The Elite could take over everything and rule forever, except for one thing. They, like the people in that story, are certain to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The only problem is that, in the meanwhile, we get to suffer along with them.

Monbiot does something very crucial here which most commentators neglect: he relates the story of how our culture's current philosophy developed. Good and bad ideas have lineage; it's always intellectually liberating to know something about where they come from. Predatory forces always seek to bury the narrative of ideas - because when we realize that our ways of thinking are not laws of nature, but an artificially constructed framework, then we know that we are capable of tearing the framework down and building another one.

(By the way, thanks much for including the citations. In a previous comment I promised to donate 50 bucks to Common Dreams if you would do this, so now I will.)

Yeah, but their narrative get broadcast with million's of watts of power, while our's get's shouted from a cheap bullhorn with half-dead batteries.

'confessions of an economic hit man' by john perkins is a good example of how policies are put into action.

After Otto von Bismark listened to (neo-)liberal arguments presented by a Free Trade delegation from England, he stated, "The free market is the weapon of the economically powerful."

Of course, he made the above statement within an historical context. Imperial Germany was successfully attempting to protect its state- initiated infant industries from the onslaught of industrially produced goods from England.

(At the time, Germany possessed a small, timorous middle class. They they were not organized enough nor did they own enough capital needed to launch Germany's industrialization.)

Also, most German economic historians knew that Britain's free trade posture was another example of its penchant for"cant" (i.e., hypocracy).

Educated Germans knew that England's ruling class started its "primitive accumulation" through piracy, the slave trade and the related goods and services that such endeavors required (insurance, shipping, steel production, weaponry, agricultural products, etc.)

They also knew how England's Navigation Acts and the consequent Anglo-Dutch Wars contributed toward breaking the worldwide Dutch shipping monopoly which opened the way for English's dominance of worldwide commerce.

The German "Socialists of the Chair" knew how the British government constantly bailed out major corporations like the East India Company. For example, the Company needed to expand its markets into China.

The average Chinese didn't want anything the Company had to offer. What better way of manufacturing demand than getting millions of Chinese hooked onto Indian Opium. And if that product was destructive and not desired by the Chinese elite, the English Crown protected and expanded the drug market via the Opium Wars.

And when the Company demonstrated that it couldn't govern India itself after the Sepoy Rebellions, the state "nationalized" the enterprise while fully compensating the Company's shareholders.

Last, the military spending and the Continental blockade (that set back European industrialisation)necessitated by the Napoleonic Wars, helped spark England's Industrial Revolution.

Very little of the above were products of Free Markets.

In fact, Ricardo's comparative advantage argument for free trade described the benefits supposedly accrued by free trade agreements between Portugal and Britain.

Portugal efficiently grew grapes for wine for English export; in return, Portugal imported England's industrial products.

However, these trade treaties actually de-industrialized Portugal and completed its economic subordination to England. In turn, the English Navy protected the Portuguese elite's commercial empire.

The above comparative advantage argument is still reproduced in introductory macro-economic texts.

Economic history is usually not a subject taught in business and economic courses.

As a result, most "educated" citizens of the U.S. know...nothing?

Excellent, succinct piece.

However, unfortunately his conclusion: "as the disasters they have caused develop, the public will need ever less persuading that it has been misled" will not apply to the US.

From it's school classrooms, to John Stossel, USAns have been so successfully propagandized to a state of utter cluelessness. They will be literally starving and freezing as the hypercapitalist neoliberal edifice collapsed under it's own weight of contradictions, unable to find the exit door.

I agree with jbs, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" is a pretty good book...extremely easy reading, goes by as I imagine a spy novel would (I haven't yet read one). Unfortunately I also agree with PDJ. Between the educational "system" and the media (and many other institutions in between) it appears that the population has been thoroughly programmed to believe, like Dr. Pangloss, that this-the capitalist world, is the best of all possible worlds . Social crises and collapses seem to shake people to their senses, BUT, only for a moment. Then it's back to business as usual, that is: "This is the system we have, how can I get ahead. I too can be rich one day. All I have to do is work hard. Or play the lottery. Or if they cut taxes." It's difficult for me not to be (what my friends consider) bleak.

btw, I don't think that I ever read anything by Mr. Monbiot that isn't thorough, reasonable and persuasive. Needs a bigger megaphone.

