The recent unpleasantness in matters economic have led me to study finance, economics and capitalism a little bit. While it would be easy to start developing a response to the mythos of capitalism as criticism, it occurs to me that he Permaculture way is positive. Okay, we know what we don’t want- it’s everywhere. But what do we want? Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” to post-Hayek apologistics is clearly a statement out of another time and place. There must be alternatives to the monopoly of neo-liberalism and it is up to us to create them.

So here’s  a stab at some ideas I’d like to propose instead. Look for further elaboration in posts to come.

1. Small is beautiful
2. Absentee ownership needs constraints
3. Legal and political jurisdictions should be based on watersheds
4. Capital accumulation is a resource like any other and therefore a pollutant in high concentrations (Orlov)
5. All economic activity has its basis in nature
6. Economics as a servant of society and community
7. Fractional reserve banking means capital is the least of the factors of production
8. Externalization of costs should be strictly curtailed by counting them as liabilities
9. Tax extraction, waste and pollution rather than production or consumption
10. Concepts of private property need drastic revision
11. Import replacement and its barriers
12. Return of surplus to Earth and people- surplus, yield, accursed share and profit
13. Human and natural capital as assets rather than expenses
14. Resource-use matrix for costing and taxation
15. why scale matters; human interaction defines scale boundaries
16. development of sustainable economics institutions
17. Design (planning) vs. Freedom
18. Permaculture as a general theory