-------
Okay. I think I follow. But I don't think of it as a double standard. Something else is afoot, but I can't quite pin it down. As I said, I am not economist. If I try to look at the totality of society as an economic problem and economic system, then I think I can see how you're looking at this. The US economic system does not meet all our socio-economic needs, problems, or match our needs, only some of them, and there lays the current system's economic inefficiencies and failures Yes?
What I think is also going in these conflicting views is that people like me, see a different world and different problems. From the economist's point of view, most if not all problems can be solved, provide better economic practices are applied. That certainly may be so.
However, from my view, the problems of the socioeconomic system neither not as soluable as they appear, nor as benign as the theory of economic markets might pressuppose. And of course economic theory suffers the conceite for most theories, the conceite to being a theory of everything.
There are additional issues. From my point of view, market theory is an attempt to convert all human existence and activity into some list of comodities (conceptual or otherwise) that can be bought and sold, or at least exchanged, and further these exchanges follow the rules and concepts of resources and needs, med and unmed, with problems of production, productivity and system efficiencies or lack thereof. From my view that kind of conceptual understanding of society is part of the problem.
On the other hand, I agree with you, that in fact is how our society in its public mind, conceives of itself. I also agree that is how we do in fact run things. But that is also why I would like to change that view and change how we run things.
``..that's not just a failure to meet `social' priorities, it's a massive failure of the `economic' system. Society has finite resources. People have potentially limitless needs. How you fit one to the other is *both* an economic problem of efficiency and production functions *and* a social problem of met and unmet needs...''
I could let this go, since I certainly agree, as long as the system of taxation and re-allocation of money or resources in the abstract are used to create and support a single payer system. Why should I argue further? Well a rhetorical point and maybe a problem of logic.
Let's go back to this key assumption which seems off: `People have potentially limitless needs.'
In a symmetric sense your claim that need is limitless is equivalent to my claim that market theory is an insufficient explanation and therefore unable to conceptualize an answer that even approximates that apparently unlimited need. We might have fun chasing this symmetry in circles...
Do you see it?
Your claim that my needs are limitless, is the mirror to my claim, your conceptual system of market economics as explanations and possible solutions is insufficent. I think this is the core. We are looking at the world from two different points of view and there are no universal standards to appeal to and reconcile the matter. However, it certainly doesn't follow we can't form a coalition, in solidarity to make a better world.
I am going it leave there. I am going to turn on the news and see just how fucked things are tonight. Cheers.
CG