Just so that we don't get bogged down right at the start in false dichotomies, let's remember that there is probably no economy on earth that is socialist, "in the full sense". Yet, among the most prosperous and harmonious countries in the world, we find a variety of mixed economy models incorporating elements of social democracy and democratic socialism.

All of these systems embrace and make use of private markets and private ownership in various ways. They also use the rule of law to regulate the behavior of people and firms interacting in the markets; and in some industries the whole body of the people, represented by their government, is a major participant in the market as either a seller or buyer. The choices made reflect the priorities people assign to the promotion of social values that are important to them. Even the US has an economy of this kind, although it is currently at the far liberal end of the spectrum.

Each of these models partakes of a unique set of institutional and legal arrangements, and each has its own triumphs and pitfalls, but there are many models for American progressives to prospect for useful ideas, and to copy. Americans are also in a position to contribute some elements of their own, based on some neglected, but traditional American ideals of community and democratic sociality, ideals which have been steadily eroded by the rapacious and disintegrating individualism of radical American capitalism.

The other developed countries in the world have seemed capable of managing something close to a rational debate between liberalism and socialism, the two main post-enlightenment movements in political thought, and have incorporated insights from both. The American economic system has generally been marked - except for the period of our prosperous post-Great Depression and postwar heyday - by a fanatical aversion to the vigorous rule of law in the economic sphere, and resentment of the intrusion of community and social values into the marketplace.

But now the US economy - excuse the vulgarity - has just taken a giant shit on the world economy, and has proved its systemic failures is a very public fashion. It is time for the US to bring its own economic practices more into line with civilized standards. This is a particularly urgent and opportune time for a deep reappraisal, because the whole world is engaged in a discussion and reevaluation right now of the common rules that should govern our unprecedented material interdependence, and the cooperative tools we need to address new challenges - particularly environmental challenges.

Other countries have copied useful ideas from the American example and experience. But long before the current hideous collapse of the American Ponzi-economy, civilized people had already refused to embrace fully the American model, which tolerates outrageous levels of inequality, and promotes extreme forms of antisocial individualism, aggression and violence. Americans should no longer embrace this model either.

American history is dotted with many traditional examples of communities built on strong moral and institutional foundations exemplifying democratic ideals of community, equality and mutual obligation. But our tradition also contains contradictory and discordant elements, and the genuinely democratic moral foundation has been ripped apart by laissez faire creative destruction, which transforms each thing of value into a commodity; each human individual into an economic free agent unto himself, in competition with every other human being; every aspect of the natural world into an exploitable tool; and which progressively pollutes and degrades the unregulated human and natural environment with filth, destruction, noise, commercial harassment and ugliness.

I don't support purely socialist alternatives, Bernard. For one thing, I do not want to eliminate private property and replace it by public ownership of the means of production. But I do think we can do many things to redesign and better regulate the institutional and legal environment in which private businesses function, so that the outcomes that are produced promote democratic self-governance, peace, a beautiful and sustainable natural and human environment, and healthy human relationships, rather than working against these things as as our current system does.

We can require that governance of the workplace be more democratic. We can pass laws that promote social equality by placing stricter limits and requirements on the distribution of income as wages within firms, and the distribution of profits to investors. We can re-design our capital markets to make the flow of savings to ventures less capricious, Barnumesque and exploitative, and to incentivize investment and production that serves broad, socially supported goals, rather than merely capitalizing on ephemeral, self-destructive, resource-hogging and anti-social lusts.

There are many different choices we can make. But we do have a choice. What I don't accept is that we simply have to adapt ourselves to every kind of economic change that comes along. The economic system in the large and in its details exhibits general tendencies that are the products of human design and legislative choices of omission or commission, even if that design is very complex, and even if the design choices were thoughtlessly blundered into rather than being made with care and deliberation. We can thus design a different system, one in which the tradeoffs are made in different ways, and in which different kinds of values are promoted.

I think once we start growing comfortable with words like "resigning", we should realize something is wrong. The economic order we live in isn't primarily a natural phenomenon. It is in large measure the result of our choices. We might have to resign ourselves to sunspots and the tides. But we don't have to resign ourselves to American-style capitalism, and a culture based on the promotion of entrepreneurial free-agency as the ruling ideal.