It is easy to understand how the capitalistic-fascist segment of our society got into power.
They simply appealed to the greed in all of us and told everyone to forget the idea that we are our brother's keeper or that we should unite behind a government of for and by the people. Forget the preamble to the constitution where it mandates that we "promote the general welfare….."

These "greed is good" charlatans skillfully explained that if we eliminate the social safety net and transform this country into an ideology of everyone for himself or herself we could all prosper beyond our wildest dreams. To hell with the few who cannot make it, they only weaken the herd anyway and should be starved off.

Unfortunately the true majority of this country are still being controlled by a minority of oligarchs who are thoughtless, inhumane, avaricious warmongers and are profiting from war and carnage, Haliburton comes to mind.

Here we go again with another article which looks at one half of trade and concludes that 'wealth' is only money, not goods and services, despite the fact that people decide that goods and services are worth more to them than the money they trade for these items.

Until an article, or a poster, actually deals with the fact that wealth is also goods and services, these critiques remain mired in inherently flawed, strawman analyses.

"They will be literally starving and freezing as the hypercapitalist neoliberal edifice collapsed under it's own weight of contradictions, unable to find the exit door."

Which contradictions would those be?

The term "trickle-down theory" should have been enough to wake up the majority. Not pour-down theory, not rain-down theory, or drizzle-down theory, or even spring-shower theory. Trickle. The rich might, just might, allow a few drops to trickle from their wealth-overstuffed clouds. Please, sir, can I have another.

The brainwashing has also included creating such a desire for wealth generally, "the people" are willing to be screwed and suckered at will because of the false belief their time will come if they just hang in there long enough. If not, there's always international humiliation for dollars on any number of FOX "reality" shows, or the local state numbers racket, AKA the lottery. And because we want a piece of what "they" got, we allow a corrupt, rigged system to flourish.

The only problem I have with Monbiot's analysis is his labeling (or rather, his framing, as Lakoff would term it).

If this be neo-liberalism, then what is neo- conservatism?

Bill from Saginaw

tecullinan,

Re: The Elite ... are certain to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

Well, maybe. But the attitudes of the neo-aristocrats remind me of Edward I of England, who, in a battle with an overmatched opponent, ordered his archers to fire into the melee. When the inevitable protest "but we'll kill our own soldiers too" was voiced, he replied, "Yes, but we have reserves, and they don't."

So while the elite may kill the goose that lays the golden egg, it is of no consequence. The gold has already been laid up. Now all that remains is the end game: bleeding the rest of the country dry.

Neo-WHAT? There's no such thing.

Hola Mntgoat

I can see you're at it again. If you wish to understand the lack of any historical basis behind neo-liberal "theories", read my earlier post expanding upon Monbiot's excellent analysis.

Second, the capitalist system is full of contradictions. I'll give you an example.

The capitalist class, as a whole, wants workers to buy all the goods and services that workers produce. However, capitalists, as individual owners, want to keep labor costs low as possible.

Eventually, because capitalists attempt to compete by keeping labor costs low, many workers cannot afford to buy the goods and services they produced.

So, if you are a CEO or VP of a company and you declare, "I think the company should raise wages, cut back on hours and slow levels of production", your fellow managers and the dominant stockholders would think you were nuts.

However, if you are a worker and you openly state, "I think the company should lower wages, add more hours, and raise production levels", your fellow workers would think you were nuts.

What Rightwing movements attempt to promote and put into place are policies that reflect the interests of CEOs and the ownership class at the expense of the working majority. How do they do this?

Look around you. Which class controls the design, production and distribution of ideas, images, and imposes the limits of permissable public discussion?

