: I don't think this is true. Didn't the Church torture an kill scientists who threatend to upset their worldview? We call these times the Dark Ages because innovation was stopped.Correct, but under primitive despotism those conditions also existed. In feudalism, the few people allowed by King or Church could and did also innovate. Innovation was even greater in Athens of ancient Greece - but that was a democracy, not despotic or monarchic.
Yes, a Dark age armed with nuclear weaponry would be cataclysmic. But if we just keep what we have and don't attempt to get on with social evolution, then what we're living in right now could be considered a dark age. Yes, we are innovating - but as I pointed out, I believe that innovation would be more useful if it was used to solve the World's problems instead of creating a new washing powder or a new billion in Bill Gates' pocket.
And as for the point you make about the price system helping innovations as in scientists, try and consider innovation as in artistic or cultural innovation. Wouldn't artists preserve their artistic integrity better if they didn't need to make marketable art to survive?
: My point is that only the incentive of profit can mobilze the best minds against the problems we face. Whatever new technology we develop will be directed towards the hungry people in the world.
The incentive of profit - or the incentive of need. If billions of people starved, such a technology would be ultimately necessary, and therefore it would be developed. If profit was no longer a concept we used, the Third World could have access to those technologies despite its current poverty.
: Nobody gets rich trying to sell food to people who aren't hungry!
: What we need to do now is liberalize third world economies so that the people their can produce something to exchange for the food. Right now, Earth has hundreds of millions of unemployed people...we need to get these people into the capitalist system so that they can start earning...and eating.
What exactly do you want them to do? Those people are not unemployed because they don't want to work, but because there is nothing for them. And if their economies are liberalised, it could very well mean the conditions of 'few have it all, most have nothing' which historically happened before when Europe integrated China and India into its economy by colonisation. And neo-imperialism is just what it might become if 'we' are to liberalise the Third World. The WTO for example, by their removal of border taxation the Third World has already become even poorer.