One way to avoid giving rhetorical ammunition to the enemies of democratic community is to avoid referring to the people's government, the government by democratic citizens, as "the state". That is old European language that partakes of various kinds of superstition and elitism, both left and right, and that fails to make full contact with the most enlightened American ideals. According to the democratic ideal, government is not exercised by some impersonal or supra-personal entity - the state. Government is a community responsibility. Democratic citizens seek to form and sustain a national community which is self-governing. We the members of that community work with each other to govern ourselves. We deliberate, vote and settle on rules, and then we agree as a community to establish and enforce that rules. I govern my neighbor and he governs me, and the whole thing is bound together by a mutual commitment to live a common life and to submit to the legitimately arrived-at decisions of the community. An essential component of democratic self-governance is a deep commitment to equality. If there are radical differences in power, wealth and standing in a society, then in being subordinated to the community, we become subordinates as slaves to masters. That is not democracy, but tyranny. Democratic citizens must be equals: We are equal under the law; equal in our responsibility to make law; equal in our commitment to seeing that the law is executed. Governing a community is hard work, and democrats commit to sharing equally in that work, and to the equitable distribution of the benefits of that work.

But I do think we can do many things to redesign and better regulate the institutional and legal environment in which private businesses function, so that the outcomes that are produced promote democratic self-governance, peace, a beautiful and sustainable natural and human environment, and healthy human relationships, rather than working against these things as as our current system does.

We can require that governance of the workplace be more democratic. We can pass laws that promote social equality by placing stricter limits and requirements on the distribution of income as wages within firms, and the distribution of profits to investors. We can re-design our capital markets to make the flow of savings to ventures less capricious, Barnumesque and exploitative, and that incentivize investment and production that serves broad, socially supported goals, rather than capitalizing on ephemeral, self-destructive and anti-social lusts.

There are many different choices we can make. But we do have a choice. What I don't accept is that we simply have to adapt ourselves to every kind of economic change that comes along. The economic system in the large and in its details has a basic shape and exhibits general tendencies that are the products of human design, even if that design is very complex, and even if the design choices were thoughtlessly blundered into rather than being made with care and deliberation. We can design a different system, one in which the tradeoffs are made in different ways, and different kinds of values are promoted.

I haven't read much Marx, so I wouldn't be able to comment on that part.

And he needs to start taking no prisoners in his war with Republicans whose goal is to deprive, starve and strangle Americans economically, and ride the carnage to electoral victory.

But I have more hope than that. In the end, the economy is something human beings have built. And if they raise their consciousness enough, and do a little more reflecting and a little less hustling after the main chance, then they can understand their collective handiwork, and can begin to work in effective solidarity with others to build a very different kind of economy: one that they control and that doesn't control them; one in which they live with neighbors and not just next to neighbors; and one that elevates humane and social values over the commercial, crudely hedonistic and avariciously individualistic values that dominate our sick present way of life.

And my hopes for educational reform are different as well. I would prefer we not focus so much on training the brains of the young for a life of individualistic entrepreneurship, or encourage them to adopt a self-image as economic "producers" in a world of competitive and destructive flux. That means training them to be servants of the commercial leviathan. I still have some hope that we can aspire to teach the young - all of the young - the history, dreams, profound reflections and spiritual legacy of their forbears, so that they will finally be able to discern how deeply unsatisfactory, socially failed and wretchedly pathological is the depressing and atomized world into which they have been born.

They need to learn to respect the humane voice inside them that is crying, "Something is really, really wrong here" instead of being told to learn how to deal with those feelings, get some poise, grab some antidepressants, pick up a brain-skill, and embrace the rolling stone flux of the system of Total Commerce in which we have enslaved them.

You're deceiving yourself if you think that training people to do more "creative" brain work is going to liberate them from the scourge of workplace mutilation. Work is always going to be repetitive and potentially tedious for the vast majority of people. Most work - whether done with hands or heads - will continue to sustain the routine humming along of established systems of production. Food has to be grown and shipped, houses have to be built, essential tools have to be manufactured, bills have to be paid, gas has to be pumped. That's life. Only a tiny sliver of humanity will have the opportunity to do deeply creative things in their workplaces. However, if we build a social life in which we work more efficiently, live more simply and provide more leisure, then our fellows may find that they can pursue rewarding and genuinely enriching and creative activities when they are not at work.

