Well, I shouldn't expend too much effort on this, but let's see.. > In a rational market Rational, huh? People make exchanges in pursuit of their personal gai

Well, I shouldn't expend too much effort on this, but let's see.. > In a rational market Rational, huh? People make exchanges in pursuit of their personal gain. That is constant. Some exchanges are better than others, but every single one has at least a perceived benefit to both parties. What's rational got to do with it? Sure, some people are better at pursuing their personal gain than others, but that kind of fluctuation just blends into the massive web of exchanges that contitutes an economy. > the skew will be toward increasing negative externalities and away from positive externalities. That is: the market exacerbates the problem That's quite a vague claim. Care to elaborate? What does that mean and why does it happen? > That generalizes to "how well do people make decisions affecting others". Free-market capitalism optimizes for the "spending your own money" part of this, but as we've already discussed, not the "taking into consideration others' costs". Money is simply a subset of this. It's blindingly obvious that people are much more careless when using other people's money. That was my point. The end result of that fact is that whatever someone using other people's money is ostensibly trying to achieve, he just won't be very efficient about it. In fact, the guy using someone else's money doesn't even care about efficiency. He just cares about his personal gain, just like every other human being on the planet, regardless of how free a market he's operating in. To re-cap: Suppose Person A is a politician in charge of a budget, and Person B is an individual using his own money. Both of them only give a fuck about their own personal gain, but Person A will just blow away as much of other people's money as he sees fit, whereas Person B will be careful in how he uses his money. > Free-market capitalism optimizes for the "spending your own money" part of this What does it mean to "optimize" for the "part" of spending your own money? That's what us little folks do in any case. > but as we've already discussed, not the "taking into consideration others' costs" Again, the politician doesn't give a flying fuck about others' costs - he's using others' money, for fuck's sake. By definition, every single expenditure he decides on is a cost to others. > For more on management through bottom-up or top-down methods for long-term survival, see Jared Diamond's _Collapse_, in particular chapter 9. Effectively they address your question, optimized for social survival, not individual wealth. The fuck? It seems I asked a question, and for an answer, you're sending me off to read a chapter of a book? How about answering in your own words, or even paraphrasing what this wise old sage said in his book? >> No matter how much Coercion you throw around, there will always be some people who don't give a fuck about other people, or nature, or whatever. > You can avoid giving them legal sanction, which is a damned good first step. Legal sanction? For not giving a fuck about other people? Can you guess what the ultimate "legal sanction" for someone who doesn't care about others is? -It's political power. In other words, sociopaths all over the world are rushing into their local governments. My point was that these people do exist, and they'll do harm to others, and there's no way to legislate them out of existence no matter how hard you try. >> Well, I didn't say that voluntary exchanges constitute all economic activity ever. > ORLY? "voluntary exchanges are the basis of all economic activity ever". Both of us want to be right, of course. But you started the nitpicking, even though you probably got the idea, especially after my previous response. Tell me, can you see a difference between these two statements: - Voluntary exchanges *constitute* all economic activity ever. - Voluntary exchanges *are the basis* of all economic activity ever. As I already mentioned, the latter statement leaves room for involuntary exchanges too. Here's an example: Slaves were forced to pick cotton, but no one was forced to buy that cotton. You brought slavery up as an example of a non-voluntary "exchange", though it's unclear if it can be called one, but buying that cotton from the farm is certainly a voluntary exchange without which there would be no need for anyone to pick the cotton. In other words, in this example, voluntary exchanges are the basis for the non-voluntary "exchanges". But this is all beside the point. When I wrote that, I was thinking of how nothing would ever happen without voluntary exchanges, all the way from bartering with meat and tools back in the stone age or whatever, to clicking on a button to charge your credit card today. The point is that Capitalism is just voluntary exchanges. Money is accumulated through exchanges (selling goods/services to your customers), and money is invested in exchange for equity etc. It's all exchanges. Again, voluntary exchanges are the basis for all economic activity ever, and thus, it makes no sense to consider "Capitalism" a bad thing. What does the word even mean anymore, after getting hi-jacked by "Liberal"/Marxist clowns? > You'd be wrong. Slavery indirectly, blackmail directly. Oh alright then. Well, actually, I'm a slave, and so are you. So yay. Non-voluntary "exchanges" affect both of our lives! Now what? >> Horror stories are surfacing anew about the Chinese prison labor system and the sale of its products in the United States. Oh wow. What about all those American prisoners making license plates? Prison labor system, anyone? > (Referring to "the game is structured to explicitly benefit one side or the other."). My point is that these effects are endemic to the modern capitalist system, and are often championed by it. I'll note that Adam Smith himself argued for significant involvement on the one hand by governments to prevent such abuses, as well as a propensity for governments to be engaged by commercial interests in exacerbating them. Later pretenders to capitalism and in particular laissez-faire principles (which Smith never discusses and didn't endorse) make the problem rather markedly worse. You seem to be talking about the so-called "crony-capitalism" I already mentioned earlier. Yes, that sucks, but again: >> What do you think the source of these particular problems might be? What exactly are the "abuses" of the "modern capitalist system"? What is the "modern capitalist system"? Does it make sense to have the government try to prevent the abuses when the government itself enables them? Anyone from Wall Street gone to jail yet for, you know, obvious crimes? > I'd chalk the problem up generally to the tendency of power to accumulate and consolidate, regardless of whether you're discussing political, corporate, military, communications, or social power. It's that old Iron Law of Oligarchy. The problem as exemplified in the present market-capitalist-financial system is that it fails to acknowledge or address the problem. Dude. When there's a small group of people exercising absolute authority over everything that happens in some specific geographical area, what could possibly go wrong? Do you think the people in power like being in power? Do you think they might enjoy accumulating wealth (at others' expense)? Do you think they might dish out special favors to their buddies? > It's less a specific fault of capitalism than a general fault which it doesn't resolve. None of that has anything to do with an economy as such. An economy is just a massive web of exchanges, where each exchange represents two or more people pursuing their personal gain. People are perfectly capable of buying iPhones, food, clothing, and whatever the hell they happen to want or need without any central authority existing. There's no need to try and force any "economic system" on this web of exchanges, the best thing to do is just to let people pursue their personal gain because no amount of legislation will change the fact that people will. It's not an economy's job to "resolve" any political problems - it's enough for it to function. Everything will sort itself out. You see, sometimes one person's personal gain involves, say, another person being able to trust that the water coming out of his brand new apartment's tap won't contain toxic chemicals from a nearby plant, or that the flight he's about to take will actually reach its destination.