Hello there. I'll push back a bit. As I've said before (on a different platform in response to you), we have much in common in our love for the Russian Sophiologists, Hart, and their patristic influences (the Cappadocians, and Maximus, mainly). However, while I've done away with a literal Adam and Eve, an eternal hell, and I accept all of Bulgakov's Sophiological proposals, my belief in the free market has only grown more robust. I know Bulgakov and Hart and...pretty much all the theologians I most admire would disagree with me, but what are you gonna do? I do wonder if your family REALLY embraced markets though since I know that my folks who once sung the praises of the "free market" have no problem advocating for populist and nationalist Trumpian policies of trade restrictions, turn a blind eye to Republican support for oil subsidies that are contributing to climate change, and basically advocate for a closed border policy when it comes to immigration. Those are the furthest you can get from a free market.
The main problem I see with the definition you share of capitalism is that it essentially sounds Neo-Darwinian. Hayek, as much as he rightly advocated for thinking of market processes as being evolutionary, saw this evolutionary process as more about cooperation than cut throat competition, which now coincides with the extended evolutionary synthesis advocated by folks like Denis Noble and others.
As Mises says,
"the fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work, performed under the division of labor, is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs."
An almost magical illustration of this, is of course the pencil, which you could never make, nor could I. I couldn't list all the jobs and states and countries involved in making one single pencil if I tried. Most of us have probably heard about the guy who tried to make his own toaster. Same thing. Didn't go too well. Something as simple as a toaster is an awe-inspiring testament to global market processes. https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch/transcript?language=en
The problem with the guild system was not that they created a kind of fraternal society, but that they seemed to serve as a type of rent seeking where the states of that time could work out special deals with the guilds in order to extract the most tax revenue. They ended up keeping people out and restricting the ability of anyone not approved to be in the guild to make a living. Perhaps in an anarchist society, your guild system would work better, but I'm not sure what your ideal guild system would look like, so I'd need to know more.
Whatever the case may be, the guild system certainly did not alleviate the absolute grinding poverty that most of the world found itself in before what Deirdre McCloskey refers to as the great enrichment. As she points out over and again, "From 1800 to the present the average person on the planet has been enriched in real terms by a factor of 10, or some 900 percent." I think it's pretty difficult to argue this didn't occur because of the success of liberalism. https://reason.com/podcast/2017/08/09/deirdre-mccloskey-bourgeois-equality/
Free markets do obviously have competition as well, but so does gym class, and receiving scholarships that don't go to everyone, and getting published in scholarly journals while others are not, and getting book deals while others don't. If you were completely honest, would you write this blog post on capitalism if you were 100 percent sure that no one would ever read it? If you hope for readership, you are thereby also competing against millions of other bloggers and you are trying to show why I should spend 15 minutes reading your blog than the other person's. At the same time, however, you are part of what I hope is a growing movement of Orthodox thinkers slightly more daring and intellectually rigorous than what is usually found on popular Orthodox websites, and I hope we can all cooperate together to keep Orthodoxy from getting taken over by the young earth creationist fundamentalist nationalists.
As Denis Noble and other advocates of the extended evolutionary synthesis are now pointing out, evolution is just as much if not more so about cooperation and even, dare I say, Neo-Lamarckian mechanisms than was originally thought, and so is the free market. The Chicago school of economics had unfortunately tied the mechanistic view of evolution to economics, but that is starting to get overturned with the advent of the "humanomics" of Vernon Smith and Deirdre McCloskey. They're bringing the humanities back into economics. I'd be interested in your critique of their more "human" centered free market economics, which has shaken off the shackles of the mechanistic worldview that you are tying to markets in this blog post.
I'd love to know where you think I'm wrong or got off track.
Looking forward to continuing to read your posts. And P.S., what academic environment are you working in that free market economics is a thing? I feel like a total anomaly in the theology department I teach in. Most people seem far more on your side than mine, and this seems to be the case in most academic departments everywhere other than at decidedly conservative universities.