The most gloomy people I know work in IT departments. Head work, yes. The started out, no doubt, as clever and excited young people doing cool and fun brain stuff with computers, those intoxicating new technologies of their youth. But all that exciting and cool computer stuff has evolved for most of them into cubical-bound drudgery. They sit and get fat, and pore over code. And its always going to be that way for most of the knowledge workers. Yes, these workers will have to "bring their heads" to work. But not everything that rattles around inside human heads, even if it takes genuine smarts and cleverness, is uplifting or rewarding in other than financial ways. Straightening out a detabase is no more exciting or less mutilating than straightening out a warehouse or a storeroom.

So what can make work tolerable and even enjoyable? For most, its not an imaginary landscape of endless intellectual delights. It's other people. The days when I am interacting with lots of people; when we are joking and laughing, commiserating or just trading stories and news; when I feel like I really lightened someone's load, solved a daunting problem for them, or helped someone with their daily struggles, those are the good days. The days when I am trapped in my cube doing whatever with myself? Those are dispiriting and lonely days.

When I first got my present job, I had to travel a lot. I would travel to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and other great American cities, and a few times to Europe. My friends were envious, and there was some initial excitement. But it quickly wore off. What was the problem about all those places? None of my family and friends were there. I would go out to really good restaurants at night, but the food didn't taste as good because it wasn't shared with others. I would go to a museum, but there was nobody to converse with about how I felt about what I saw. I did love San Francisco, and rented a bike once and rode it up the coast highway and across the Golden Gate Bridge. It was amazing. But you know what I did when I got halfway across? I called my wife and son, so they could be there with me. And I wished they were there. I am not ashamed to say that I sometimes ended up sobbing in my bed from loneliness. I guess I lacked the poise demanded by my exciting world of gypsy flux and entrepreneurial dynamism.

My supposition is that if we want to prepare and educate the next generation of young people for a fulfilling life, then we need to think a lot more about how to help them build a world in which they are working shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart with others, and not just sending depersonalized commercial gibberish to each other over blackberries, and dancing the entrepreneurial hustle all over the country or the globe.

And what is "creative" anyway? I am often amazed by the creative talent that is on display in advertising. Some young lover of art studied design or art history, and is now making art themselves. You can just feel the bubbling creativity and imagination struggling to get out. Unfortunately, it is all scrambled up with inauthentic and ugly messages about how awesome is some new bar of soap, item of underwear, airline seating arrangement or gut-busting food. What a tragic waste of creative human endeavor. Talk about mutilation.

Our entire social and media atmosphere is like a mustache on a Rembrandt, with so many forced to prostitute their beautiful selves into something filthy, ugly and demeaned. So who is the more creative and beautiful human being? The educated knowledge worker making a clever but cheesy ad campaign for the latest entrepreneurial master of the universe? Or the skilled workman painting a straight, simple and elegant yellow line on the highway, and smoothing the asphalt with practiced and experienced care.

You say "We need the state to think of ways to help engender entrepreneurship and cosmopolitan values" in our young people. I would prefer that they focus a bit more more on instilling solidarity, comradeship, the capacity for love and friendship, the appreciation of genuine beauty, reverential awe for the parts of the natural world that we haven't destroyed yet, and community values. Some of us would still like to live in an actual society, even a tight-knit community of real friends, not just an entourage of transitory acquaintances, or an extended cosmopolitan "network" of individual producers and consumers. I want to be a person, not a freaking node. I don't want my son to be a node either, not even a well-paid and somewhat more brainy one.

You talk about exciting technological changes. Well, a lot of the technological changes taking place in the world I see around me are not that exciting at all. Most are a big ho-hum. If somebody invents a new gadget, it seems fun and liberating for about a week. I do think the internet itself has been a fantastic invention. But what are the other great changes? New weekly video games so I can eviscerate ogres and go to bed with Omnivia, Queen of the Boob Maidens, in virtual jerk-off land, maybe electronically groping some remote virtual partner? No thanks. I'm not 19 anymore. (Hey, isn't it great that the geniuses William Rowan Hamilton, Sophus Lie and their successors discovered the fantastic intellectual paradise of quaternions, Lie groups, spin rotations and vector spaces, so that I can now rotate my virtual arm in virtual space, and chop off some gang-banger's head with my virtual hunting knife!)

