Sacrifice some of your time to a stupid idea. Here is the idea. It is an idea that is very, very stupid: An economy where everything self-regulates. Yes, that is it. Is that even a good idea? It sounds like a world where there are only some sort of zombies doing all the work. So, Like, Um—I don’t get it. Does that mean the real people just sit around doing squat, or enjoying luxuries every day?
And around and around we go with this trash. It is like saying that, at the gym, the weights just move themselves. No. People’s got to lift them!!!
Referring to a different system, called “The Dharma,” and revered by generations of Asian Buddhists, there are causes. Everything exists through causes: this is called “interdependence.” There are beings, too, and the beings all have karma. (Karma is not the name of a gift shop.)
The root is consciousness. One may practice Dharma. One may become liberated (either instantly or in time). You can improve your karma through acts of a good kind, eschewing those acts that are negative.
Ignoring interdependence is obviously not encouraged, so the Dharma teachings frequently seize on ti (interdependence) as a specific concept.
Ignoring interdependence, which is to say cause and effect, will eventually cause economic collapse. The economy doesn’t just go by itself.
So the idea that the economy will just go by itself is very, very stupid.
The question is: why would a sophisticated capitalistic economy fail to understand itself?
Part Two
A simple reply to the “free-market purist.” A story: “I Have My Gym.” Here,
I have my gym. Persons pay to work out.
I also provide them with a feeling of community. They lift weights. If economics is everything, and the economy self-regulates, it follows that everything self-regulates. This is called “economics imperialism,” where the basic view deployed for economics is extended to other territories of ideas. The term is encountered in the literature of economics. (https://tinyurl.com/3pxk95sz)
Life just works by itself. Oh. Very profound, eh? So that is the idea. This they say is one area where you just gots ta back off and let it happen. This junk was very popular in the eighties and nineties. Everyone stood back and let the good, decent economists have their say. It was officially not-stupid and unofficially stupid. The idea had “heft,” you might say. It was hedgemonic…
If it does NOT work by itself then there are causes. If there are specific things that are causes, can we see them? But this is a problem, because if we start getting into specific things the discussion will never end. What causes specific things to happen? The sun? The moon? The tides? Energy?
Love? Molecules? Or, is it economics again?
Has there ever been any business that just worked by itself? What the hell are they talking about? People work fourteen-hour days.
but it happens all by itself
Oh, how profound!
it just happens by itself all day
When we are all asleep, knocked out by all our thinking and working? I wonder: what is the economy doing then? It just works by itself all night?
I reckon we need a song for this
Yep, the whole economy works like that. Wow! Now you are smart and you understand economics.
I don’t see animals and plants viewing life as on autopilot. Each two, four or eight legged creature as well those without feet and all plants never blithely assume that life will take care of them. If an animal is hungry it must hunt. If it’s being hunted it must escape and hide. If it’s to bear young it needs to build a nest, find a cave, dig a hole, travel in a herd or swim in schools.
Plants need to adapt to these same conditions through a spreading crown, developing tap roots (sometimes with rhizomes), transmit information from an intermeshing root system of other plants like it in order to be able to receive and transmit information about dangers and vital resources as well as to chemically process light into needed energy.
What makes us so special? Left to what we assume to be a self-regulating economic system we’d all starve to death.