Markets anachronism as an obstacle to achieve sustainability

What would happen if an enterprise forgets to register a cost? Let’s suppose that it doesn’t register the machinery depreciation, obviously the company would work with illusory information. As a consequence of that, the machinery won’t be properly maintained and, more important, when the days of renewal come it will be impossible to afford it and the economic troubles and the bankruptcy are theinevitable next steps. So, we can affirm from the beginning that this business is not sustainable and no lucid entrepreneur would risk a dime in it. Let’s imagine now our world wide productive system as a big enterprise. What would happen if we forget to register a cost? Year after year, our capital will slowly undermine and one day we’ll wake up and find out how bad entrepreneur we were, and infront of our bankrupt company we’ll cry for our impossibility to renovate the capital.
Even we usually don’t realize, the enterprises that are part of the world’s productive system always forget to register a cost, or more precisely, nobody charges it. The cost I’m talking about is the price of the destruction of natural resources, the price of the accelerated depreciation of a huge naturalcapital which is indispensable and irreparable. That adjectives force us to protect and take care of that inheritance, but instead of that, in our daily productive activity we act as if it is non-existent or free. That way of acting of the big enterprise’s administrators shows to any observant entrepreneur that our business is not sustainable. Our mission as citizens of this age, as administrators ofour world is to find the productive system’s defects and mend them to sort out the way of humanity and finally reach perpetuity.

The price is in the future

The natural resources are those which can’t be reproduced by human work, our field of action is restricted to utilize them in the more efficient possible way. Nowadays, the more efficient way of production and allocation of goods andservices known is the market system, it is also the system that rules actual economy and all the economic agents take decisions based on markets. Some of the natural resources, such as oil, wood or some minerals for example, have their place in the economic system because they have markets and, consequently, a price; that’s why all the decisions taken with regard to them are highly rational (eventhough, it may exist mistakes because of lack of information). There are also other natural resources which are extremely necessary for human life and welfare (air, water, temperature, forest, etc); even though these material riches constitute an inestimable capital there are not taken into account by the economic reality, and the agents act as if these ones don’t exist. The characteristic thatdetermines this indifference is the lack of markets. In a market economy there are economic goods only those which have markets in where these goods get a price. In order that a market appears it is necessary the scarcity of the goods and the determination of requesters to pay for them. These conditions don’t exist for the resources we are interested in, and that’s the reason of the deterioration ofthem.
These resources, indispensables for human life, would still be insignificant from the economic point of view if it weren’t for the serious possibility of future scarcity of them. So, as soon as we’ve began paying attention to the evident human necessity of these resources, and after we’ve open our eyes to the not less evident future scarcity of them we’ll be able to affirm that this naturalheritage is only waiting for more destruction to see appearing in the horizon their markets and, with them, the price of today’s damage.
The important thing to note is that there are two truly and undeniable facts (human’s necessity of the resources we’re dealing with, and future scarce of them); and from these facts we can derivate the inevitable creation of markets, and consequently, of...