1. The lively discussions on choice here reveal that economists do not agree on the meaning, significance and role of choice in economic theory. I have no choice but to break out of this state of refutation. 2. Economics was supposed to be a study of the observable concrete reality called the economy. But the marginalist revolution dropped the economy out of economics and instead fled to the world of an isolated individuals choice that does not matter to anybody else. It began studying the application of the principle of economy or economizing, and hence properly belongs to biology. Mickey the individual mouse faces choices between hunting this or that insect, and foraging for this or that food, and has time and energy constraints, and he bears various risks and uncertainties in the hunting and gathering activities. The biological principle of conservation of energy can very well be presented as the principle of economizing. Microeconomics as it stands today is nothing more than Mickeynomics of Mickey the Mouse, and can be simply thrown away with no loss of understanding about the market economy. We can make a short visit to biology to read about the natural economy and how solitary individuals allocate their given resources to maximize their utilities and minimize their costs. Specifically, the Walrasian general equilibrium model applies to a single mouse that hunts n different insects and equalizes the production of each item with its consumption. It says nothing about the uniquely human choices in a market economy which is not a natural economy. It has nothing about the market at all. It mistakes equality of production and consumption under autarky for equality of demand and supply under exchange. To make it into exchange, the demand for each good must be matched by something of a different kind, but of equal value in payment. Without that additional equation, the Walrasian model cannot be said to have anything about the market. It remains pure biology. I must add that there is old confusion about the idea of rational choice. Rationality is not an observable reality. We cannot say that Crusoe is 38% rational while Friday is 57% rational. It is an analytical concept for the analyst only. Anything is rational if it is reasonable, that is, if the analyst can make sense of it. The choices of a solitary mouse must be deemed to be rational. It adds nothing about human beings at all. Biological choices are rational choices too. 3. In a market economy, an individual is not isolated. He must rise above an optimizer and be an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, he produces what he does not consume (but what he sells), and he consumes what he does not produce (but what he buys). Through buying and selling, he expresses his entrepreneurial choices, which are fundamentally different from allocational choices of an optimizer. An optimizer is a miserable loner who allocates a given scare resource, and cannot make any gains. But an entrepreneur breaks out of scarcity by creating new value that did not exist before. He exchanges something of lower value for something of higher value. Since he tries to satisfy the demand of others, he produces far in excess of what he would produce only for his own consumption. This is what Grandpa Smith wanted to understand in the Wealth of Nations: how do you create new wealth? Division of labor did not mean allocation of an individual's time to many tasks all done by Crusoe, but the exchange of time so that one man produced something for many others, and relied on others for many things he did not produce himself. There is entrepreneurial choice here, but no optimizer can deal with it. Biologists are not economists because they cannot deal with entrepreneurial choices. 4. James Ahiakpore sees that if the employer did not hire the guys at the minimum wage, they laborers would be without work and worse off. To me, he is saying what a biologist would say. Why? In biology, plunder is normal: a lion simply kills and eats the fawn, and never pays. A slave has no economic choice, but has biological choice: he can submit to the master and stay alive or rebel and die. To become an economist, it is necessary to see the entrepreneurial potential, which in this case would be one of competition. Can the worker compete effectively to get jobs that pay wages equal to marginal product? If they cannot, there is plunder, and it is an exercise in biology of hunting. If the worker does not have competing employers, he is not a participant in a market, and he is of no importance to economics. In economics, one must see the individual as a pursuer of profit, and that pursuit must occur within an institutional setting in which the buyer is compelled to pay full price to the seller. If the slave wage is lower than the value of marginal product, the institution is not a market, and politics will intervene to set it right based on brute power. As long as Americans can keep the Africans as slaves, they will. If the political power-balance changes, the story will change. It has nothing to do with economics. To make it into economics, one must consider the option of the individual for self-employment. Only under a plundering natural economy of one man hunting another will a worker be unable to employ himself on his land or get access to capital to set him up in production. If workers are unable to find alternative employment, something is seriously wrong and it is time to pick up the axe and fix it. It is time for politicians to liberate the market from the free-market lobbyists who want the market to be monopolized, and plunder to continue without any regulation. It is time to install competition by busting monopoly. 5. How can a biologist aspire to become an economist? First, forget about optimization and begin with entrepreneurship. Derive a merchants demand for something which he will not consume and hence where utility will not matter. Next, derive a merchants supply curve of something which he sells but does not produce, and hence in which the production function and cost of production does not matter. Next, one begins in economics by specifying an economy as a set of real goods, all of which are potentially exchangeable, that is, in principle, all of which could be consumed by people other than their producers. Next, specify the relations between the kinds and quantities of the goods to display how they affect one another. I have shown how to do that with four equations. It covers the degenerate case of autarky as well, the only case known to micreconomics. 6. The constraints on an optimizers miserable choices seem to have prevented the biologist from becoming an economist. Why assume constant prices and incomes in the consumers choices? No, prices are not constants, and incomes are not constants either. When an individual is put in the market context of exchange, he is both a producer and a consumer, and he must be both a seller and a buyer. The fun is that he buys one thing and sells another, and these two things must be related in some way to comply with the rules of exchange. One rule is that he must pay for what he buys, and the value of the payment must be equal to the value of what he buys. One learns about price through an entrepreneurial exchange in which arbitrage necessarily occurs. Arbitrage means that the market price is above the marginal cost of production and below the marginal benefit of consumption, when both are measured in units of a reference good. One also learns about money when specifying indirect exchange in which the first individual gives his real good to a second and gets its real compensation from a third. One then sees the seigniorage operation of arranging payments in two steps: the seller first gets money from the buyer, and then gets real goods from another supplier. All of it is far above and beyond Mickey Mouse optimization. 7. An optimizer does not gain anything from allocating a given budget, but only avoids wastage of misallocation. Seemingly, most economists choose to be optimizers who will remain within the constraints of micro and macroeconomics and individual choice as was handed down to them, and will not break out of constraints to courageously beat micro, macro, trade and monetary theory all into one solid pulp of economic theory that offers great gains over those crude fragments. Micro fetish continues. 8. There is intellectual choice. The meek can inherit the earth and its old miseries and be biologists looking at the optimizing behavior of isolated Crusoe/ Mickey Mouse. Or they can be zoologists, primatologists and even anthropologists and psychologists to observe the behavior of solitary man or mouse or chimp, and even see them in a colony of interaction, but all within the natural limits of optimization for the miserably constrained. The non-meek can venture into the realm of economics as a study of the market economy in which entrepreneurial choices occur. Those are choices devoted to make net gains from actions of buying and selling, of arbitrage and seigniorage. Then there would be no need to apologize for the plunders of the slave masters, but one could instead offer eulogy to the accomplishments of creators of wealth of nations. And then one would see the rules of the game of exchange and have much fun watching how it is played. I would encourage future economists to watch the creation of new wealth, the busting of old constraints, and the elimination of the isolation of the miserable Crusoe rescued back into glorious company of movers and shakers. Save Crusoe out of his misery: let him produce for others and make profits, and let him enjoy the products of others for which he pays well. Make him richer and richer, so that the budget constraint becomes a laugh. Let him be a man: let him bust his constraints. Have a gainful summer of unconstrained fun and enjoy doing something new. Mohammad Gani