Is the exciting change to be found in new business tools that allow my boss to climb completely inside my head from 10,000 miles away and nag me to answer my email. Awesome! What an exciting new toy! What a brave new world!

Before we throw a fortune into educating people to live the life our economic masters have decided we are required to live, we could stop to ask ourselves how people really want to live, and then think about how we can build a world they want.

By the way, did you hear the story today about France Telecom? They were privatized ten years ago, moving to the wonderfully competitive and entrepreneurial American system, adapted to the creatively destructive world of flux that is America's gift to the world of social relations. In the past year and a half, there have been 24 suicides at the company:

Gauthier Rollin, 52, has been employed by the company for 20 years. He says the work environment has been unbearable since France Telecom was privatized a decade ago.

"France Telecom has spent its time breaking up teams and breaking down solidarity," Rollin says. "They cultivate individualism and selfishness. So the support you might have found amongst colleagues in difficult times is not there. France Telecom manages its employees like cattle."

A former state monopoly, France Telecom was privatized in 1998 and now competes on the world market. It has undergone several major reorganizations in recent years and cut 22,000 jobs in the past two years. But company officials say those were voluntary departures and that the firm is the only telecom giant not to have carried out mass layoffs.

How babyish those French are! Imagine, expecting a world containing some security, and without perpetual fear of unemployment. How romantic of them! Where is their poise?

http://www.rollcall.com/issues/55_33/news/39053-1.html?type=pf

Bingo. But the public option is the foot in the door. Once we have something in place, they we can begin working every year on expanding it and increasing its market heft and bargaining power.

The public needs some tool they can use to bargain with (blackmail?) our corrupt political system. It's an easy message: "No public option; then no mandate." I just don't see the other components of the package doing much to address the cost issues. So far, the whole package looks more like a boondoggle for the existing stakeholders than a serious effort at reform.

On the other hand, I do, like you, oppose the libertarian arguments against a mandate. Health care is an area, like education and infrastructure, in which every American needs to kick in and help shoulder the social load. I would prefer to socialize much of the whole system and do this through taxes. But since we can't do that, the next best thing is a mandate.

Politicians know that without the mandate, the new equity rules might very well have the effect of driving up costs on a whole bunch of middle class Americans who already have insurance. It will be a political disaster for them. But if they don't pass a serious reform package, that will also be a political disaster and there will be hell to pay. So it looks to me like we have them right where we want them. If they want us to support this package, mandate included, they need to show us they are dead serious about taking on the power and inefficient economic gluttony of the established health order.

If people are unwilling to work hard, then they aren't owed much. Even the communists said, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". They didn't say "from each according to his inclination, to each according to his wants."

But as I understand Avishai's world, each person should not just be responsible for working hard and pulling his weight. He has to be responsible for figuring out on his own the puzzle of how to live and thrive in a restless, bloody pool of very clever entrepreneurial sharks, and for charting his own unique career path through the wilderness. And if he can't figure it out, or stops for a beer or two on the way home from his body-draining job, well its his own damn fault for being too dumb or too inclined to relax. He should be out there hustling and changing!

Yes, that kind of cooperation is sometimes called "sticking together" and is usually contrasted with the anti-social, every-man-for-himself ethos of the "ownership society" - the ethos that is so attractive to the entrepreneurial class.

There are two fundamentally different pictures of social progress that we can associate with different kinds of "progressives". One view is that social progress is identical to material progress, and that such progress is and should be in the hands of a special, relatively small and clever class of cut-above "change agents". These overmen make all the decisions and innovations that really matter, and it is the lot of everyone else to sink or swim, as they struggle in these mighty titans' wake.

Another view of progress is more democratic: that we should all move forward together, taking account of the needs, preferences and interests of our slowest members. The major structural changes in the way we live and work, the ones wrought by technological innovation, should be determined by well-deliberated community decisions, not by some hustler with his own private Big Idea and the capital to market it and hawk it. The chief role of intellectuals on this alternative picture is not to stride titanically over the landscape, but to serve their community by applying their brain power to the accomplishment of tasks the community has chosen.

