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Table of Contents
Limitations of the market system
Our current market system in underpinned by a system of trade.
The use of trade - and its logical extension money - appears on the face of it to be a useful concept: Two parties engage in a trade, both get something they want, and both are better off than before. This has been the dominant mode of social organisation for at least the last 10,000 years.
Though useful, it has many drawbacks, and, in today's society where we value compassion and equality, it no longer serves our best interest (assuming you accept the existence of a viable alternative). and it has also created extensive collateral damage on our natural world. The main drawbacks are:
Poverty
Just under half the human population (3bn) in the world today live on less that $2.50 a day - many much less than that. Clearly they have insufficient skills or resources to trade with to break from poverty, and/r their geographical location doesn't offer them a fair market value. If almost 50% of the planet's human population have insufficient means to trade for a good quality of life, then it follows that a trading system just doesn't work for those people.
Debt
Even in the parts of the world where trade appears to create prosperity, it is backed almost entirely by debt. Since most money is created in the economy by commercial banks (not government), it follows that most money is actually a product of interesting-bearing debt, without which current economies would cease to function. And the interest on those debts still obviously needs to be produced to meet those loan requirements.
So, the question needs to be asked: if a trading society actually worked, why would anyone owe anything? if trade was truly the optimum way of organising society, then shouldn't it follow that all members of that society would have sufficient resources and skills to trade with rather than resorting to debt.
Environmental damage
Since profit and the creation of wealth is the primary driver of economies and behaviour, it follows that other 'externalities' like the environment take a secondary place when there is no direct incentive to protect it.
This inevitably leads to widespread destruction of natural habitat, reckless methods of resource extraction, pollution and biodiversity loss.