I really don't understand the need many people on this list to represent capitalism as an arena of mere criminality and chicanary. I don't expect more from the aanarchsits, but the Marxists or those in their neighborhood should understand that in the real of exchnage, all is freedom, equality, proprty and Bentham. Equivalent is exchanged for equivalent. The normal case is not where the capitalist steals, but where he keeps his promises. Marx;s great discovery was tro show that capitalist ptofit was nonetheless possible because of exploitation.
Domeone, maybe Chuck, actually took this totally orthodoc Marxist statement to be an apologia for capitalsim. That is realluy puzzling to me.
jks
John Thornton <jthorn65 at mchsi.com> wrote:
>Actually, this is cheap cynicism that shows a mistaken grasp of the nature
>of markets and business activities. Business runs mainly on trust ...
Untrue. If this were true contracts would not be necessary. Contracts are insisted on because of lack of trust. There is no way to finesse this point. Trust exists at some level but it is not the main level of operation and it is subservient to distrust. You trust the other party will do what they agree to because they have agreed to in writing and will in all probability face a financial penalty for violating it. You don't trust them to do the right thing but rather the contractually agreed upon thing. I lent my brother $9000 and he signs nothing because I trust him. If I borrow $9000 from the bank to buy a used car I sign a contract because the bank does not trust me, pure and simple.
>and requires an fairly robust ethical standard. If it's all a cheat and
>and sham, then any market system would collapse in very short order. The
>law and threat of legal sanction, civil and criminal, is incapable of
>keeping people in line if they are not generally pretty decent to start with.
That depends on what behaviors you are discussing. If you are talking murder then yes the threat of legal action has almost nothing to do with whether people murder each other or not. That is not true for business transactions. If a company ordered fixtures for their location and never received a bill due to a clerical error and the billing company said they had no record of the transaction so they did not know how to charge do you believe that the company on the receiving end would voluntarily step up and pay the full amount or would they would tell the fixture company when they sorted out their billing problems to send them a complete bill and they would pay the amount due then? No properly itemized bill, no payment forthcoming. I picked this problem for the reason that I have been in the position of one of the companies suggested above. Guess what happened. Did contracts or trust rule the day? Feel free to post your guess here for all to see. The "decency" of the parties in question may have had less to do with this than you would like to believe. The odds are neither party involved was a rapist or murderer and was considered by their peers to be a "decent" person. Why does it have to be "mainly trust" or else "all cheat and sham"? It doesn't of course as most things don't exist in such unnuanced black and white. It is mainly distrust, with contractual obligations enforced by law. There is some trust involved but the trust is that both parties operate in the same manner for the same reasons, not that either of them behaves "ethically" however that is defined. The trust is in consistency, not "decency".
>You know this, too. You act on it even if you don't officially believe
>it. jks
I don't know this and you may or may not believe it that is beside the point. I operate on trust where friends and family are concerned. Everyone else gets to sign a contract. When lending institutions dismiss with contracts and simply lend money mostly on trust you will be correct, until then you are mistaken.
John Thornton
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040813/1f78ca92/attachment.htm>