> [Marsha] > The idea of the free market is a myth, a cruel joke. > > [Arlo] > I've said it before, and I'll say it again, a "market" is only as > good as the values of the society (or better said, it is a reflection > of social values). The much-lauded "free market" had no trouble in > the buying and selling of slaves throughout history, and a "free > market" has no qualms engaging in child or sex-slave trafficking. It > will distribute pornography with the same ease as it distributes my > weekly Time. It will unload a boatload of shackled "darkies" to slave > in plantations with the same ease as it unloads crates of > Playstations. A "free market" would traffic cocaine and meth with the > same mechanistic precision at it distributes Coca-Cola and Doritoes. > > No one, not even Platt, truly wants a wholly unregulated market > (bye-bye copyright and hello personal nuclear missile sales!) The > issue is realistically about what regulations and why? To what degree > and what for? That is the sensible dialogue. Chest-thumping about the > "free market" is merely talk-radio rhetoric.
"A free market is a Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people sell, in other words what people value, can never be contained by any intellectual formula. What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality. The market is always changing and the direction of that change can never be predetermined. The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody richer-by preventing static economic patterns from setting in and stagnating economic growth. That is the reason the major capitalist economies of the world have done so much better since World War II than the major socialist economies. It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and objectively, have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling of things. They closed it because the metaphysical structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists." -- Robert Pirsig Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
