==================== HES POSTING =================== [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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]