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Thread: 'What Caused Capitalism?'

  1. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mister D View Post
    I disagree on that point if I understand your objection correctly. What Polyani argues is that the economy is/was embedded in social relations. Economics per se was not autonomous. Our society and market economy is peculiar in that respect. And, yes, the history of free market ideology is somewhat contradictory and that's one of his points. In order to subject society to the price mechanisms of the market the organic structures of society had to be destroyed. It was the state that ultimately did so via legislation.
    My argument is the economy was and still is integral to society, it emerges from social interaction just as family and religion and other social orders. To me that is the free market. That's why I sometimes leave off voluntary to describe exchange because it's not something we think about most of the time. --And it exists outside the state which is something we design based on ideology.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    The Sage of Main Street's Avatar Senior Member
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    From One End to the Other, the Specious Spectrum Is Pseudo-Religious Nonsense

    Quote Originally Posted by midcan5 View Post

    "....If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society." Robert Locke http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/

    educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/op...1-percent.html
    Marx was a spoiled upper-middle-class adventurer. Marx's wife and his co-conspirator Engels were even higher up the birth-class ladder. Ayn Rand is equally popular among the privileged plotters. Both Marxism and Libertarianism are products of the conceited, ignorant, demanding, and aggressive cliques malignantly tumored at the prep schools, which must be abolished because of their carcinogenic effect on society.

    Despite its unfunded mandate imposed on everyone else, the plutocracy knows exactly what to do to keep its own spawn in college. What they pay their brats in the form of an allowance should be the salary of everyone else there. As it is, education through all grades is work without a naturally motivating reward. A "good job" 4 to 20 years down the line is not naturally inspiring. If students aren't paid a higher salary in college than they can expect in any other job, they aren't worth anything. But only released indentured servants are allowed to publish anything, so all the criticism that we are given to read about education is compromised.
    On the outside, trickling down on the Insiders

    We won't live free until the Democrats, and their voters, live in fear.

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    Maybe I can explain the distinction I see this way. When we speak of theories there are two sorts. One looks at the world and describes what's there in an attempt to say this is how it works. The other looks inside and reasons out and prescribes what might work. Adam Smith describes the free market economy and compares it to the mercantilist economy and says this works better than that. One reason I think the free market works better is because no one designed it, unlike the prescriptions of mercantilism, designed and prescribed by what one might call economists who wanted to curry favor of the ruler. Marxism is another prescriptive theory. Keynesian economics, which most governments today follow, is pure prescription. Even the neoliberal Chicago School of Friedman is somewhat prescriptive though it has a substantial descriptive base. Prescriptive theories are, I contend, based on ideologies, descriptive theories are not, or at least try to counter personal ideological biases. Perhaps I'm being ideological in my classification but when you speak of the laws of supply and demand, of Say's Law, of human action as applying reason to achieve the best ends, I think you are describing the world around us, the way it works, the way we work.
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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