Samuel Bostaph wrote: > We choose because we have free will and human actions are > non-deterministic. [Apologies to you Marxists out there > who have swallowed the historical materialism argument. > I think you are wrong, but that is another argument.] A claim that humans make economic choices because they have free will is not a challenge to Marxism any more than to neoclassical economics. Rather it is a challenge to the physicalist interpretation of the world, which is to say modern science. It is also a pointless claim for economists: economic science acquires nothing from the claim (except the useless possibility of truly inexplicable actions). As far as I am aware, nobody has yet said in a sensible way just what "free will" means. Perhaps Kant got the closest, and he was forced to maintain a kind of compatibilism. Which is just to say, there is nothing in it for science. Cheers, Alan Isaac