Laissez-faire and laissez-aller are cute expressions describing how men and women should be free.
I don't understand your reference to the jungle of the environmentalists.
However, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. So, again, I don't understand how you relate this non-existent value to the geneticists.
It should be noted that in a free market "profit" is almost always wages. Of course, in a modern command economy, profit can be practically anything -- particularly after it's been well scrubbed by the your local neighborhood accounting firm.
Harry
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Ray wrote:
Have you ever contemplated the parallel between Laissez Faire and the Environmental belief in the goodness of the Jungle? Have you ever thought about the parallel between the economic concept of "intrinsic" value and the "genetic" arguments that we have been discussing on this list? Have you thought of how the paradox is that in the former case the Laissez Faire people in the market would never allow a Jungle to lie fallow and in the latter the geneticists are the ones who advocate all material value as extrinsic to the thing itself, being grounded in what humans decide makes it valuable.A paradox maybe? Or should we say that John Calvin was not such a nut afterall? That the genetic argument is just another version of the doctrine of the Elect and that only the Elect have the right to define value. I discovered this quote below while rethinking the works of Walter Kerr the New York Theater Critic from my college days. I was given this wonderful book that Father Burghardt quotes by a neighbor pianist friend who went on to become a psychoanalyst and later to become the first of my friends to die young. Her name was Pamela Gunnell and I say that name at this time as a remembrance and a thanks for sharing the work of this fine American theatrical thinker. Kerr was the first one to put his finger squarely on the trigger point, that has destroyed the serious Arts in America, that many more famous economic minds would travel not nearly so succinctly or so well. Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] CONTEMPLATION: A long loving look at the real. Reverend Walter J. Burghardt (1989) This adventure in contemplation has three stages. First, some introductory remarks about obstacles to contemplation. Then, the more substantive issue: What is contemplation? Finally, practical suggestions on how to realize your capacity for contemplation. The primary villain is a 20th-century law, a law that hounds us without our knowing it, has a strong ring of virtue, seems self-evident for responsible living. Almost three decades ago Walter Kerr framed that law as follows: "Only useful activity is valuable, meaningful, moral. Activity that is not dearly, concretely useful to oneself or to others is worthless, meaningless, immoral."1 By that law most Americans live. That is why they feel guilty if they have nothing to "do." That is why many are reluctant to confess they took yesterday off, "did" nothing, just enjoyed. That is why so many must justify a vacation: it will help them work better when they get back. That is why the introductory ploy at a cocktail party is not "Who are you?" but "What do you do?" That is why young coronary patients are characteristically restless during leisure hours and feel guilty when they should relax. How did we come to this unpretty pass? Through a philosophy. Not that utilitarianism conquered our culture at one masterstroke. As Kerr phrased it, 'Ideas that are powerful enough to dictate the conduct of whole generations. . . enter the blood and marrow of a people as spirochetes do-unnamed, invisible-quite a long time after a lonely thinker has set them loose in the silence of his study."2 You have to go back to Jeremy Benthem (d. 1832), identifying happiness with utility, pleasure with profit. Back to James Mill (d. 1836), rigid utilitarian educating his small son on a philosophy of rigid utilitarianism. And there was the son himself, John Stuart Mill (d. 1873). He began Greek and math at the age of three; at eight, he had read Aesop, Xenophon, and Herodotus in the original, together with masses of history; about 12, he was grappling with Aquinas and Aristotle; at 13, political economy, Adam Smith. At 21, he broke down, "victim of a dejection which robbed life not only of its pleasures but also of its purpose."3 And the last word in that philosophical assault may have been succinctly written in 1871 by an English logician and political economist, William Stanley Jevons (d. 1882): "Value depends entirely upon utility." This, I am afraid, is a thesis that dominates much of American culture today: what is important is usefulness, the profit I can extract from an experience or a possession.
--------------------------------------------------- For those who have gone to that History of Economics page on the New School website, you might be interested in checking out the Henry George articles which contains a letter from Milton Friedman. REH ****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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