No class. Anyone who wants to can produce images, distribution of ideas, and this website proves it. There are numerous publishers, websites, and all kinds of media run by all kinds of people. I am not aware of anyone who attempts to limit public discussion by law..except for those who back threatening people who place campaign ads when they do not want them run, with jail or sanction.

I do not see the contradiction in the example you provide either. There is a set of competing goals yes, but this is not a contradiction, it's merely two elements each vying for that they want...competition.

Nice note from Balakirev. We could all stand a little more economic history.

Also from PJB: "From it's school classrooms, to John Stossel, USAns have been so successfully propagandized to a state of utter cluelessness. They will be literally starving and freezing as the hypercapitalist neoliberal edifice collapsed under it's own weight of contradictions, unable to find the exit door."

I would only add something about the television keeping their minds off their stomachs.

MtnGoat: It is true that many can publish on the web. But, many people have no practical capability to so, due to poor internet access or lack of time. The rich have a huge advantage in the public debate, because they can and do shout louder, and control such a huge fraction of the media most viewed by the public. They control access to all of Congress as a practical matter; the limited time members have to listen to the public is dwarfed by the amount of time they listen to the spokesman for the wealthy. They is why the practical consequence of the campaign finance system and K Street is to deny free speech of people in favor of paid speech of non-people (i.e. corporations). Thus, it is a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

zazmo-I think we're on the same track here.

Call me a dummy, but what the heck is the difference between a neoliberal or a neocon? It seems like they're just used interchangeably. Help me out here. :)

Neoliberals are conservatives disguised as liberals. Neoconservatives are fascists disguised as conservatives.

I'd almost settle for just knowing that more of us realized we've been mislead.

NeoLiberal would be the Thomas Friedman and his world is flat crowd/drink the globalization koolaid and Neocon would be Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz.

Ok I get it now. Thanks.

"But as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top one percent, but to the top tenth of the top one per cent(4). In the United States, for example, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s(5)."

Well, let's accentuate the positive! When the global economy collapses and 99.90% of the people are living in poverty or close to it, it shouldn't take the majority a great deal of time to find these predators and lynch them.

"Civilian holdings of weapons worldwide are much larger than we previously believed," .......according to another article on this site by Laura McInnis.

If these uncivilized miscreants allow the world economy to collapse, they will never leave their compounds and return to them alive; they will undoubtedly become prisoners of their own pathological greed.

No, they'll become prisoners of those who think it's just to kill them, apparently one of whom is you. You're not a robot, you own the responsibility for your choices. No matter what they have done, what you do is on your own hands.

Now that's commitment to human values for you.

Mtn Goat asked: "Which contradictions would those be?"

Economic booms and busts for one, sub prime mortgage bubble ring a bell? How about dot com boom? How about 70s economic malaise? How about great depression? yes there is a gap in the 403, 50, and 60s, while the U.S. surfed the windfall of government investment in WWII and being the only undamaged industrial economy left in the world. How about 1 in 6 Americans with no health insurance? How about tens of thousands crumbling bridges and roads. A few Americans have a lot of bling while society crumbles before our eyes.

Helix said: "So while the elite may kill the goose that lays the golden egg, it is of no consequence. The gold has already been laid up. Now all that remains is the end game: bleeding the rest of the country dry."

I am afraid you are right, I heard Cheney was investing in Euros, it seems they intend to squeeze the U.S. dry and then move on to the next victim. Chomsky said once that you don't understand them until you understand they want it ALL, and to leave you with NOTHING.

"Economic booms and busts for one, sub prime mortgage bubble ring a bell? How about dot com boom? How about 70s economic malaise? How about great depression? "

How can you lay these at the feet of capitalism when State intervention is also at work distorting markets?

"How about 1 in 6 Americans with no health insurance?"

What does this contradict? Capitalism has never claimed it will supply everything to everyone based on someone's social views.

I see it as a contradiction in the sense that pure laisez affaire capitalists claim that it leads to the best society, yet IMO a society where 1 in 6 have no access to health care, and many people are living in the street, our mentally ill aren't taken care of, and we are wrecking our environment seems like no utopia to me. Economically in terms of providing a humane, and sustainable society the Europeans are far ahead of us IMO.

senior mtngoat

It is so frustrating to take my time and attempt to answer your posts. As I have noticed in other discussions, you do not seem to carefully read other people's arguments.

