Common Wealth Trusts: Structures of Transition
By Peter Barnes, Great Transition Initiative
Common wealth, properly organized, provides a way to address the two greatest flaws in contemporary capitalism—its relentless destruction of nature and widening of inequality—while still keeping the benefits that markets provide.
We Need New Economics for a New Era of History
By Peter Barnes, On The Commons
We are entering a new era in which the current way we run our economy won’t work.
A brief history of how we lost the commons
By Peter Barnes, On The Commons
As a Republican Alaska governor Walter Hickel said, “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.” In the beginning, the commons was everywhere. Humans roamed through it, hunting and gathering to meet their needs. Like other species, we had territories but these were communal to the tribe, not private to the person.