Musings on the future of Liberal Social Theory

The future is always shaped by the past, and thus the Liberal rejection of Socialism will shape what future Utopia they will pursue (and the unachievable objective of an Utopia is essential to motivation of Humans, we must always have some goal. You can see this even in the modern American reactionaries, they long for a vision of America that never existed.). As we look towards the issues of the future, resource limitation, global climate change, the emergence of the third world into developed economies, all of these seem best answered by the synthesis of liberal democratic theories and socialist theories as now made possible by advances in technology and the permeation of science into culture.

Some Guessed Attributes:

It will have currency and private property. The concept of ownership is too inherent in human nature to resist, and with private ownership comes currency.

The means of production will be standardly organized. As management, production, and predictive analysis become more scientific and thus more accurate, industry can be made leaner and more multifunctional. There is no reason to produce four specialty machines when you can buy four multipurpose machines that are interchangeable in case of malfunction. This is also heavily influenced by the separation of the design industry from the manufacturing industry.

Individuals will be fully participatory in their community, their economy, and their government. As technology allows for the full aggregation of input from millions of users, the necessity and the economy of direct consumer input will push through the required infrastructure changes. Perhaps an argument for realtime public veto of legislation, cast as voters browse the daily first readings. I have little doubt that consumers will directly influence designers (if not be them themselves) and manufacturers, there is little need for consumer economics to to involve more actors besides the designer, the manufacturer, the shipper, the consumer, and possibly an aggregator (like a blog or magazine) to inform the consumer.

Economics will be closed loop. Unfortunately, there is no current predictions of near-term economic benefits from space. So we are sitting on a (very large) pile of resources called Earth. It is also our only home, and like children in a gingerbread house we have eaten very large holes in it. Thus for an economic theory to be viable in the long term, it must take this into account. Capitalism only goes halfway, recognizing that their is finite material, but not providing a mechanism to save a proportion of those finite resources for the future.

The problem facing liberal thinkers in quite similar to a problem faced by our brain. There is no single light wavelength for purple (look it up yourself). Our minds create it when it sees both blue and red at the same time. The other alternative would be to average blue and red, which is green on the color spectrum. Liberal thinkers are faced with reconciling what appears to be two radically different theories, but instead of creating a truly new synthesis have chosen to simply average them into third-way liberalism.