Many times I have noticed that you, instead, set up strawmen to demolish. However, these raggedy scarecrows have little relation to the ideas presented.

Moreover, you want to argue for the ideology of possessive and atomistic individualism, but you tend to not to do so either systematically and factually.

Of course, you also tend to repeatedly introduce other related concepts such as individual choice, individual rationality and individual responsibility.

However, the above concepts you base your arguments upon have been empirically and philosophically tested or critically analyzed and they have been found wanting by Freud, Skinner,Marx, Durkheim, Foucault, Nietzche, Heidegger and many other social scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In fact, the history of the 20th century has empirically decimated all of the 18th c. Enlightment foundation of your ideas.

And that is the problem of neo-liberalism. It can only work if the general population has very little knowledge of the great thinkers of the 19th and 2oth centuries; additionally, the general population has to have almost historical consciousness.

If the ruling elite can destroy the pursuit of critical and analytical knowledge and replace it with ideological slogans, religious metaphysics and narrow forms of technical education, they've got it made.

MtnGoat August 28th, 2007 11:16 pm

"No, they'll become prisoners of those who think it's just to kill them, apparently one of whom is you. You're not a robot, you own the responsibility for your choices. No matter what they have done, what you do is on your own hands.
Now that's commitment to human values for you."

MtnGoat:

When the "white collar" elite intentionally destroy the lives of others because they can, they deserve the same sentence as any other person who commits a crime and gets thrown in prison.

I'm not advocating death, but imprisonment for crime. It's not just to kill an escapee from a state prison, but somehow the killing of those people is justified.

Let those who would destroy the lives of others "own the responsibility for their choices" as well. If it means having to spend the rest of their lives behind their luxurious compound walls, then so be it. The criminals in state prison cells are much worse off.

balakirev

Your post is better than the article. Thanks.

Why should governments create and defend markets for corporations?

Mr. Monbiot provides the answer to the question in his title. We got into this mess by opposition parties deciding not to oppose. Of course a political apparatus devoted to unceasing expansion of power and control for the powerful and controlling will advance policies that help the few and harm the many. The trouble comes when Labour and Democrats uncritically accept Thatcher's "no alternative."

Why is anybody surprised at the real results of capitalism? Its sacred word---profit---comes from origins meaning "advantage." You cannot corrupt an even trade into an "advantage" for yourself without "DISadvantaging" somebody else. Everywhere capitalism went it "discovered" self-sufficient peoples only to rape them. The "disadvantaged" are now most of the world, and it seems the only reason we hear about it now is that, oh my, it's affecting WHITE people. There is not going to be any real change until we deconstruct PROFIT itself and find a new reason to be alive. And when we do, the "primitives" will be waiting on the hill...

Don't worry about Republicans, they will survive and prosper from all their corruption, lies and scandals. Americans have reached a saturation point with corruption and no matter what happens now, it's like water off a Sponge Bob's back. There's only so much insanity we can absorb, before we all go insane. Our economic system, government and society are so perversely insane, we will likely elect another madman or woman for president.

Bush wants Fifty Billion more to fight the war, and he'll get it. That might get us through another month, but what if the war lasts for years? Will he force us to buy War Bonds?

"Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad."
Euripides.

.

MtnGoat:

Not only do you appear ignorant of the article's main thrust, you also appear ignorant of Adam Smith's writings: an efficiently-working free market system presupposes there will be NO concentrations of economic power. Any system of regulation/de-regulation that allows such concentrations to exist is by definition anti-free market.

Bill for saginaw wrote:

If this be neo-liberalism, then what is neo-conservatism?

Neoliberalism is the widely used and widely understood term meaning the resurgent global system of lazzez-faire capitalism. For example, the Australian party closest to the US Republican party is the "Liberal Party". The "neo" referrs to the fact that it is in many ways a reincarnation of teh robber-baron era.

