and a half ago The Wall Street Journal (1 / 11 /99) wrestled to appraise the prophetic powers of Alan Greenspan on the future of the stock market boom: �For three years now Greenspan has morphed back and forth between the New Economy�s most powerful advocate and its most menacing skeptic .... Yet what�s lost amid his musings about `Dutch tulip bulbs,� �Russian equities,� and `inflationary imbalances� is the fact that he has, if anything, become an even stronger public advocate of the view that the US economy has been transformed for the better. It is worth taking a second look at his mid-October speech on financial risk�[in which] Mr. Greenspan discussed the �equityrisk premium,� the discount buyers demand for the uncertainty clouding the ultimate value of their purchase. It touched 12% in 1980 and is currently a fraction of one percent. Greenspan�s theory: New technology has made the management of business more stable and predictable, from shortening production lead times to lessening the need for inventory build-ups. Greater certainty means less risk. That in turn may well have `permanently raised the prices of collateral that underlies all financial assets.��

The more recent values placed on the inventory of bankrupt high-tech firms suggests that Mr. Greenspan would have been wiser sticking to Dutch tulip bulbs and Russian equities.

WSJ (11/05/01, �Telecom Debt Debacle Could Lead to Losses of Historic Proportions� by Gregory Zuckerman and Deborah Solomon) unfolds a blood-chilling tale.