I’ve recently become more and more interested in economics. for a variety of reasons. its fascinating, like a mandala. everyone sees what they want to in it.
there’s psychology, and sociology, and it matters, like food and jobs, and mom can’t even make apple pie if she don’t have apples or money to buy gas for the oven.
and there’s politics and these days, its almost a theology.
if you ask a some people, its like religion, and ronald reagan ain’t jesus, but maybe he is saint paul. the pharisee, converted. pointing the way to the one: that would have to be milton friedman, I guess, in this analogy. he did win a nobel prize (friedman, that is), but it turns out economics is also kind of like magic, you can be totally, 100% provably wrong, and still win a nobel prize in your field. you’ve got to love it.
so the basic idea is that we have these contending theories. there have been other theories in the past, but they have all been proven wrong. usually through the force of arms, it turns out, which would seem to be out of the field of economics, but no, its quite ecumenical. so flexible. it can accommodate any eventuality. it has to. that’s one of the many attributes it shares with theology.
one of these theories is that the market is the most efficient way to organize pretty much anything.
and that’s good as far as it goes, since the market relies on some very reliable forces: greed and self-interest.
but a free market is like an AI thing called expert systems. it works well enough, perhaps even optimally, but only within certain constraints. outside those constraints, a free market, like an expert system, is subject to catastrophic failure.
do I really have to cite chapter and verse on you at this point? oh, yes. another thing about economists is that their memories can be so astonishingly short.
now, the other idea is that we have rights and responsibilities as individuals, and we have other responsibilities as groups, organizations and societies of human beings. and to the extent that markets help us achieve our objectives and satisfy our responsibilities, that’s fine. but there are other things that we simply must do, be, and have, and markets don’t guarantee that these things come into being, so we as a society will them into being.
these include things like the military, schools, libraries, parks, volunteer fire departments, and so on. we used to have a word for it, we called it the “common wealth” or the commons. where we all shared the pasture. we helped raise each other’s barns. not for money, but because we were social minded. and at the bottom, we hoped that if we helped out when we could, should the need arise, we could expect help from others in return. basic human decency.
but there’s another word for that these days: socialism. ooh. how we hate socialism. its right there next to communism in our pantheon of isms. and we know we hate communism, because we fought a long and bitter war against it. the war was so long that the other side even forgot what they were about and morphed into something entirely different from what I’m talking about when I use the word socialism.
but unfortunately, most of us in the west have been brainwashed so thoroughly, that even volunteer fire departments are suspect these days.
like the man said, don’t confuse the map for the territory.