That so many USAns have no familiarity with this term is very telling. Everywhere else it is a household word.

MtnGoat,

Whay seems to be always entirely lacking in your arguments and those of US "libertarians" is a huge, probably deliberate blind spot regarding the dynamics of wealth and power. One who aquires wealth acquires power, specifically the power to acquire more wealth, which leads to more power, more wealth, more power etc. Just like the runaway chemical reaction of a high explosive, but in slow-motion.

This power also gives the wealthy the ability to impose harsh bargaining terms, to his advantage, in any market interaction on the less wealthy - and under the capitalist system, he is practically compelled to. The rich capitalist can bide his time; his refirgerator is full, his bank account full of money. The worker without power must accept the raw deal offered or become homeless and starve. And, the deal will will become more raw as the rich man accmulates more power.

No, "competetion" does little to help. Profit demands extracting ever more added value on a worker's labor, so the capitalists collaborate to keep wages low. Workers, of course, can orgnize and collectively bargain, with threat to withhold their labor, too, but unavoidably do so from a much weaker position, because the power held by the capitalists gives them virtual ownership of governments, law-enforcement, armies, private armed thugs. Governments pass anti-worker laws, law enforcement and even armies violently supress labor action, through threat or actual force.

Of course, externalities - the maximization of profit even to the point of rendering the planet uninhabitable is a totally separate, compelling issue.

So, how can you find such a situation morally acceptable?

And, there is no way even more doses of the same would help the situation - market transactions among unequal parties are inherently antagonistic, and capitalism assures gross inequality and the enrichment of the few and poverty for billions. So, sorry to say, Adam Smith's notion of "free markets" is a fantasy. It was developed by a man sitting in his library without actually-observing the messy world. In contrast, Marx developed his theories entirely from actual observations of economic activity in all it's messiness.

BALIKIREV: Bravo!
PDJ: Excellent analysis. Thanks for relating it.

Anyone interested in understanding how European civilization was transformed from the preindustrial world to the era of industrialization and how free market ideology came to dominate British and continental economics (to say nothing of the US) should read "THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION" by Karl Polanyi. (Paperback, Beacon Press, 2001)

The effectiveness of the neoliberal PR machine (as George Monbiot points out)is also demonstrated by the fact that most people know Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, etc. but only a few have heard of Polanyi, whose book was published in the same year (1944)as von Hayek´s famous work "The Road to Serfdom".

Polanyi shows that the absurd concept of self-regulating markets will never work and that markets have always been embedded in society. The creation of "free" markets requires that human beings and nature be turned into pure commodities which ultimately results in the destruction of the fabrics of society and the natural environment (we have come pretty far, haven`t we?).....

To ensure "stability" and increase profits for investors and corporations people and the environment have to bear increasing risk and "casualties", which sooner or later should lead to protest and a counter-movement. However, perhaps the greatest achievement of the free-market / globalization ideologists is, that they have succeeded in convincing the public that there is no alternative, that their insane ideology is a kind of natural force, so resistance is pointless. In fact, "market forces" are man-made and can be changed but ecological laws cannot.In the long run the boomerang comes back and there is no escape... (climate change, distruction of biodiversity, etc.)

The irony is that while capital now enjoys the greatest freedom human beings are more and more subjected to surveillance and civil rights are undermined in the name of "security."

Orwell and Huxley must be turning in their graves.....

Why should governments create and defend markets for corporations? ? ?

minitru,

I enjoyed reading your comment. I have always marveled at the success of some in convincing large numbers of Americans that a society organized into large, impersonal, heartless automata that mindlessly seek to maximize profit, i.e. corporations, is somehow required by the laws of nature. WTF? I had thought humans evolved their natural inclinations in small hunter-gatherer groups which depended on compassion and sharing for survival.

And I would second Siouxrose in complimenting balakirev and PJD for well-written comments.

"an efficiently-working free market system presupposes there will be NO concentrations of economic power."

No Smith doesn't. He supposes they will not be concentrated and backed by State power to protect markets, create rent seeking profits, and create monopolies.

