Keith Hudson wrote: > Quite what is traded falls within the subject of economics. However, > quite why things are traded is indisputably within the subject of > evolutionary theory from now onwards. It is nothing to do with greed or > exploitation or politics; It is, quite simply, natural and beneficial
As usual, Keith conveniently omits "quite HOW things are traded", to conceal the crucial differences between trade per se (which may indeed be "natural and beneficial") and the follies of "Free" Trade (which is unnatural and harmful, and has _everything_ to do with greed & exploitation & politics). If Keith still thinks that... > it is nothing to do with greed or > exploitation or politics; It is, quite simply, natural and beneficial ..., then I invite him to come to the Alps to a transit motorway and watch the EU 40-ton trucks blasting thru the valley, making people choke in the diesel and ozone, just to unnecessarily transport stuff back and forth between Italy and Germany/France, e.g. - taking potatoes to Italy for processing because it's a bit cheaper there, and then taking them back to Germany/France, - taking animals from Poland to Italy alive, utterly torturing them along the way without food or water for days penned in narrow transporters, just because it's cheaper to transport them alive, then processing their meat in Italy because it gives higher profits to sell the meat as Italian ham while grown in Poland (with lower wages and standards for animal welfare), - taking Irish butter to Italy and Italian butter to Ireland just so the consumers have an illusion of choice and savings (btw, the Belgian truck that set the Montblanc tunnel on fire in 1999, killing 39 people, carried butter and flour). - of course this game also works with non-food items that are completely exchangeable. This so utterly contrasts the usual PR tale of stone-age cave-men trading in things they otherwise would lack. Btw, the monkey research was about envy & meanness rather than fairness. The former is indeed endemic among neo-cons, but does that mean that modern human societies should behave like capuchin monkeys ? What ever happened to millennia of social progress (which the neo-cons happen to roll back) ? I think by now it has become clear that if one wants to view economics as evolutionary in the biological sense (as opposed to shareholder value "sense"), then the more social societies are the winners (in the long run, anyway). The only problem is that the anti-social societies are taking the others down the abyss. Chris _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
