Product Description

Terrorism - Environmental Policy - Political Freedom & Security - Political Science-History & Theory - Radical Thought - Public Policy Permanent global peace and sustainable development. Eliminating monopolies we are told are not there. Creating a modern commons. Increasing economic efficiency equal to the invention of money, the printing press, and electricity. The efficiency increase measures the previously wasted labor, capital, and resources. Each person works 2-3 days per week without loss of food, fiber, shelter, or recreation Under full and equal rights, poverty can be eliminated in 10 years. Under full and equal rights, within 50 years each citizen of the world can have a quality life. Plunder by trade and Capital destroying capital eliminated through superefficient capitalism. Empowering the powerless. The evolution from plunder by raids to plunder by trade began 800 to 1,000 years ago in the Free Cities of Europe. As those cities evolved into nations and those nations into empires, plunder by trade was plunder by both raids and trade was practiced. Plunder by trade has been the dominant feature of world trade since WWII. But the developing world is now aware and that structure of world trade may soon be history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1356943 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

About the Author
J.W. Smith, with a PhD in Environmental Economics from Union Institute and University, Cleveland, Ohio has written six books on the elimination of poverty and war. He has been invited, and has presented, his concepts in 10 countries. commongoodbank.com is establishing a local currency banking system based on his insights on banking with the intended goal of providing banking services at 1/3 the cost of monopolized banking. Through a professors lecture, his concepts showed up in Indonesia's major newspaper and they are being studied at that university. He has had many such compliments from all over the world.

Customer Reviews

Explains what we don't know
I rate this book as amongst the most influential in my life. The author spends the first half of the book explaining why even though things may look much more advanced and different now than 2000 years ago, the same underlying forces are at play. The powerful are in control and we live under a system of mercantilism and not anything resembling the free trade we are taught at school.

I have read widely and believe that the solutions proposed by Dr Smith in the second half of this book focus too narrowly on the economic aspects of peoples lives and tend to be very prescriptive such as specific taxation reforms. I prefer the writings of Noam Chomsky who is less proscriptive but generally has more the right idea - that as human beings our main goal should be to let everyone live in freedom and peace where everyone is able to be himself. People just want to be free to control their own destiny and economics is only one part of this solution.

Despite not agreeing with all the solutions posed by Dr Smith I still fully rate this book because it is the first half that will blow your socks off. You do not have to agree with the second half and can pick and choose which reforms should be implemented as I did. This book changed my thinking forever and I now realise and understand the real forces at play when I see news items and read books.

A mind-altering experience
Essentially this book is an extremely in-depth deconstruction of neo-liberal economics/politics. I had long thought myself almost unique (outside Academia) in the depth and breadth of my reading, but after having read this book, I realized that I understood very little about what was really going on. It was a humbling experience, to say the least. But it was also liberating, in that for the first time in my life, the opaque inconsistencies between what I had been taught in university and the realities I saw happening in the news became transparent. The author additionally offers many progressive ideas for a more just, efficient and ultimately sustainable economic system, which in my experience is very rare indeed. If you are looking for something more substantial than Michael Moore's often inarticulate rants - albeit less entertaining - than this is the book for you. BE WARNED: once you read this book, nothing will ever seem quite the same.

Getting on the right path to world peace and prosperity
I was first impressed by JW Smith's book, The World's Wasted Wealth 2, filled as it is with ideas about how to reduce waste. His Economic Democracy book exposes the roots of world poverty and identifies how all people everywhere can become truly wealthy while respecting and conserving the world's ecology. I use several chapters in the undergraduate sociology course I teach called, Cooperation and Conflict. Every chapter is packed with information that we all need to know in order to participate responsibly in redirecting government policies.