Hello there. I'll push back a bit. As I've said before (on a different platform in response to you), we have much in common in our love for the Russian Sophiologists, Hart, and their patristic influences (the Cappadocians, and Maximus, mainly). However, while I've done away with a literal Adam and Eve, an eternal hell, and I accept all of Bulgakov's Sophiological proposals, my belief in the free market has only grown more robust. I know Bulgakov and Hart and...pretty much all the theologians I most admire would disagree with me, but what are you gonna do? I do wonder if your family REALLY embraced markets though since I know that my folks who once sung the praises of the "free market" have no problem advocating for populist and nationalist Trumpian policies of trade restrictions, turn a blind eye to Republican support for oil subsidies that are contributing to climate change, and basically advocate for a closed border policy when it comes to immigration. Those are the furthest you can get from a free market.
The main problem I see with the definition you share of capitalism is that it essentially sounds Neo-Darwinian. Hayek, as much as he rightly advocated for thinking of market processes as being evolutionary, saw this evolutionary process as more about cooperation than cut throat competition, which now coincides with the extended evolutionary synthesis advocated by folks like Denis Noble and others.
As Mises says,
"the fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work, performed under the division of labor, is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs."
An almost magical illustration of this, is of course the pencil, which you could never make, nor could I. I couldn't list all the jobs and states and countries involved in making one single pencil if I tried. Most of us have probably heard about the guy who tried to make his own toaster. Same thing. Didn't go too well. Something as simple as a toaster is an awe-inspiring testament to global market processes. https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch/transcript?language=en
The problem with the guild system was not that they created a kind of fraternal society, but that they seemed to serve as a type of rent seeking where the states of that time could work out special deals with the guilds in order to extract the most tax revenue. They ended up keeping people out and restricting the ability of anyone not approved to be in the guild to make a living. Perhaps in an anarchist society, your guild system would work better, but I'm not sure what your ideal guild system would look like, so I'd need to know more.
Whatever the case may be, the guild system certainly did not alleviate the absolute grinding poverty that most of the world found itself in before what Deirdre McCloskey refers to as the great enrichment. As she points out over and again, "From 1800 to the present the average person on the planet has been enriched in real terms by a factor of 10, or some 900 percent." I think it's pretty difficult to argue this didn't occur because of the success of liberalism. https://reason.com/podcast/2017/08/09/deirdre-mccloskey-bourgeois-equality/
Free markets do obviously have competition as well, but so does gym class, and receiving scholarships that don't go to everyone, and getting published in scholarly journals while others are not, and getting book deals while others don't. If you were completely honest, would you write this blog post on capitalism if you were 100 percent sure that no one would ever read it? If you hope for readership, you are thereby also competing against millions of other bloggers and you are trying to show why I should spend 15 minutes reading your blog than the other person's. At the same time, however, you are part of what I hope is a growing movement of Orthodox thinkers slightly more daring and intellectually rigorous than what is usually found on popular Orthodox websites, and I hope we can all cooperate together to keep Orthodoxy from getting taken over by the young earth creationist fundamentalist nationalists.
As Denis Noble and other advocates of the extended evolutionary synthesis are now pointing out, evolution is just as much if not more so about cooperation and even, dare I say, Neo-Lamarckian mechanisms than was originally thought, and so is the free market. The Chicago school of economics had unfortunately tied the mechanistic view of evolution to economics, but that is starting to get overturned with the advent of the "humanomics" of Vernon Smith and Deirdre McCloskey. They're bringing the humanities back into economics. I'd be interested in your critique of their more "human" centered free market economics, which has shaken off the shackles of the mechanistic worldview that you are tying to markets in this blog post.
I'd love to know where you think I'm wrong or got off track.
Looking forward to continuing to read your posts. And P.S., what academic environment are you working in that free market economics is a thing? I feel like a total anomaly in the theology department I teach in. Most people seem far more on your side than mine, and this seems to be the case in most academic departments everywhere other than at decidedly conservative universities.
Peace,
"Max"