[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources among competing uses.
[snip]
This sounds to me like it could be the subject of
serious fully linguistic conversation among the citizens of the polis,
to decide among themselves the shape of their shared social life,
rather than the content of an impoverished less-than-conversation
between "buyers" and "sellers", with only one word in its
language: "$", where the shape of shared social
life is formed by the "cunning of the price mechanism which
takes place behind the persons' backs" likw qw have in
our "formal democracy" where the most important issues are
excluded from political discussion and relegated to
the hidden machanations of CxOs and Directors of
corporate boards (as has been pointed out many times,
some large "private" corporations are bigger than
many "sovereign nations").
So "economics" could be a discipline which studied in a
disciplined way the ways persons decide how to
shape their shared social world, e.g., how and why some of
them abnegate genuine responsibility and let
the quasi-natural force of "The Invisible Hand"
made the decisions instead.
A secondary part of economics, of course, would be
calculating the various alternatives that are available
for the citizens of the polis to choosae among. For instance,
the economists might determine that the citizens of
the polid afford both an Anti Ballistic Missile shield and
also have resources left over to preserve the
books in their libraries, or even to protect themselves from
terrorists in dinghies loaded with fertilizer-based
explosives.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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