Re: justice, justice... Was: Anti-Semitism in the Neo-Confederate movement.

"Steve Goldfarb" <slg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dpka5a$9ab$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Herman beat me to this point, but I don't understand your objection....

My basic point here is that (now that we're really off-topic, I'll try to
wrap this up), on the grand scale of human economic history, production for
the purpose of exchange is the exception rather than the rule. The norm is
production for the purpose of use (e.g. subsistence or personal pleasure).
[For that matter, even "production", in the civilized sense, is an
exception, as hunting and gathering are more like procurement - i.e.
foraging - than production, which is a term so bound up in our agrarian and
industrial past, in which natural resources are intentionally transformed.
Also, foragers keep relatively few possessions, given the difficulties of
transporting them on foot from site to site.]

But if you insist on universalizing economic terms like "market", then why
give the term "wealth" such a special status? Why not liken the resources of
whatever ecosystem a society currently inhabits (as settlement is also a
relatively recent exception) as that society's "wealth" (access to which it
must sometimes fight to protect)? After all, that seems to me no more of a
semantical stretch than calling an informal, backyard barter a "market."

And I didn't say that money was "magic." I said that it changes things (viz.
economic relations), and suggested that it's not "produced" in the same
sense as "real" commodities, like food or fuel. It has more in common with a
profession, like legal services, and is a particularly powerful profession
(e.g. given such traditionally enriching customs as compound interest and
fractional reserve banking).

Rafael



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