By J.D. ALT
According to the “invisible hand” theory—long celebrated (in America) as the most effective mode of human economics—private commerce should now be busy directing our efforts and resources toward those things we truly need to prosper as a collective society. Instead, the “invisible hand” seems to be willfully guiding us in the opposite direction. How can that be? Has something fundamental shifted, causing the mechanism of the Great American Enterprise to steer not just blindly, but recklessly?
The answer appears to be YES. And what has shifted is that the secret formula of the “invisible hand”—the profit-motive—is no longer capable of ignoring, or hiding, the collateral damages (unpaid “costs”) that have floated from its wake for two centuries. Or, to put it more accurately, while the profit-motive and the “invisible hand” continue to both hide and ignore those damages (most dangerously exemplified by carbon pollution) human society (which supposedly is the beneficiary of the “invisible hand”) can no longer allow it to happen.
