Think Science .

I wasn’t identifying Ayn Rand as making specific claims about free-market systems: just as a pretender to philosophy, and who pretends to support statements about economics on the philosophical principles she outlines. To make “A is A” an axiom, and pretend to derive anything significant from it, is to be intellectually dishonest.

(To be fair, perhaps this was a reaction against the extremely ’subjectivist’ philosophies which have been popular in continental Europe, but from an analytical standpoint her ‘work’ is in many ways too coarse-grained and populist to be taken seriously.)

Ayn placed tremendous importance on humans as tool using animals, who can acquire power by reason. But she seemed not to consider very much the fact of humans as social animals. This seems to skew her entire worldview to the question of what systems will prevent you from doing what you might want to, as opposed to whether or not what you want to do will prevent others from doing what they want to. In short, “might makes right, except if by ‘might’ you mean the power of government to interfere, which is evil”.

1) Is economic disparitiy intrinsic to Capitalism?

Actually, it is not only intrinsic, it is a sine qua non component; without disparity, Capitalism ceases to be. In capitalism, the more something is abundant, the less is its value. That’s why real prosperity is anatema to capitalism; when things start to go well, when more people start to have plenty, stuff loses value, inflation eats the prosperity, disaster and collapse hits everybody, and the cycle restarts.

2) Can capital accumulation be justified by an individual’s “merit”?

Not if the accumulation is an end in itself. Accumulated wealth should be used as a tool to provoke growth and prosperity; it is sad that so often this accumulation is nothing more than just accumulation (greed). Accumulate in order to accumulate even more and the hell with people!

Still, as said on item 1, if everyone could be wealthy, no one would be wealthy, because the offer would soon become larger than the demand, money would lose its value and collapse would follow.

I think this mix of capitalism and socialism that the helvetics are trying is a better alternative, the trick is to achieve the right balance, the correct dose of both in the mix. Markets are human cultural institutions.
Somebody is always making rules and the definition of “free” is arbitrarily made up by one interest or another.

What most free marketers often tout as free markets are markets with no government regulation. But such markets end up internally controlled by interests with the most power, they breed monopolies and such.

Free marketers have this illusion that such problems will fix themselves, and maybe they can, eventually, or at least they will change over time, but the “adjustments” involved can wreak havoc with peoples lives while the adjustments are still trying to work themselves out “naturally”.

The idea touted as a free market usually includes the illusion that markets are “natural”, but then falls into the naturalistic fallacy that “natural is good”. Hurricanes are natural, earthquakes are natural, bubonic plague is natural. Pretending that a human cultural institution is good because it is “natural” fallacious thinking. Sure human culture is natural, because we are embedded in nature, so religions are also natural and wars are natural.

Current wisdom among free marketers is magical thinking. The fact that economics is heavily invested in mathematics does not make it a science when the models are based on fantasy, which most modern economic models are. And this isn’t just me, there are voices in economics saying similar things.)

The only alternative to the is to have some regulating body, and the body must come up with a definition of what the purpose of the market is and what criteria constitute “free”. It all gets messy very quickly, but messiness is the human condition.

All markets are controlled by some process or another, the magical thinking of most free market economics is really magical thinking which merely abnegates the responsibility of deciding how the market should run.

I just completed reading paulo cohelo’s book brida. So thought of writing review for the book. If you’re interested then read on. The story revolves around the a woman called Brida who is aware of some special gift which God has given her. She feels that she’s the right person to learn about the supernatural powers and become a witch. She wants to trail in the past, present and future. And thus so, with her strong determination, she succeeds in getting these powers. In the process, she meets the Magus and Wicca. The Magus was her male teacher who was supposed to teach her the Tradition of Sun. While Wicca impressively teaches Brida the true power to become a witch.

But in the process, the Magus finds the bright illuminating point on the left shoulder of Brida, which indicates the she’s his Soul-mate. She finds the same on his right shoulder. But Brida is already in love with another man, Lorens, who loved her from bottom of his heart. Brida finds herself in a pickle because with the knowledge of these supernatural powers, she was in love with two men in her life.

Paulo Coelho did succeed in bringing the magic of the supernatural powers to a forefront and how some people can achieve it with true dedication. Somewhere, in the middle of the book, I got really bored with story. But at the end it speeds up with a rather emotional climax. I’ll rate this book as 7/10.

Some beautiful lines from the book:
Accept what life offers to you and try to drink from every cup. All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle.
You can only know a good wine if you’ve first tasted a bad one.

Any of you had any encounters with JWs ? they are totally pathetic. They ex-communicate their on family members for totally silly reasons. In 1876 a charismatic pastor names Charles Taze Russell announced he had discovered a “code” in the Bible that clearly showed that all dead Christians would be resurrected and returned to Earth in 1878. Russell dutifully appeared on Pittsburgh’s 6th Street bridge with his followers dressed in a white robe prepared to witness the rapture and welcome the resurrected Christians.

Result : Nothing happened.

Decimated, Russell left the bridge. Later he announced that he had miscalculated while deciphering the code and the events he predicted were actually fated to occur in 1879. He showed up again on the 6th Street bridge with even more followers to witness the Rapture and welcome the resurrected Christians.

Result : Again… Nothing happened.

Several more events occurred with similar results. Amazingly, every event produced even more followers and eventually Russell didn’t even have to bother showing up at the 6th Street bridge to witness his failure. In 1881 he formed the Zion Watchtower Tract Society which is today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The purpose of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is to be present at specified places and times to witness the Rapture and welcome the resurrected Christians. This Rapture was predicted to occur in 1878, 1879, 1880, 1882, 1885, 1891, 1893, 1894, 1896, 1901, 1904, 1908, and eventually 1914. None of the predictions actually came to pass, but the doctrine at this time is that it actually occurred in 1914 but they missed it. (No… I’m not making that up.)

UNO assures world peace ? No, it doesn’t. If this was the case there would be no wars. There are wars — hence, it doesn’t assure it. Similarly as to how the League of Nations (predecessor of the U.N.) didn’t prevent the World War from happening. Q.E.D. And provide the opportunity to all nations to put their case and let the world decide who is right and who is wrong.” ??? Not true. Replace “the world” with “the unelected bureaucrats” — then it’s true.

The leadership of the free world is with the United States. Like it or not — that’s the reality on the planet you live on. U.N. has no practical relevance and no mandate — it never had, it never will. if a majority of the population of a given country is religious, isn’t it obvious that self-determination of this country coincides with religion determining its behavior in reality? Note, that I’m not talking about legal principles (like the separation b/w state, church, whatever — practically kind of rare anyways), but practical outcomes — if the voting population is religious, then taking away the right to live according to a given religion is equivalent to taking away the right of self-determination — isn’t it?