This is a public response to private mail sent to me. Ordinarily, I would agree with you, but what in the hell does Peter Burns think that he is trying to accomplish by asking me these sorts of questions. Do you think the average person is going to have the sort of grasp of pricing theory minutiae that a professional economist has? One of the reasons I get steamed by these sorts of questions from Burns, Rosser, Mitchell, etc. is that they smack of academic insider knowledge. This is what these people do for a living. I could throw around computer programming concepts with a bunch of people who haven't been doing it for 28 years like me and they would say, "Wow, how does he know all that". Simple. I know all that computer stuff because I am paid to do so. If I was paid to read literature on pricing theory in particular and economics in general for the last 28 years, I would sound as smart as the people on this list. But less academic insider knowledge would make this a more relevant site. I don't need to remind you of that, do I? Well, I guess maybe I do. Mitchel Cohen, the author of the Z Magazine post, is somebody I know quite well and who I've argued with in the past about the same exact issues. I couldn't resist the opportunity to challenge his ideas about Che Guevara. He is an amateur like me. He makes his living selling poems on the subway. Can you dig that? But to butt heads with a professional economist about pricing theory. Forget about it. > <clip> don't be so unfair > to Peter Burns. He's not an economist as much as a activist > socialist Jesuit who's interested in such issues of how > capitalism can be replaced by a planned economy that _actually_ > works and in responding to critics of planning such as Hayek. > > In any event, personal insults should not appear on this list. >