"When the "white collar" elite intentionally destroy the lives of others because they can, they deserve the same sentence as any other person who commits a crime and gets thrown in prison. "

Can you show us what you mean by 'intentionally destroying' the lives of others?

"Whay seems to be always entirely lacking in your arguments and those of US "libertarians" is a huge, probably deliberate blind spot regarding the dynamics of wealth and power."

No, we just do not accept the ideas concerning power that you espouse. Yes, that non acceptance is deliberate, just as I deliberately do not accept it when someone tells me that one plus one is three. Non acceptance of flawed ideas is not only acceptable, but vital.

"One who aquires wealth acquires power, specifically the power to acquire more wealth, which leads to more power, more wealth, more power etc. Just like the runaway chemical reaction of a high explosive, but in slow-motion."

Problem number one...not all 'power' is the same. The 'power' that comes from ones own property and profit is completely and entirely legitimate as a human right, and is only wrong, or sanctionable, when it takes someone elses rights. In as much as trade yields wealth, wealth yields the ability to create more trade, and that trade yields more wealth in a 'runaway'..

SO WHAT? There is not a fixed amount of money in the world and all that wealth comes from trade, which means it is innately shared as goods and services. If someone trading manages to increasingly expand the economy, just what is the problem?

"This power also gives the wealthy the ability to impose harsh bargaining terms, to his advantage, in any market interaction on the less wealthy - and under the capitalist system, he is practically compelled to."

There is no compulsion to do so, that is your straw man addition in order to oppose it.

In any case, even if they do...they cannot violate the power of those who can say yes or no to any deal. No rich person or poor person owns the right to force other people to engage in a deal they do not want. When I want that cell phone, or that tomato, and AT&T won't come down on price...I walk away and forgo the phone..Safeway won't come down...I leave sans tomato....rights on both sides preserved.

Your rights as a person do not presuppose the right to threaten other people with loss of liberty or property because you don't like the deal they offer. You seem to have the idea you are literally entitled to force other people to offer you deals to your terms. You refuse to treat others as fully human with their own rights to their own production.

"The rich capitalist can bide his time; his refirgerator is full, his bank account full of money. The worker without power must accept the raw deal offered or become homeless and starve."

No, there is no "must". The worker without power is not forced by the power company to want power, he is not forced by the power company to value power. Acting as if people's wants are the responsibility of someone else is ludicrous. The power company offers power to whoever decides that they wish to buy it..that is the sum total extent of their 'power'.

"Workers, of course, can orgnize and collectively bargain, with threat to withhold their labor, too, but unavoidably do so from a much weaker position, because the power held by the capitalists gives them virtual ownership of governments, law-enforcement, armies, private armed thugs. Governments pass anti-worker laws, law enforcement and even armies violently supress labor action, through threat or actual force."

This is *precisely* why I CONTINUALLY and unceasingly argue to take this power from govt. Yet you continue to support doling it out, regardless of the fact that it is the very existence of this power that results in it's misuse. My system solves this. Your's creates it.

"So, how can you find such a situation morally acceptable?"

Because number one, your morality does not hold each person morally responsible for their own choices and valuations. You persist in accruing responsibility to parties who have nothing to do with what you apply to them, so that you can then justify threatening them into submission using the tools of the State.

Number two, you believe in treating other people as if they are yours to direct, and make dichotomies on people's rights based on situations and wealth. Thirdly, you see other people's lives and property as tools to serve your goals, and you violate those lives and rights with full intent by replacing their choices and freedoms with your ideas.

I don't see how you can consider a system of what you propose moral at all, regardless of the nobility of your goals, it is completely backwards and disrespectful of each person as unique and sovereign within their rights. We are not here to be your tools.

"And, there is no way even more doses of the same would help the situation - market transactions among unequal parties are inherently antagonistic,"

No they aren't.

"and capitalism assures gross inequality and the enrichment of the few and poverty for billions."

no it doesn't.

