Comments on: Economics vs. Theology

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 20:54:06 +0000

J Michael Neal was talking about the situation in America, where the hard right advocates a particularly brutal dog-eat-dog form of capitalism (Read up on Ayn Rand if you want to see where they’re coming from). He’s commenting on the Religious Right’s alliance with the dog-eat-dog economic right.

By: Dad

Dad — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 12:36:15 +0000

There are some funny assumptions and connections being made.

1 Economics is all about capitalism
2 Capitalism is all about free markets
3 Free markets are based on the idea that “greed is good”.

Economics is about the “best ” use of resources. Lionel Robbins 1932 definition is good enough for me: “Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” No society – socialist, exclusively private ownership, or mixed – or indeed Robinson Crusoe on his own, can escape economic issues of how to allocate resources. (Much use of the word “capitalism” confuses: all economies, whatever forms of property ownership, use capital.) It is demonstrable that through free markets wants, expressed in units of exchange, are satisfied optimally for a given distribution of units of exchange. These wants and the means of supplying them may be determined collectively or individually. If I sell my services or my products to the person or collective offering the highest payment I am, ceteris paribus, providing more satisfaction than if I accept the second highest bid. This is not being greedy. Greed comes in when attempts are made to impair free markets by withholding information or restricting competition or skewing the distribution of income by “unfair” taxation. It is doubtful whether there can be truly free markets without good government. As Will Hutton points out in his “The Writing on the Wall”, that’s where China, without political reform, will come unstuck. Theology doesn’t have to come into it at all.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 16:03:10 +0000

It’s hard to keep them down on the Harry Potter farm when they’ve seen those blinding Bill O’Reilly lights of truth.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:50:45 +0000

If all they want to do is have something to belong to, what’s wrong with Fandom? At least that doesn’t fubar the world in the process.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:04:18 +0000

The knee-jerk supporters? I think they’re mostly in it to have something to belong to … which makes them even more pathetic.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:09:09 +0000

You can’t invoke Godwin’s Law on the very first post! Bad Gline.

I can quite believe that of the Bush administration themselves; people like Cheney come over as 100% cynical, with a sole goal of retaining power and accumulating wealth, like a munchkin DnD player ignoring the alignment rules except when it gives him plusses.

But what about their knee-jerk supporter? There seems to be at least one on every internet forum, and they can’t *all* be sock puppets of Karl Rove.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:23:46 +0000

When you get into any group that seeks power and that will do most anything it must to maintain power, niggling questions of intellectual consistency tend to be the first things to be swept out of the way.

To use an argument that people will probably hate to hear, Hitler was often heard to say that he was “doing God’s bidding” by exterminating “world Jewry” and by partnering with the Catholic Church whenever he had to to achieve that and other aims — but he also made it no secret among his close confidants that in time the Church too would be put out of its misery. In his mind he was being perfectly consistent: he was doing whatever he had to.