I suggest we figure out how to prevent the abuse of the price mechanism as a form of private government and private taxation, by individuals and institutions using commodities and financial instruments as a weapon.
How is this a straw man? Demonstrate that it is please, I submit that the concept of rationality breaks down when setting prices, since our current form of money is a flawed store of value.
They are the same thing in the real world where we actually live, or should I point you in the direction of the lobbyists in washington for a serious dose of reality? Milton friedman told us to be weary of wordsmiths and the idea that political power and economic power are seperate is fallacious, because in the real world they are one and the same thing, I could bring up numerous examples.
So we can accept that all economic transactions are political transactions because they are actions by agents who act. Hence the phrase “Vote with your dollars”, and that the idea that they are seperate is intellectual gymnastics to avoid the double edged nature of economic power.
No it hasn’t been debunked, we can demonstrate that it hasn’t using real world examples of water shortages, those who have water (i.e. goods you need to survive) have power over those who don’t have water, therefore the people that have water have more bargaining power then the people who don’t have water. And if they don’t have anything to trade that the owners want in exchange for water, then they can’t get water. Here is where freedom meets tyranny… if they have nothing to trade, they are dependent on your charity and you have power over whether they starve and suffer or not.
That’s all we need to show the fallacious idea that power and freedom are seperate. Power and freedom are expressions of the same thing, freeom of action, is the POWER to act, to dictate, to dictate an action: Power gives you means to reshape reality. If I only have $10,000 I can’t afford to build a modern jumbo jet for instance. That means I have less means in the real sense of the term.
Ok well let us take a look at what rights are (individual rights – wikipedia) just so we don’t get off track.
“In the jurisprudence and the law, a right is the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something, or to obtain or refrain from obtaining a thing or recognition from civil society. Rights serve as rules of interaction between people, and, as such, they place constraints and obligations upon the actions of individuals or groups (for example, if one has a right to life, others cannot have the liberty to kill).”
What rights do we give people, and how do we determine that our rules are not conceptually flawed? I submit that certain rights are conceptually flawed from the outset because of bounded rationality. Because one persons right in one context can be annulled in another context.
Consider the right to self defense, depending on the society you exist in, what is considered self defense will be different from place to place. Not to mention the fact that someones rights can be expanded or contracted based on circumstances… we already do this in the real world. So it shows us we dont universally apply our rights consistently (in every situation) anyway. i.e. we are inconsistent in our application of rights.
Don’t believe this? Then why am I not allowed to own my children? By my right I created them and invested my money and wealth in them, if we say they own themselves, but they didn’t create themselves, I produced them. Now because I produced these children why can’t they be bought and sold as commodity? Oh that’s right because we INCONSISTENTLY apply our rights depending on the context. i.e. we never universally apply our rights, we pick and choose willy nilly depending on the circumstances to grant them or annul them as the situations we find ourselves in dictates.