A Dreamless Sleep

The economic crisis of the last year showed us once again the embedded land mines contained within the free market system. Modern society must always strike a careful balance between permitting capitalism enough room to roam while at the same time placing restraints upon its more destructive tendencies. This past 12 months proves once again why it has such great difficulty regulating itself - when it doesn't get it right, we all suffer. And when such trends occur, the taxpayer is often left with the tab for corporate bungling.Now it's government's turn to go through its similar cycle. Virtually all the preliminary run-up meetings to the Copenhagen Climate Change summit in December have ended in failure. It is clear to every single MP in Ottawa that the summit will arrive stillborn - a tragedy with major consequences. This will be one of those world summits where complete failure was a known result months in advance. The previous Liberal government gave us Kyoto with little else, and the Conservatives have turned that "little else" into an art form. At least with the financial crisis, taxpayers were there to bail out the companies. But who pays for the planet? Who will bankroll us to keep the coming environmental cataclysm at bay?Alas, we have entered the dead zone of dreamless sleep. In most cases, if left to itself, capitalism has built in corrective measures learned over a period of time. When it goes wrong, however, the impacts are most often sudden and rattle the confidence of consumers. Kyoto, and now Copenhagen, were meant to establish and install similar standards and measures designed to keep us from excess.  Failure in this realm is not as clearly discerned and thus we go on as though all is well.Lack of action and regulation in both spheres has a clear dark side. In effect, our excesses cheapen us, get us to concentrate on the little things. As this continues, we discover we are unable to dream of the bigger things. The supposed "Unseen Hand" of capitalism never was able to produce a Sistine Chapel, cures to malaria or polio. We would never have reached the North Pole, let alone the moon. Our great works of culture, the arts or science happened with only marginal assistance of that great Hand; they came into being because people dared to dream about those things capitalism could never produce. Our current markets never dream; they just make deals and deliberate, leaving consumers to muddle through and only feeling content with the next version of the iPhone or a new car model.We are now in a parallel universe regarding climate change, only our governments, while definitely deliberating, shown themselves incapable of deal-making for Copenhagen. Worse still, they have lost the ability to envision what this planet might look like with effective sustainable development and prosperous green economies. Within every MP's mind lurks the fear we have gotten this wrong, that by refusing to act in unified fashion we have brought on the age of unintended consequences. We no longer dream of the modern equivalent of national railroads, the invention of peacekeeping, national healthcare or a diverse federation. Instead, we drift off to sleep with certain nagging doubts. We wake in the morning following a restless night, saddened that the dreams never came and that politics is now only the realm of the expedient. Few dreamers remain, and in a planet in decline this is the worst of all possible outcomes.