All ideas are fiction. You wont find reality in your email inbox. Sorry.
> I don't think the
> expression "drives price to utility" makes sense.
Then please refute it logically, if you can.
Question: How much will you pay for the right to breath? Answer: Everything you can produce, minus your subsistence cost.
If air was private property, then that is what you would pay: every single penny you could spare.
However, so long as air is available for free to all who have the physical ability to breath, what is it's price? 0, because the cost is zero.
> This is a rough and approximate statement of
> the general equilibrium theorem underlying
> neoclassical economics. This is all mathematics and
> few economists pretend that it describes, or could
> describe, reality.
Yes, you seem to have a general grasp of price theory, although I am not sure why you feel it is neoclassical, as what I am presenting is classical price theory, as used by socialists.
Neoclassical price theory (from the so-called "vulgar economists") tries to mystify the role of cost in price and thus deny the existence of surplus value by focusing on utility and claiming that all contributions to production earn only their marginal contribution. It is exactly the neoclassical view that socialism rejects. The point of the neoclassical efforts to distract from cost as the logical basis of price is to justify private ownership of land and capital, making raising prices to utility (required for Capitalist accumulation) normal and good, rather than a theft of surplus value and bad.
In any case. not sure about the relevance of any of this to the question of this thread. Which, AFAIK, is Capitalism barbarism?
The answer is yes. Capitalism can not exist without barbarism because a Capitalist class can not exist without the theft of surplus value, and theft requires force.
-- Dmytri Kleiner, robotnik Telekommunisten, Berlin.
dk at telekommunisten.net http://www.telekommunisten.net freenode/#telnik