Re: [PEN-L] interview with Milton Friedman

[ken hanly]

Markets are a form of rationing on the basis of money. It therefore magnifies differences on the basis of how much money individuals command. As Marx points out in his remarks on the power of money in capitalist society it also turns natural qualities into their opposites. You can be ugly but attract the beautiful because u have money. You can be weak but hire the strong to make you powerful etc. etc. You can have talents but without the money to develop them they are useless...etc. etc.

 

Someone asked ages ago about what WIttgenstein contributed to the foundations of mathematics. Just do a google on the topic. There are several books and an entire edition of the Aristotelian Socieyt Procedings etc. Anyway the point is simply that some of the most eminent 20th century philosophers were also mathematicians including Russell and WHitehead. There is sharp disagreement about the importance of Wittgenstein's ruminations about mathematics. By the way he independently invented truth tables. The mathematician Post's manner of constructing them has been the standard I believe..

Gil Skillman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

As Doug noted, there's an element of truth in this, but there are (at
least) two fatal conceits here. The first is that "markets" and "politics"
are a matter of either-or. Beyond a certain primitive level, market
interactions are always accompanied by "government intervention" of some
sort, at some stage--including the stage that enforces prior, opportunistic
private appropriations of what used to be common resources. The second
conceit is the astonishing suggestion that the operation of markets doesn't
"exacerbate and magnify differences." Heck, even Adam Smith realized that
market interactions specifically and emphatically do this.

Gil

>"The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate
>each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic
>backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can't
>do that. Politics exacerbates and magnifies differences."
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