This Is Our City

A Hermit and Roger McKinney, it looks like this discussion is headed no where. Feel free to continue in another place but at this point I think it's gone far enough away from the original article that we'll delete further comments in this discussion.

Hermit, you’re engaging in psychological projecting. I respond to all of your points. You ignore most of mine. No one in the US claims to be a socialist any more, but your characterizations of capitalism and you ideas are all pure socialist. In past posts I have defined socialism and communism; you just don’t read them. Jesus endorsed free market capitalism when he endorsed the Torah, from which the Church’s scholars at Salamanca determined that the only just market is a free market. You don’t need money to have capitalism. Capitalism can include barter.

The military may have purchased the first electronic computer, but the principles behind it go back centuries. It was based on mechanical computers. The military always purchases cutting edge technology. So what? That doesn’t mean that without military spending the technology would never develop. The steam engine was far more important to Western development than the computer and the military had nothing to do with it. The computer would have been invented regardless of what the military or the government did. All you can say about military spending is that it might have speeded up the process. The transistor made modern computing possible and Bell Labs, a private company developed it.

Hermit, I don’t believe any of the things you attribute to me. Making those claims just proves once again that you don’t read my posts. You just regurgitate your socialist ideas. Yes, God gave us free markets. Study the Scholars of Salamanca. Free market capitalism is in the New and Old Testaments. The Church did not give us communal ownership of property. That’s a dishonest reading of scripture. Sharing private property is not anything at all like common ownership. Christ said to make your primary goal in life to please God. He did not condemn providing for your family and saving for hard times, which is capitalism. Capitalism did not invent greed; mankind did. Greed is far older than capitalism.

Hermit, current demand and supply also take into account what individual actors think the future price will be, too. If individuals thought that oil would run out next year they would price it much higher today. The current price tells us that most people don't think oil will run out in our lifetimes. The market reflects the opinions of the majority of buyers/sellers. I'm sorry they don't agree with you or have your values. I'm sure you would love to dictate to the market what prices should be, but then we wouldn't have a market. We would have socialism. If you think oil should be priced higher, I'm sure producers will allow you to pay more. But just because the majority of people don't agree with your ideas doesn't mean the market is failing or is wrong.