08/10/2025
“The people know that something in America is broken, but they don’t quite know what, they don’t know why, and, most important, they don’t know how to fix it. All they can point to are the symptoms.
The symptoms, of course, are evident everywhere. It is the illness itself we can’t seem to put our finger on. And so all our solutions…are symptom-orientated, which means that they are by definition inadequate. Indeed, so many of our so-called solutions create more problems than they cure. They attempt to alter the results of the system without changing the system that produces those results…
Our economic system, we must acknowledge, is much more than just a free market, a collection of businesses and bureaucracies, exchanges and transactions. At a more fundamental level, it is a common pattern of thought, a way of looking at the world around us, and it manifests itself in our financial dealings, our ownership practices, and our consumer-producer relationships. This pattern of thought pervades all we do…
[It] is the economic system, and not just the way we implement it that is flawed. If we are to solve the monumental problems that face us, we must change the way we think about things, because our problems are systemic in nature, and all our attempts to solve them are as effective as straightening deck chairs on the Titanic.”
[Roger Terry, Economic Insanity: How Growth-Driven Capitalism is Devouring the American Dream, Berret-Koehler, San Francisco, 1995, pp. 1-3]