[quote]@Arraya: I believe that the laws of economics are natural and not determined through the state. The state is supposed to allow free exchange of goods and services and enforce laws against things like fraud and counterfeit.[/quote]
Economics and it’s naturalness is something I’ve put a great deal of study into over the past few years. We assume that what we see now is simply the way it’s always been, when history itself says otherwise.
Biospheric interactions are inherently cooperative in nature, not supremely competitive… this is how a life manages to endure without snuffing everyone else out. Everything finds its unique niche in a functioning ecosystem, and the niches in their entirety are unique to the organisms that occupy them. And nature doesn’t have concentrated ownership of the means of production… EVERYTHING is the means of production for everything else, equally distributed. Output = input. No waste to speak of, contrary to our system.
The human social construct of private ownership of the means of production that is our current economic system, a man-made institution fully dependent on social support… (without the social organization of military, police, and courts [you don’t think these just magically appear, do you? And you don’t think they’ve been with us for our entire history as a species, do you?] to keep the land under private ownership and control, it would fall apart immediately) is not mirrored in the natural world.
Capitalism is not cooperative in a holistic sense as life is. It does not perpetuate life in a balanced and sustainable way. We are now seeing the central concepts of externalities at work, and what that means for eventual destruction of the framework in which our economic paradigm and institution operates. Output = waste. Production = turning life (landbases and creatures) into non-life (consumer goods). No longer a cycle, and so completely different.
IMO, the debate is not regulation verse’s none. It’s to completely deconstruct the system and rewrite it from the ground up before we do to much damage. We need a fully integrated view of this world and our place in it. Our understanding of the natural world, science and human behavior was non-existent when we doctrinized this social system and actually if you look at the history, it was more imposed than naturally evolving. Capital is a “social relation” and not the only way to relate.
The sum total of “monied” interests does not equal collective good.
