We are free to buy goods and services as consumers, but we are not free to create our future as our education is being privatized and as our schools have become training programs for the transnational corporations.

In the course of my writing I have been reiterating the fallacy of the Free Market as I defined it as the opportunity to make money with money. And if you reflect on this opportunity to make money with money then we can understand that, on the average, people with more money will always make more money. Therefore, the Free Market, void of social regulations protecting the less fortunate, will result in a more divisive and violent society.

In the last few weeks I have been thinking about the concepts of streamlining and redundancy. The concept of economic streamlining is associated to the conventional understanding of being more efficient and specialized in our work, and the concept of economic redundancy has been associated with the conventional understanding that it causes wastes and overlapping of work. However, as the failures of the present Free Market framework have been accentuated by our businesses in becoming more streamlined and efficient so we must realize that this political and business obsession on cutting taxes, on cutting supposed duplicate costs, on privatizing public services and on cutting regulations is just a big lie. And in fact, we need a component of redundancy in our work as this redundancy allows us to share our work and become more intelligent.

Today I learn that European air traffic controllers are on strike and that air travel has been disrupted. The European Transport Commission plans to put the continent's air space under international controls (Single Sky). While the air traffic controllers maintain that this Single Sky will lead to job losses, privatization, and safety concerns, the European Commission maintains that the current system of air routings costs Europe 5bn euros ($4.7bn) annually in extra fuel, staff costs, and lost passenger time.

As we are experiencing the failures of the Free Market we must really wonder if we must put these 5bn euros before our lives. And this reminds me of the new Department of Homeland Security as President Bush tries to obfuscate the need for healthy redundancy of information among different departments versus the obsolete hierarchical streamlining of a mammoth Homeland department. And yes, we must think of trying to balance streamlining with redundancy.

References

Air travel hit by strike chaos BBC News, June 19, 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_2052000/2052844.stm