Mntgoat

Like you said,you and people of your convictions don't want to empirically observe, measure and test any ideas that concern unequal economic power.

Somehow, you still buy into the civil society vs. state dichotomy; civil society is the bastion of individual "freedom" and rationality while the state thwarts both freedom and individual rational decision-making. In other words, it's the Big Bad Wolf.

Of course, the only response you can give to any observations concerning unequal economic power is "No they aren't" and "no it doesn't."

As I've stated earlier, 18th century Enlightenment concepts such as atomistic and possessive individualism are out of touch with historical reality, social science research and philosophical developments since the 18th c.

And such views were held, they were held, by a small intellectual elite within Northwestern Europe-especially England. Most of the world's population never bought it. These concepts didn't intellectually fit within the reality of tribal, nomadic, monarchical, city-state, and imperial societies.

In other words, concepts based on 18th century Enlightenment ideas were both irrelevant to most people and very ethnocentric.

Today, these concepts are mostly found in neo-classical economics departments in universities. And many people consider this form of economics ahistorical, non-contextual, and non-empirical.

Moreover, this type of economic analysis increasingly resorts to mathematics. The mathematics is used to extend and refine usually untested economic models and concepts.

(In fact, economics -especially the neo-classical form -has an awful history when it comes to economic forecasting. Many joke about this reality by saying, economic forecasters are statistically less reliable than people who just make guesses.)

So, neo-classical economics is built on a faith based foundation; as a discipline, it is still stuck in the ethnocentric and metaphysical world of the 18th century enlightment.

It refuses to introduce economic coercion, intrinsic individualism, political economy, historical empiricism, social class, economic imperialism, ecology, anthropology, psycology and systematic criticisms of its 18th century theoretical model.

Hey, mntgoat. I'll end with two observations.

The basic problem within the capitalist political economy is as follows: Those with the most needs have the least power while those with the least needs have the most power (Parenti).

Social and economic stratification is based
on unequal control over access to important material resources (Sanders).

Welcome to the realities of the 21st century!

Mtn Goat thinks very clearly, and I'm glad he remains part of the discussion, even when seriously reviled. I take exception to some of his reasoning, however.

His ethic of choice is admirable, but unrealistic, because our economic regime has reduced so many to subsistence level, and every classical economist draws the line there. When you hit that line, transactions are no longer a matter choice.

Another problem is that our current regime is highly monopolistic, which is anti-libertarian, so Mtn Goat is advocating a system which does not obtain, as if it were the system we live under. He is describing a free market that exists only in fantasy. Our system is no more "capitalist" in the classical sense than the Soviet Union's.

Also, though he mentioned economic rent, he hasn't accounted for its effects. This is a biggie, and explains a lot more than the pseudo-conflict between labor and capital. Someone in another CD forum mentioned Henry George, and I spent a couple of days reading his work. I think we'd all benefit from doing the same; it makes a lot of things much clearer than we tend to in these CD debates. George's understanding of the relations among labor, capital and land, show that progressives and libertarians have a lot of common ground and can be reconciled easily by returning to some basic concepts.

The Free-Market isn't about market at all. Capitalism is about competition.
In all this high-minded dissertation and historical analyses and emphatic declaration of rights and responsibilities, i read only once -COMPETITION.
Consider everything you have observed of Competition. Sports, Quiz Shows, Shell Games- Each favours the Agressor. Competition is inately rigged for the Agressor. Labour is About Quality -whether you're a Craftsman, Professional or those I admire most as they are so vertically versatile, the Service Industry~their success and remuneration comes from Quality Work. Capitalism is solely determined by competition - The more Agressive the greater the Remuneration

Please -Commerce Industry -GOOD. We all agree on that But Free-Market Capitalism is PREDATORY. And Predatory is Humanities Adversary.

Many of you do not understand Me, but it can't be denied. Therre is nothing Self-Regulating of a Free-Market. Ask any Capitalist, Bold face ask an Executive "isn't the Free-Market based on Competition?" Say No More
But Listen to Them. And considering my words all this will become Very Clear to You. Try It-He Won't Deny it