Think Science .

I think that you don’t have to consider “factors leading to non-religious stance”. Rather the opposite; Just consider the mere decline in opportunity to indoctrinate. If you grow up to about the age of ten without some influential significant adult having messed you up, then I think the window of opportunity is lost.

You need to get to the child before it develops critical faculties. I think that you also need to get to the child before it develops the concept of “fairy tales”. If the child is somewhat familiar with the genre, I think it takes many times times the effort to convince the child that, for no reason, this one particular story (which in shape and form is basically the same as all other stories) is supposed to be treated differently.

It is no accident that they lobby heavily to get access to the younger classes in school. Even though basic philosophy is only taught at university level, they want to start in first grade to

I visit local schools on behalf of Norwegian Humanist Association, and I don’t want younger than 10th graders. I educate, I don’t indoctrinate. I want to be challenged. I want a dialog.

Objectivism is nothing more than a pseudo-philosophy which is patently devised to support an ideology, much in the same style of the anatomical pseudo-science which came out of Germany in the 30s and early 40s.

It is nice to wish to be free from coersion; that’s why modern governments usually involve some form of division of powers (with varying degrees of success) to make sure that no one person is too powerful. The problem is that people with an irrational exuberance for capitalism, such as Ayn Rand, obviously like to feel that power in the form of money should be excluded from any system which could limit extremes of power; and that capitalists should be free to seek the mediocre Nash equilibria of the economic games that they play with each other, without any interference by organizations that might (gasp) be more interested in public welfare than in money.

Objectivism is a great way to realize that you should be allowed to want and do things for yourself, if you’re trapped in some sort of codependent frame of mind. Beyond that, if you want real economic thinking, it would be better to read Adam Smith or even Thomas Hobbes, than a pretender such as Ayn Rand.

I would define a “free market” as one which operates without government interaction. This is an economic state of affairs which is not unlike anarchy.

It seems to me that our reaction (for example) might be that the fact that, like anarchy, it tends to produce significant power blocks (which bring an effective end to anarchy) in the form of monopolies, duopolies, and large corporations generally make it unreasonable to lump all economic systems which lack governmental interference into a single term. Because of the presence of the government as a legislative authority, however, and precisely because “free markets” have advocates who blatantly ignore this tendancy of accumulation of power, it is important at least to identify the class of economic systems without governmental control, in order to show how they may degenerate.

The problem is not in the concept of a “free market”, but (as with all models which get abused) in the fact that a “free market” doesn’t have the features that many enthusiasts claim/hope/wish it does. But whatever one claims about it, one cannot identify what the actual features of a free market would be without appealing to the concept of a “free market”, defined in some way.

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.

One of the most commonly used arguments concerning an Intelligent Designer is the “Watchmaker” argument… Basically that anything complex requires an intelligent designer. Now Richard Dawkins basically blew this argument out of the water, but since ID people won’t read Dawkins, I’ll go ahead and explain the logically fallicy of the argument here.

Nothing designed is original… They are merely the result of small, incremental improvements over time. In other words, an evolution parallel.

Lets take the Watch as an example as it appears to be one of the favorite used by ID proponents:

The watch wasn’t invented one day by a man who decided, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tell time?” It was a long, slow process involving thousands of years.

First there was observing the Sun. People could tell approximately what time of day it was merely by looking up and seeing where the sun was.

Of course that wasn’t always accurate enough so the Sundial was produced. Markings around the sundial could give much more accurate information in regards to what time of day it was.

Then there was the problem of cloudy days (not to mention nighttime) which led to the invention of the mechanical clock. The markings were the same as the sundial and even the hand moved in the exact same direction (clockwise). Other hands were eventually included to make the clock more accurate.

The first clocks weren’t very portable. They required weighted pendulums and weighed several tons. For that reason there was usually only one in each town (usually in a central location such as a church or clocktower). Refinements to the design were made until eventually the clocks weighed only a couple hundred pounds apiece and could therefore be placed in individual homes.

As clocks became shrinking in size, there became a challenge amongst engineers to create a portable version. Once the weighted pendulums were replaced by a series of springs, the clock became truly portable and the “watch” was invented.

Of course these first watches weighed between 10-15 pounds, but incremental improvements over the years eventually brought the size and weight down to the point where they could be comfortably strapped to the wrist.

Other improvements included a small pendulum inserted into the winding mechanism (self-winding) through replacing the mechanics of the watch altogether with piezoelectric crystals.

As you can see, the watch wasn’t just invented “out of the blue” by some genius in Switzerland, but rather evolved through thousands of years with small, incremental changes over time.

So, we can see pretty easily that the “Watchmaker” argument does not prove ID, but rather supports evolution rather nicely. ID proponents point to the watch as proof of the necessity of a designer. Dawkins refers to this as “The Blind Watchmaker” argument because it relies on the watch being invented by an individual that had never seen a clock, a sundial, or even the Sun itself to be valid.