----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com>
Tom wrote:
> It's not an assumption in this discussion that any
> element of individual irrationality in economic life
> must be a rare exception, confined to the
> "psychopathic," is it?
It's not my assumption. I pointed to the psychoanalytic theory of greed as an expression of psychopathology as the most likely psychology underpinning Keynes's claims that "the essential characteristic of capitalism ... is the dependence on an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine" and that "the love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - ... [is] a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."
=====================
These are judgments and opinions, not irrefutable assertions of facts, which would nonetheless run into the theory ladenness of observations. The same goes for Aristotle.
Note how you are basically using an argument from authority that is not much different from an xtian using Leviticus in asserting that homosexuality is an abomination.
Ian