The first, entrepreneurial mindset contains a deep hostility to unions, and other similar associations. They see them as the force for economic stability and permanence, which in their minds is equivalent to "stagnation", and runs counter to the ceaseless entrepreneurial turmoil they prefer. The entrepreneurial spirit was perhaps best captured by the Italian futurists, for whom only movement, aggression and violence were healthy.

Bernard has been associated in the past with the Monitor Group, which apparently believes the entrepreneurial model of human existence is applicable to everything, even social activism. They co-sponsor the Fast Company Social Capitalist Awards, whose name alone tells you something about their attitude toward social change. They pride themselves on the elite nature of their employees and clientele .

We can't even count on the damn natural environment to stay the same any more. The physical places we love, and that used to provide solace, comfort and familiarity are constantly wrecked. I heard a couple of years ago that the average wintertime temperature in New Hampshire has risen 4.5 degrees over the past 50 years. But the creative destructionists are in charge, so we can't get control of our environment either.

But it's all the fault of those beer-swilling union troglodytes. The nerve of them! Wanting to work in one place for a whole lifetime, with their uncreative and prehensile brains, so that they can build a real life with a real family and a real community, and so their kids can develop permanent and healthy friendships, and then still have a family homestead to return to with their own kids when everybody is older. Where is their Social Darwinist spirit? Don't they get the new world, where every human being is supposed to live the life of an Army brat, and just get used to changed schools, changed friends, changed houses, revolving parents and swapped-out mates?

What's interesting is that no matter how often people complain about this crappy modern world, and suggest timidly that it might actually be possible to build the world we want to live in, the message we get from our economic masters is "No, we can't!" Or at least that's what they say when they aren't busy mocking the old-fashioned desires and community values of the Old Economy dinosaurs.

In the current economy, I'm happy to have a job and to be able to support my family.

To me, that sounds like a very annoying, stressful, spiritually lonely and unsettled way to live. Is it true, nevertheless, that we are doomed to this kind of life if we want a decent standard of living? I have no way of knowing. But if it is true, why is it true? Is this inherent in our stage of cultural development? Or does it just reflect choices we have made, and that can be unmade? Why can't we aim to build a society that is stable and sustainable, that is organized cleanly and efficiently, that is physically and mentally healthy, and that isn't so consumed by the itchy drive to destroy and remake its material framework constantly?

Do we really need to make the creative, high-investment, high-intensity satisfaction of every restless human craving and lust the driver of our economy?

I think many would be happy with a stable and secure job in a peaceful and sustainable community, a job that provided a life with more leisure time and fewer challenges to time management, but perhaps also fewer toys and entertainments and gadgets; a job that allowed one to meet one's responsibilities, but wasn't a scene of perpetual crises and insecurity. Many would probably thrive in a human environment that eschewed the anxious, bubbling, go-go hysteria and noise of contemporary American life. Shouldn't people at least have the choice to live that kind of life? If so, are they being denied the opportunity for such a life by the dominant individualistic economic culture and its greedy, exploitative and anarchic ruling ethos?

I am struck more and more frequently lately by the amount of sheer waste of brain power that characterizes our supposedly brainy "knowledge economy". I recently was doing some independent research on certain areas of mathematics - not because its my "career path", but just because its stuff I like to think about and learn. The more I learned about these areas, the more disturbed I was by the huge amount of intellectual energy that is devoted to video gaming, and other forms of remote yapping, chattering and stimulation. All of this brain power could be employed in engineering a healthy and sustainable world, and rationally organized human communities. But instead of designing communities and systems for the more efficient production of the necessities of life, the brains are applied to ever more "creative" means of escapism and remote masturbation. I am appalled by the amount of intellectual talent that is drawn to edgy, decadent and expensive outposts of human desire and craving, while the fundamentals of human life are neglected and taken for granted. Our lives seem deeply out of balance.

Maybe. But the last I read, there are only a few hundred Al Qaeda left. If they all decided to move to Afghanistan, why couldn't we just bomb them to smithereens and be done with them?