[ExI] Belief in Market Efficiency

[Damien Broderick]

At 06:19 PM 1/31/2009 +1100, Stathis wrote:

>If there is one central idea in
>Marxist economic theory it is that the wealth of society is produced
>by workers - labourers, intellectuals, managers - and, therefore, the
>wealth that accrues to a capitalist must be stolen. The communist
>would therefore agree with you that a person should keep the fruits of
>his labour.

In a thumbnail, yes. And the famous error of that analysis is the 
claim that the capitalist makes no remunerative contribution to the 
increase of wealth. Acknowledging this error doesn't, however, 
necessitate agreeing that every capitalist who can get away with it 
deserves nearly all the cream off the top, nor that other ways of 
handling investment cannot be as effective (see, as usual, some of 
the experience reported* of the Mondragon anarchistic cooperative 
approach in Basque Spain--which inevitably also has its detractors).

Damien Broderick
*e.g.: <http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/long_mondragon.html> 
or my friend Dr. Race Mathews' "Jobs of Our Own: Building a 
Stakeholder Society"