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[NOTE: The following come from Romain Kroes <[log in to unmask]>. -- RBE] 
 
In my opinion, "market" never had such an importance as the one which is 
given it today, and there are two reasons why. The first one is markets 
are only a second order mediation, from a macroeconomic point of vue. 
The second one is "market rationality" has become a magic concept that 
takes the whole and anonymous guilt in the supposed inevitably fatal 
destruction of social and local protections. 
 
In the National Accounts, markets appear only, and as a result, under 
the foreign trade balance column. So has it been for thousands of years, 
since the first sumerian economic counties. Even OECD, deeply involved 
in the "market economy" propaganda and pressures, works on a predictive 
model without considering the markets parameters (it remains only a 
global businessmen opinion survey concerning their orders books). 
 
It can be daily checked that there is no relationship at all, between 
the financial markets vibrations and the real economy fluctuations. 
Rather than those of a "Labour Market" the choices, in workers 
management, are between Labour Right and Slavery Right (which is coming 
back, and not only in Anglo-Saxon countries). 
 
Market competition and business war were always a transitory state, 
never a steady one. The present persistent relative overproduction, 
which keeps alive the illusion, is only due to monetarist policies. 
"Market Economy" is to don't say "Profit Economy". 
 
But we inherited the confusion between market and capitalism as well 
from Sismondi and Marx as from Smith, Walras and Marshall. And these 
latter were probably all mystified by the seventeenth and eighteenth 
century ideological struggle between administered economy and trade 
freedom which reflected the bourgeoisie fight for power. So that 
questioning the "evidence" of "Market Economy" both stands out as an 
urgent debate and exceeds the limits of Polanyi thought. 
 
 
Romain Kroes 
 
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