I responded at length on the VRM blog, here

Married off my youngest last Oct.

Bittersweet days … wonderful that they move on, sad that they aren’t your little girl any more

[Now it's later and I put up a fix, pointing at your comment.]

Without taking anything away from (or even commenting on) your VRM thesis, when I wrote “The sky is open to the stars,” I wasn’t thinking of the marketplace. Far from it. What I meant was that human beings are in direct contact with the infinite — in a real, tangible and very much NON-metaphysical sense. Just to clarify that bit.

chris

Well, I don’t know the answer exactly, but I have a feeling the culture of consumerism dissuades consumers from believing they are giving up anything (or devalues the money they are giving away for the product/service). For example, the belief that everything is free that is on the web. That’s an inherent problem that has to be solved before there will be an market that starts with the consumers. The “market’ necessitates a trade of value, and if one side is inherently told that what they want is free, then why would they give up money to trade for it?

Of course, I’m speaking on the general scale, and of course there are definitely products and services that exist because people wanted them to. And of course they do well in charging for something because the demographic believes it’s worth the trade. But that’s not a change of the macro market. And although it’s nice and warm and fuzzy, the reality is that on a large scale people are simply being conditioned to take things for free. They don’t want to trade value for value.

I wish it weren’t that way. Perhaps some day it won’t be. But we have to start changing the message that we’re sending out there, or even better than pushing a message, finding the areas where people are indicating they’re willing to pay for a product to be created. Harder done than said.