Posted on 01/04/2006 7:33:35 AM PST by Nicholas Conradin
The author might be leaping to conclusions. Either that, or he's a monkey mind-reader.
Er, the invention of writing was part of evid dead white male plot. Try to keep up.
You could appear as a defense witness for this guy.
He says he was just 'pastoring'. And since we can't read his mind, who's to know what he intended?
(/OJ juror mode)
Do monkeys typically trade goods? If yes, such behavior should be commonly observed. If this behavior is unusual, how do you know that this is what the monkey was doing?
That bonobos trade food for sex has been known for years. I'm surprised you haven't heard of it. That monkeys do it is news to me, but I'm not surpised.
As usual, you are missing the point. As I wrote, the free market on a large scale is not based on anarchy. It most definitely requires a government of men to enforce the rules of fair play. That government is a central authority that must obviously posses some intelligence. If you are going to compare that government to the "laws of nature," you are profoundly confused, unless you are willing to concede that the "laws of nature" are intelligently designed.
King: Today, I think I'll invent market regulation.Market regulations attempt to impose design after the fact on a thing that just grew. Often, they aren't very intelligent.Minister: What's a market?
King: I was about to invent that, too.
It's not deliberate. Galbraith really is that ignorant of economics. A reading of any of his books will indicate such.
NEW The Left’s Intelligent Design Problem. Evolution is like Adam Smith's economics; ID is socialism.
"Free markets grew out of primitive barter relationships. They obviously antedate any effort to regulate them. It would be absurd to believe otherwise."
So what. Adam Smith's invisible hand applies to more than just "primitive barter relationships." Once the economy reaches a certain size (and we're about six orders of magnitude past that now), government regulation becomes necessary.
No, not to set prices or anything like that. Just establishing a common currency requires intelligent government intervention. So does contract enforcement. Your partner renigs on his contract, and what do you do? That's right: you sue him. Can you do that without government involvement? (Yes, I realize that frivolous lawsuits are out of control, but that does not mean that *all* lawsuits are frivolous.)
And what about equities markets? Do you suppose for a minute that they don't need any intelligent government regulation?
The bottom line is that drawing a comparison between evolution and free-market economics is fundamentally misleading if the purpose is to show that ID is not needed in economics.
My last post (#70) was directed to the wrong person. It should have been directed to you. Yes, you.
the economy isn’t a machine at all, but an ecosystem. And ecosystems aren’t designed, they evolve.
Unfortunately for the thesis of this article, economies aren't "blind, purposeless processes of trial-and-error, specialization, and complexity (the hallmarks of the Darwinian algorithm)."
Rather, among other things an economy is better described in terms of a large number of informed, purposeful decisions on the part of those who partake in the economy. Further, it's not possible to divorce an economy from the rules imposed upon it by politicians, among others -- another breakdown in the thesis.
I stopped reading at this point -- if he's wrong on this fundamental point, the rest of the article's gonna be headed off the cliff.
Only if you assume that there is no place for intelligent consideration and pursuit of specific goals in peoples' economic decisions. Once you factor in the influence of human intelligence on economic decisions, the whole thing falls apart.
"I think you're completely ignorant of the historical development of trade. It was not a government invention. That governments cannot leave it alone now does not demonstrate that it cannot exist without government. It only demonstrates that dung draws flies."
If you think that modern, global free trade could work with no "intelligent" government regulation, you are a genuine idiot.
If a hacker breaks into a company's computers and empties its accounts, do you suppose they will call someone in the government? Or do you think they would just say, "Hey, he outsmarted us, and we deserve to die. It's survival of the fittest, after all."
If you buy a car with a 100,000 mile warranty, and the car is a lemon but the car company just tells you to get lost, will you try to fight them through legal means (i.e., the governmnent), or will you just say, "Hey, I'm not going to buy a car from them again."
What if you sign a mortgage, and then find out that it contained a clause on page 43 that prohibits you from using your home? Would you say, "Well, I deserve it. I should have read the whole contract." I suspect you would assume that some *government* regulation prevents such a clause.
Use your brain, dude!
In his graphic style, Milton Freidman illustrated that principle on his television program, Free to Choose, with "The Pencil Story." Friedman held a common yellow #2 pencil in his hand and said:
"Nobody knows how to make a pencil. There's not a single person in the world who actually knows how to make a pencil.
"In order to make a pencil, you have to get wood for the barrel. In order to get wood, you have to have logging. You have to have somebody who can manufacture saws. No single person knows how to do all that.
"What's called lead isn't lead. It's graphite. It comes from some mines in South America. In order to make pencils, you'd have to be able to get the lead.
"The rubber at the tip isn't really rubber, but it used to be. It comes from Malaysia, although the rubber tree is not native to Malaysia. It was imported into Malaysia by some English botanists.
"So, in order to make a pencil, you would have to be able to do all of these things. There are probably thousands of people who have cooperated together to make this pencil. Somehow or other, the people in South America who dug out the graphite cooperated with the people in Malaysia who tapped the rubber trees, cooperated with, maybe, people in Oregon who cut down the trees.
"These thousands of people don't know one another. They speak different languages. They come from different religions. They might hate one another if they met. What is it that enabled them to cooperate together?
"The answer is the existence of a market.
"The simple answer is the people in South America were led to dig out the graphite because somebody was willing to pay them. They didn't have to know who was paying them; they didn't have to know what it was going to be used for. All they had to know was somebody was going to pay them.
"What brought all these people together was an enormously complex structure of prices - the price of graphite, the price of lumber, the price of rubber, the wages paid to the laborer, and so on. It's a marvelous example of how you can get a complex structure of cooperation and coordination which no individual planned.
"There was nobody who sat in a central office and sent an order out to Malaysia: 'Produce more rubber.' It was the market that coordinated all of this without anybody having to know all of the people involved."
That pretty well says it all.
"What brought all these people together was an enormously complex structure of prices - the price of graphite, the price of lumber, the price of rubber, the wages paid to the laborer, and so on. It's a marvelous example of how you can get a complex structure of cooperation and coordination which no individual planned."
O horrible man. How dare you deny the Intelligent Economy Designer?
I'd say it does. It should. Somehow, it won't. There's some reason it won't.
Almost the only economy I can remember that had anything like an identifiable designer was the Soviet economy from the time of collectivization through Stalin's death. Even then, a mostly underground and formally illegal black market--the residue of former capitalism--was the final resort for getting goods where they were needed.
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