An Apology For The Market Economy

The strong point of the market-economy is that it is a social-economic system that resembles a jungle. And as we seem to be descendents of monkeys, that's not a bad habitat at all for the human species... ;-)

No serious: The advantage of the market-economy is that it needs no "creator" or "planner", because it's all a matter of demand and offer, and where there's more demand than production, the prices rise (wheiter expressed in money or in labor), and this will make production more profitable, and therefore more likely to happen...

In this sense socialists are Creationists and many religious Creationists are economic Evolutionists...

Of course the biggest problem of the market economy is that it decontextualizes the economy. The economy becomes an independent field of human endavour in which costs and rewards are only expressed in terms of money, not in ethical, intellectual or social credits. To be good economically often means "to be bad" when seen from other, more balanced human viewpoints.

Chomsky surely has a point when he expresses that we (in the west) might have arrived at a point where we can consider ourselves rich enough in economic terms to begin looking at other valuables...

pomos

If you think of humans as monkeys, capitalism is the perfect cage indeed.

But Wybo, how can you call the absence of human involvement in the decisions about production and demand an advantage ? You can answer that an advantage is always relative - but to defend capitalism by comparing it to stalinism is in my opinion not usefull. This is what the people with vested interests want you to believe - capitalism may have its flaws but its the best system history has offered so far. A good point to turn our attention to different historical alternatives of capitalism. To begin with the SpanishRevolution

Secondly I think this is a good point to become critical about anarchism as we have defined it so far, regarding its theory about the change of society. Thus to think of ArgumentsAgainstAnarchism

wybo

I think that the absence of human involvement, and the presence of evolutionary forces can be an advantage because humans are not suitable for politics. Evolution allows the creation of complex systems without much intelligence.

But yes, you have a point in saying that we should try to become more than monkeys. In my opinion this is possible on top of a market-economy, not instead of it.