Welcome to FLOW!

FLOW is an emerging movement dedicated to liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good and directing it towards creating sustainable peace, prosperity, and happiness for all in our lifetime. The FLOW Movement reflects a FLOW Worldview, integrating appreciation for economic freedom, voluntary exchange, individual initiative, combined with social and environmental consciousness, and embodies FLOW Principles, which include commitments to human flourishing, non-violence, diversity, and radical tolerance.

Click on their names for links to articles by FLOW founders Michael Strong and John Mackey.

Member Platform: PETER BARNES

Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right

Introduction by Susan Witt,
Executive Director of the Schumacher Society

The name Peter Barnes has been a household word at the E. F. Schumacher Society since our formation in 1980. In 1973 Peter organized a conference called “Who Owns the Land?” that both our board President, Robert Swann, and our Chairman, John McClaughry, described as the best conference they ever attended. When John McClaughry encouraged us to sponsor our first decentralist conference, he said, “You know, I’m really looking for the energy, the vitality, the historic content of that 1973 conference.” So Peter Barnes and his legacy have been looming over our heads since the beginning of the Schumacher Society. Peter Barnes, when he organized that conference, was a reporter for The New Republic. He was also an activist, working on social and ecological issues. Following that period in his life he became an entrepreneur, involved with solar energy products, and then in the 1980s he cofounded the Working Assets Long Distance telephone company. The idea was to bring a social impulse into a capitalist structure. It is a successful company from which he is now retired. He is following his original impulse of love and concern for the commons in his book Who Owns the Sky? and now in The State of the Commons.

During the last year of his life Bob Swann was having trouble seeing; it was a spatial memory loss, and he could no longer read his favorite books, but he had good friends who would read them to him. The book he chose to have read to him three times in that year was Peter Barnes’s Who Owns the Sky? If Bob were here, he would be thrilled to see such a large group gathered on an issue he devoted his life to, a concern for redefinition of our relationship to the land. He would highly recommend to you, Peter Barnes.

Click here to read Peter's speech on Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right, presented at the E.F Schumacher Society.

Click here to Download the full book, Capitalism 3.0.

Click here for Peter Barnes' bio.

Featured Media, Projects, And Organizations

Our current version of capitalism—the corporate, globalized version 2.0—is rapidly squandering our shared inheritances. Now, Peter Barnes offers a solution: protect the commons by giving it property rights and strong institutional managers. Barnes shows how capitalism—like a computer—is run by an operating system. Our current operating system gives too much power to profit-maximizing corporations that devour our commons and distribute most of their profit to a sliver of the population. And government—which in theory should defend our commons—is all too often a tool of those very corporations. Barnes proposes a revised operating system—Capitalism 3.0—that protects the commons while preserving the many strengths of capitalism as we know it. His major innovation is the commons trust—a market-based entity with the power to limit use of scarce commons, charge rent, and pay dividends to everyone. Capitalism 3.0 offers a practical alternative to our current flawed economic system. It points the way to a future in which we can retain capitalism's virtues while mitigating its vices.

Click here to download Michael Strong's "Sustainability in a Bright Green Future."