Particulary in response to Rod and Brad: 
 
     If you had ever listened to physicists and historians mock the 
jargon and style of positive neoclassical economics you would not 
pass the comments of postmodern literary criticism that you do.  To 
ridicule what you do not understand is to underline that you do not 
understand it. 
 
     Postmodern deconstructionists should also stay in their own 
field, which is literature and humanities, not economics. 
 
     I hold no brief for the content of the works of Foucault or 
Baudrillard, who, by the way, quite disagree with one another.  It 
seems to me that they have taken the subject matter of what once was 
Moral Theology and dealt with it from the point of view subjective 
fallen nature.  If God is dead [They misunderstand Nietzsche on 
this.], and all the works of God are dead, then there is nothing but 
the unconstrained experience of fallen nature.  From a Buddhist point 
of view, they speak of and from samsara, the experience of birth and 
death.  I am not interested in plumbing this illusion, though I 
conceed the requirement that those working in the humanities do so. 
>From time to time, in their discourse, however, they do rise above the 
illusion to give it, however sureptitiously, sufficient structure to 
alow them to go on talking. 
 
     As I read Baudrillard's FORGET FOUCAULT, I extract the following 
perhaps useful assertions.  Faucault's discussion of sex is not about 
sex, but about constraints on sex.  His discussion of power is not 
about power, but about constraints on power. [I profess no special 
knowledge about sex, but I am aware that the Political Science has 
dealt with constitutions, voting procedures, pressure groups and 
political parties - all of which are discussions of the structure of 
or constraint on power, and not of power itself.  NOW economics is 
about relative scarcity, that is, a particular constraint on wealth, 
and not wealth itself. 
 
     Does this tell us anything? 
 
     It is not a new idea, as anyone who has read John Rae, E.G. 
Wakefield, Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, or Joseph Schumpeter 
knows.  Schumpeter spoke of the rupturing of the static circular flow 
with its associated relative scarcities. 
 
     Economics, as we now have it, is not about wealth, but about the 
constraints on wealth.  Is this a directive as we look to explain the 
present relatively unhappy situation?