From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 02 1998 - 07:22:39 MDT
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>>Capitalism is not a natural law of nature, as some like to say,
>
>Supply and demand /is/ a law of nature. Scarce things have value
>no less than material things have mass. "Capitalism" is a choice
>of human behavior that history has shown to be consistent with
>that law and human desires in the way that how one chooses to
>build a plane is consistent with gravity and one's desire not to
>crash into the ground.
Eh? There are no "natural" laws which dictate what value is, Objectivism
aside. Assigning things a price according to supply and demand happens to
maximize economic value, but an anti-capitalist could counter that we're
not maximizing anything that we ought to be maximizing when we do so.
Now, I happen to think that human utility is the good, and to this end,
maximizing economic value tends strongly to maximize human utility.
However, I have no way to prove that Kantian "goodwill" or some other
arbitrarily chosen virtue is not the true good which we should pursue
instead of economic value.
-TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO LIVE-
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