Basically the banks are arguing "your love gimme such a thrill, but your love don't pay my bills, so gimme money, that's what I want." (actually John Lennon was sick in the plane prior to performing this song at the "Live Peace in Toronto" concert in 1969).
Suppose that you are or feel dependent for your survival on monetary income from the market. Then you are bound to argue that there has to be a market and there has to be private property, because there is no other way to survive. What economics adds to this, as you imply, is an ideological justification: it's efficient, and results in a better form of civilisation. Or, if we become a little more dogmatic, we could say that it is inconceivable (untheorisable) to run an economy without markets and bourgeois private property, and the United Nations just haven't understood Milton Friedman. Neo-liberalism (sic.) takes this idea further, and says there exist only markets and only bourgeois private property, public ownership, commonly held goods, sharing and co-operation are a fiction, outside of private consumption in households and outside private enterprise. Neo-conservatism (sic.) is just a tack more cautious and defensive in this, because it admits there are some areas of public assets in the world which could be still be privatised, for example to pay off debts, but, all the same, christian fundamentalism basically admits only private property, only Jesus Christ is permitted to do things like sharing out loaves and fishes and stuff and he is in heaven now, and no longer available to do it except through the hidden hand of the market. The conceptual issue here is how we deal with the historical evidence, because for most of human history there was no monetary economy at all and for a very long time monetary economy played only a very small role in economic life. This issue can ultimately be resolved only by the theorem that God (sic.) created the market and God created money for us to use one day to allocate his bountiful resources (a creationist theory), or else simply by ignoring this sticky issue (history is bunk theory). Now suppose that in a market economy, you already have assets, resources, wherewithal of life etc. then you can still in principle exchange without using money, receive stuff, give away stuff, share stuff, own stuff in common, because of the freedom with the market provides, which is the basis for a lingering socialist evil (sic.). But this creates a problem at the very frontiers of bourgeois economic (sic.) thinking, namely: how do we prevent people from giving stuff away instead of selling, receiving without buying, sharing things, and owning things in common ? What do we need here ? Armies ? Police ? Security staff ? Brainwashing ? In other words, how do we move the privatisation process forward and thus expand the market ? At the most theoretically advanced level, neo-liberalism resolves this through prostitution economics, because if we model prostitution, we can obtain the data necessary to devise institutions in which all observable transfers of economic resources between people can take the form of a monetary transaction, and then we can phase this program in, and remove all outstanding impediments to the market. The theoretical objection to this is, that the model shows, that there is still a problem with pricing and costing, because observable interactions between economic agents (the negotiation process, the bargaining process) involve a significant number of unknowns, and the very act of observing a buyer or seller, may change prices. To overcome the volatility problem, christian fundamentalism provides an answer: prayers and faith in the hidden hand of God, because if we all have faith, then the market will work well, and economic behaviour of economic agents will become more consistent, regulated and predictable. Churches should therefore be theorised as essential market instruments. As I implied at the start, love cannot be the theoretical foundation of bourgeois economics, and it is not surprising therefore that Marx discovered that bourgeois economics is actually a highly contradictory enterprise. References: Karl Marx, Economics and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Note also: http://www.yakupkucukkale.com/nobel/GunnarMyrdal.htm J.
