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107636973193858106

February 9, 2004 By Chris Uncategorized

Saskatchewan was fantastic, and I’ll write more about it soon. In addition to working with some amazing First Nations and Metis youth in Prince Albert and Saskatoon, I had a nice dinner with fellow blogger and Hockey Pundit Jordon Cooper, chatting over the NHL, Christianity and politics.

The moment I got home though, and started catching up on my reading, I got gobsmacked by Michael Herman who has just posted something on markets that resonates:

…since we know that profit, per se, is not essential to life, we can say this another way. we can say that if markets and their movements are consistent with the flow of life, and ‘profit’ in itself is not essential to life, then there must be other reasons for our being in markets. life reasons. we can’t get past the ‘profit’ unless we get underneath it to those needs whose satisfaction *is* essential to life. food, shelter, hope, future, direction, support. and if we can see and satisfy those life reasons for entering markets, real needs for living, then i think the interim ‘need’ for profit begins to dissolve.

also worth noting, markets are not only based on private ownership… they are also based on public space. no space, no market. without a commons, then we can only have me crossing over to your territory to deal. or you crossing to mine. if there is no other trading space, there may be the sense that there are no other traders, and no alternative to the prices that we quote to each other.

without some other trading space, real physical trading space or at least mindspace wherein other trading/pricing alternative choices can be plausibly imagined and analyzed, then there may be not movement between us… there is always the chance of deadlock or dominance. have you ever been in a marketplace where the seller tried to convince you that his/her product was the only option, tried to keep you from considering others? i think we naturally recoil from those who would limit our access to the rest of the ‘market’ that we know is out there.

we need big markets, open spaces, and commons because they provide the mental juice that lubricates our individual dealings, they mediate life in the same way parks and streets and meeting halls mediate our living together in physical spaces.

Reading this immediately brought to mind a quote from (who else?) Vaclav Havel, out of a short essay he published in the most recent issue of The Walrus. The essay is called “The Culture of Enterprise” and it aligns nicely with Michael’s writing and something I posted a few weeks ago on the nature of my business activities:

…it’s worth stressing that entrepreneurship is above all about the creation of values, not about the accumulation of wealth. Of course material gain – profit – is the force that drives the market economy, but it should be understood to a far greater extent as an essential instrument of human creativity, not as an end in itself. By far the best way for an entrepreneur to support culture is by shaping the culture of his or her own enterprise, its quality and its significance. The human and social measures of success, common sense, humility before the mysteries of nature and the world, consideration for future generations, a well-developed conscience – all of these things have to enter into the creation of the culture of entrepreneurship.

Amen to that.

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