Maybe I should have said _self-styled_ libertarian.I am surprised that a libertarian takes this view
I think I now have the answer to my original question. But that leads me to a second question (below).
First, I'll just add something I came across after Daniel (I think it was) gave the tip of calling it the "axiom of insatiability." Lionel Robbins specified that the economic problem concerns scarcity, which can be specified as wants are unlimited _relative to_ the means of achieving them. Obviously there are also wants that are not unlimited relative to the means of achieving them and they pose no issue of scarcity. Even if we accept that there will always be wants that exceed the means for satisfying them, though, that doesn't mean that we can't reduce the gap between wants and means by modifying those wants. But the received opinion of neoclassical economics doesn't want to go there. Instead there would appear to be a "doctrine of dumbification" that holds an axiom can be changed into a fact by deleting the relativizing term and some times replacing it with a redundant emphasis, such as "and desires".
My second question is: going back to Robbins's axiom, which I'm happy to entertain, isn't that another way of stating Say's Law, or at least doesn't it have the same effect in terms of what is considered to be admissible to economic analysis?
The Sandwichman
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