@ John Kelliher - food for cogitative thought (You are good at teasing out a debate).
The strength of the economic model lies in its easily defined, numerical, universal/ubiquitous metric - money. It is so universal it is all-encompassing. I think that we Systems Thinkers have an obligation to retrieve this situation. Let's examine the situation.
The possibility exists in our contemporary world to have dialogue at both the global and local levels. The instrumentalism of the web guarantees this fact - just look at THIS weblog.
At the local level, governments have tended to cede power away from the populace, an effect best described by Habermas as the Colonisation of the Lifeworld, and in contravention of the papal encyclical on Subsidiarity. (P.S. I am not Catholic). It is this democratic erosion that makes us all feel disenfranchised (other than the centralising politicians and their backroom boys/girls).
Globally our conversations ("communicative actions", dialogue etc) through the internet are a demonstration of cooperative interdependency and from these conversations we all feel a modicum of contributory enfranchisement. The questions then become: How do we project our efforts to retake the local ground? Is it possible that it could be achieved by imposing global conditions or regulations (like ISO26000)?
Let me elaborate as to how we have ceded the local ground in terms of the economic metric - money. Because we have relegated democratic responsibility to others through the ballot box or through the pulling of a lever every few years (hanging chads notwithstanding), it is of little wonder that fundamental democratic principles have decayed. (I'm using the generic and common conception of democracy here whereby we, individually, have control over all of our own Lifeworld aspects. I don't intend to enter into a debate regarding the merits/demerits of differing specific systems.)
To placate the populace and to demonstrate their managerial competencies, politicians resort to predicating all their responses in economic monetary terms because there are no other measures in the competitive social milieu that can validate their actions. Money reigns supreme in a competitive society even at the governance level. However, from eons of experience as a community, our best governance can only reside within an interdependent cooperative milieu setting, otherwise society would tear itself apart.
This has several advantages. It entertains subsidiarity in that power is devolved to the local cellular Lifeworld level. (A Lifeworld is the world around one's life, otherwise known as a small social group.) The Lifeworld is restored to the citizenry with instrumental links consolidating the resultant governance entity (designed using Systems Thinking and/or stochastic processes). Overall control is transparent but organised in a federalist manner with an elected central core making the hermeneutic strategic-direction decisions based on feedback from and to the Lifeworlds, and alignment in respect to global conventions and standards. There is no or little actual change to constitutional conventions and therefore the social instruments like the judiciary, education etc will not be disturbed. We will be creating what is in effect a pacifist paradigm shift.
One important thing that could be overlooked is the cement that will bind this model so that it does not unravel back to its previous competitive entity. If we leave the metric at just a monetary consideration, interdependence will unravel. We need other metrics to achieve a social bonding within the constraints of the Lifeworld environment. The keys to the bonding are in the words 'social' and 'environment'. We need to create a metric for these other models that are valid at the local level and can be readily transmitted to the federalist core in a comprehensible form capable of competing with the economic monetary metric. (Even this metric could be supplanted with an Economic value judgment that would take into account quality and delivery in addition to monetary cost.) Both the social and environmental models require value judgments to evaluate the synergisms related to them. In the long term we may be able to develop Systems models to guide these Lifeworld value judgments but initially, a well-informed populace should be able to make the appraisals. Education is the key here and this can be provided by the same instrumental network that would underpin the governance function.
Value judgments are the personal outcomes of subjective discourse so I agree with you regarding the importance of participatory alternative dialogue, but I also contend that the discourse must have outcomes that are measurable in terms that lie within the framework of the triple bottom line model as espoused by Elkington and given imprimatur under the United Nations sanctioned Rio Summit and Agenda 21 as part of those Ecologically Sustainable Development discussions.
While I can see merit in all the issues that you have proposed, I prefer to juxtapose the discourse to an overall schema which IMHO will comprehensively allay many of the concerns expressed in this blog.