Tom posted a link over in Flame to this CNN opinion piece by Douglas Rushkoff. It (Tom’s choice of venue) struck me as a somewhat underhanded tactic to preclude serious discussion of the essay, and it didn’t work very well–ER and Eri started discussing it seriously.

I want to comment on it, but Flame is inappropriate. I think it’s important because Rushkoff isn’t original, and in one form or another the debate about the insane mismatch between a jobs-oriented economy and an obsession with technology that eliminates jobs has been around much longer than I have. But I will give Rushkoff credit for writing a particularly clear and accessible explanation of the problem.

Which is, basically, that our present predicament isn’t that we’re any poorer than we used to be, but that the mechanism for distributing the abundance has seized up.

We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings Video to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

When you get right down to it, an economic system that fails not to produce but to distribute is serving us poorly. We’ve got the production part down pat, but it seems our ideological blinders cause us to suck at the distribution part.

I can see how the economic equivalent of “The Emperor has no clothes!” would threaten a Conservative like Tom, but instead of flaming the piece,Tom, I really want you to explain where Rushkoff got it wrong. Did I miss al Qaeda blowing up half the factories in America? Did American farmers forget how to grow their crops? Or is there some good explanation why productive capacity and wealth and empty homes are piling up to one side, while millions of Americans are begging for subsistence?

Please convince me that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds under capitalism.