You started talking accountants, management and MBAS, and how businesses will always make poor decisions to save money. You’re the one who pulled Ayn Rand into the conversation. I will admit I should have left it alone at that point.

And let’s not pretend I have a monopoly on political ranting around here, or somehow I’m responsible for “bending” the entire conversation. I won’t rub anyone’s nose in specific examples, but people seem to have no trouble venting their political spleens even when I’m not involved.

You somehow seem to have found my purely academic remarks about these abstract issues a threat to your political religion and felt compelled to divert the whole conversation into yet another anti-liberal witch hunt. And it’s not the first time. It’s hard to talk about anything here without you using it as an excuse to commandeer the dialog into what you want to talk about.

Take Ms Rand’s advice yourself, and stop taking charge of all activity on this board and bending it into a referendum on your obsessions. I have no idea what inner demons have taken over your life, Tom, but I am tired of having to come here every day for recreation and fellowship and being forced to face your shrill jihadism instead. Providing you with emotional therapy and political reassurance is not my reason for existence.

I don’t give an Albanian pussy fart what Ayn Rand says or thinks. She was just another neurotic emotional basket case who took out her personal shortcomings and aberrations on everyone around her by substituting her anomalistic political fundamentalism for whatever was really poisoning her life. I refuse to be lured into a detailed dissection of her hormonal imbalances.

I just found it amusing.

The “absolutely wrong” was just a bit funny for someone who thinks everything is basically an opinion. That’s the only point I was making, and I wasn’t making it all that hard.

I used to needle people who would tell me “there are no absolutes.” I’d go, “none at all?” Most of them didn’t catch it.

1)Ayn Rand/Karl Marx “in charge” are metaphors for the fact that an overly complex Roman Empire became top heavy for non-ideological reasons. I’m not making any implied comparisons of the two.

2)Yes, economies DO have a purpose: To help organize human communities so that human labor can be converted to goods and services that serve human needs and to allow humans to participate in that activity. It is NOT the purpose of a human economy to provide a means for the owners of human resources to accumulate wealth and provide meaningful emotional activity, personal wealth and career satisfaction for themselves. Coral reefs existed long before human beings. Economies arose after humans did. It makes no sense to talk about economies where no humans are involved. The same goes for governments.

3)Governments and economies are not equivalent, but it is impossible to have one without the other. Even if you claim you “only have one”, it is actually carrying out both functions. Communists tried to have government run the economy. It didn’t work, unless you worked for the government in a high position. Capitalism tries to have owners of the means of production controlling all governmental functions, by either privatizing them or forcing a puppet government to administer them in ways that primarily benefit them. That doesn’t work either, except for those in high positions. I’ve always felt the only difference between a Soviet Commissar and a high level executive is that the former wore a baggy suit. But they have the exact same mentality.

4) “Only highly-centralized systems CAN become “too big to govern.” A meaningless statement that really is an attempt to justify a government in which large commercial organizations and those who run them exercise all the political power. All big human systems are highly centralized, from the top down,have you ever seen a company that wasn’t? Laissez faire economies in their immature state may exhibit competition, but when they finally mature, they are oligarchies. Free markets can only exist if regulation splits up the biggest and most powerful predator organizations. This is why the Libertarian utopias you are always talking about have never existed in the real world. Business men want no part of them, and good businessmen know how to frustrate market forces.

In historical times, power was concentrated in the hands of those who owned land.
It was a landed aristocracy where land was the source of all wealth and only land owners had any power. Today, we have an ownership oligarchy which functions in pretty much the same way, although it is not based on land, but commercial and financial activity.However, they are acting pretty much the same way as the land owners did to hold their power and their wealth.

Modern capitalism does have one major improvement over landed aristocracies, though, they are not hereditary. But the Republicans are working on that.

5) “Absolutely?” You sure? Why?”

Don’t patronize me, TB. You can tell me I’m full of shit, but don’t talk to me like I was a child. Do you really think I don’t have good reasons for thinking what I think? Do you think I’m going to get tongue-tied and be incapable of expressing myself? Do you believe I will be unable to put together a coherent sentence? Do you wish to contrast your inquisitive thoughtful mind to my indoctrinated and opinionated and emotional rationalizations? Remember, Tom, you’re the one who seems determined to challenge everything I say. Are you afraid someone might actually believe me?

It takes effort to write these long posts and when I know ahead of time you won’t believe anything I’m saying, it is not worth that effort. Remember, this is not a debate. I’m not trying to convince you, or anyone else, or impress anyone with my erudition or debating skills.

I simply find the entrepreneurial ethos unpleasant and those obsessed with it tiresome. They have a right to exist, I suppose. They even provide a useful service and they deserve to be rewarded for it if they provide that service well and fill that role successfully. They’re kind of like cops and lawyers, bail bondsmen, motivational speakers, football coaches, wedding planners and fitness gurus. We may occasionally need one, but we don’t have to like them. I know you feel they are admirable people, but I tend to find them annoying. I would rather hang out with mystics, scientists and artists. They aren’t always trying to sell me something.

Talk about unclear on a concept.

You can’t seem to get past the pyramid paradigm. An economy does not have an overriding “purpose,” commanded from above, any more than a coral reef does.

Governments and “economies” are not equivalents.

Only highly-centralized systems CAN become “too big to govern.”

Big systems, like rain forests or coral reefs or planetary climates, do not have a purpose. They just are, and they evolve. They are natural phenomena. We can harvest their resources, nurture them or abuse them, destroy them, perhaps even manage them to our long-term benefit, depending on how well we understand them.

Human governments and economies are human artifacts. They have a purpose, and that purpose is to serve human needs. When that purpose is no longer served humans have the right and obligation to change them. And humans also have the right to decide just what that purpose should be, and what those needs are.

It is inevitable that those who benefit the most from any economic or political system will disagree violently about purpose and need with those who benefit the least. Those who do well resist change, those who do not will seek it. There are always exceptions, particularly from those who feel either secure, or victimized, a few scattered individuals like us who are operating on some abstract level of ideology, but as a rule, political and economic conflict is not about intellectual or philosophical differences. It’s about class struggle. When the mob is hungry, it riots. When Pharaoh doesn’t want to open the granaries, he calls out the chariots.

Heck, you made that point yourself in the last post.

The problem with your assessment of business is that it carries the unspoken assumption that businesses are some kind of monolith, and that decisions are made the same way for the same reasons everywhere.

There are thousands of businesses, making thousands of different decisions for different reasons.

One company may automate a warehouse. Another may automate it but arrange backup procedures. A third may not automate at all. A fourth may come up with something new you hadn’t thought of. And so on.

The decisions work in some cases, and fail in others. Often for wildly different reasons. The overall economy keeps going, same as your warship could keep going if one generating system failed, or the fleet could operate if one ship is lost.