Are you claiming that I'm appealing to authority by offering a link? I sketched out the basic argument and offered you a place to find more information -- and Wikipedia (where I linked) has an explicit policy of "neutral point of view." A page you can change yourself, if you think it flawed. I don't see the authoritarianism in my action.
When you wrote, "I have never seen a logical explanation of..." I assumed you were interested in changing that state of affairs.
(As a side note, speaking of "debate," I'm personally persuaded that debate is a largely irrational institution where you and I have the role of disagreeing with each other.)
> > Personally, I expect an advanced industrial economy will require large
> > amount of planning, no matter what. Ours certainly does. Therefore I
> > don't expect that market economies are necessarily desirable.
>
> No doubt planning is needed, planning and markets are not mutually
> exclusive. As I mentioned in a different thread, commons-based
> free-producers can find their equilibrium scale by interacting with the
> market.
Do you mean price equilibrium through the "laws" of supply and demand? If so, then yes, I understand that aspect of markets, and that they often come to some sort of equilibrium. Whether that equilibrium point (when it exists) is a good one is another issue...
I assume you're a proponent of mutualism?
> > Anarchistic economic visions like Parecon reject markets for reasons
> > like pervasive externalities, since only the buyer and seller are
> > accounted for in any given transaction, which excludes all others who
> > may be affected by it.
>
> Yet this is not true, as there is no such thing as buyers and sellers,
> but rather a network of traders. Today's seller is yesterday's buyer and
> had to negotiate to secure inputs. When inputs can not be secured by
> force, how can costs be externalized?
In each individual market transaction, aren't there typically two roles, which we call "buyer" and "seller"? Note that I wrote, "in any given transaction." Who played what role yesterday seems irrelevant to what I mentioned.
If you want, we can generalize the definition of market transactions past 2 to "a small non-negative number of simultaneous participants," each playing the role of "trader." I kind of doubt that the fundamental analysis seriously changes though in any useful way, at least in this stage of the conversation.
Tayssir