Total ownership

If you watch the documentary The Corporation you'll see various people arguing that the reason we have pollution and depletion of natural resources is that not everything on this planet is owned private entities. The idea is if every square inch of land, sea, air is owned then market forces will have their way and environmental destruction will just be economized out of the picture due to market forces. No matter what you are doing, depleting, saying, thining - someone will have an economic interest in making sure its not hurting their interests. So when you pollute the air someone will charge you for it because they are charging someone to breath that air and they can charge more for clean air so you'd better compensate them for making it dirty in the first place...

This idea extends to all kinds of intangibles such as the radio-frequency spectrum, genes, organisms, music, patents, trademarks etc. etc. The perfect corporate world is one in which every second and every facet of your existance is an interaction with, and subject to the control by a for profit corporate entity. Only then, they tell us, will we no longer have to worry about air pollution, side effects of smoking, impacts of cars, depletion of fisheries, dangers of genetic modifications etc. etc.

Personally I find that idea frightening. It basically says that at no stage in human history will society evolve to the point where we can put money aside and just do things for the common good. It surrenders our humanity to pure economic issues of dollars and cents. As Douglas Adams said:

This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy.

Basically I agree with Adams and believe that even when this total ownership scenario comes to pass people will still not be happy. I think many things in life need to be kept in the public domain and owned by a government and the government needs to be elected and run by the people and for the people. We need to take money out of that loop or forever be doomed to unhappiness.