Keith Hudson wrote, > A lot of other activities go on in society -- and rightly so -- than the > mere earnings of wages and creation of profits from business. But all the > activities of society depend upon business. At least it's always been so > ever since man invented and traded the first flint axehead.
You're kidding? You must be kidding. I saw The Flintstones, too. But I viewed it as a cartoon, not a documentary about anthropological prehistory. I'll let Mark Anspach reply, since I previously posted his remark to futurework, under the subject heading "Yams & pigs", without any response: "The economists' myth tells us that exchange fulfills a simple instrumental function. You live in a community that produces yams and I live in a community that raises pigs, so we enter into an exchange in order to vary our diets. One fine day, to facilitate our transactions, we invent a system of equivalence between our products -- money -- and there you have it. But, as anthropologists have shown us, Marcel Mauss in particular, the main form of exchange in so-called 'primitive'societies is the gift, which cannot be reduced to economic rationality." -- Mark Anspach. "Global Markets, Anonymous Victims", UNESCO Courier, May 2001. Below is a fine example of the kind of rationalization that follows from following the "self-evident" economists' myth to its counter-factual, counter-intuitive and absurd end. It is from the Reason Public Policy Institute, in its 2002 16th Annual Report on Privatization: "Criminal investigations are already underway, and markets have already punished Enron for its lack of transparency and poor disclosure. Investors large and small will now demand that the "gatekeeper" institutions of our financial markets -- accounting firms, bondrating companies, company boards of directors, and regulators like the SEC -- do what they can to promote and reward transparency and disclosure. Companies failing to meet the transparency standards that the gatekeepers and the markets require will have trouble raising capital and will shrink, while companies that provide accurate information will thrive." In short, according to Reason (but not reason) even criminal activity has beneficial social effects due to the "already" self-correcting activity of the market. Hitherto, think-tank savants of the right have merely advocated the regime of greed as a beacon of progress and general welfare. Who would have expected them to advocate the regime of fraud as the primrose path to transparency, disclosure and due diligence? What's next? Drunken revelry as the upholder of sobriety? Rape as the guardian of chastity? Irony is when bad consequences follow from good intentions or good consequences follow from sordid motives. It is rank sophistry to argue from the mere possiblity of a devious outcome to its inevitability. There is a children's story called "Lazy Jack" in which everything Jack does is based on rote obedience to specific instructions his mother gave him to correct a previous mistake. The climax of the story comes when the beautiful daughter of a wealthy merchant bursts into laughter upon seeing Jack foolishly carrying a donkey on his back. The laughter cures the girl of her inability to speak, Jack and the girl marry and they live happily ever after without ever having to work again. It is a charming story with a surprise ending. One would not conclude from the tale that if one persists long enough in acts of obstinate stupidity there will eventually come a provident result that will redeem all previous misadventure. Adam Smith's invisible hand vignette is a version of the Lazy Jack story. The quote from Reason Public Policy Institute is an interpretation of the Lazy Jack story that claims we will be better off if we walk through town carrying donkeys on our backs. It is conceivable that if a million men walk through a million towns with a million donkeys on their backs, a handful of them will marry rich and beautiful young ladies. I wouldn't count on it.
