Quote from: Jimmy245 on May 03, 2012, 02:39 amI'm not sure I'm completely comfortable with the "they won't kill me because I'm their customer" theory.Alignment of self interest is how everything works in this world when you get right down to it. Look at the principal agent problem. Question is how to achieve it most practically. Capitalists for example, you might be often told about how much money they have. But where is that money? It's not in the bank now is it? (not that would be a terrible thing thanks to FRB). It's out there in the world, making more money for its owners by creating work, jobs. So... who really has the power? The workers or the capitalist?The 20th century wept blood over that question. The bittersweet tang of the truth is that the chains of the proletarians, were their own. The workers and the capitalists are not discrete entities. I think Karl Marx understood that in some way, but his followers on a century later certainly did not. The key question everybody should be asking is, how is a group of capitalists different from 1 government in the manner they utilize money. In the end, you're asking whether millions of tiny self directed agents are smarter than 1 giant agent, a hive mind. Is 1 person (the infamous benevolent dictatorship) more rational, more efficient than millions of people, or less so? What model of reality most closely corresponds to the real thing? Being right or wrong on these matters is a life and death matter.Then it gets complicated, but the answers are more satisfying. It's like this when you're taking real intellectual risks. Now you're tackling the core problem, not fucking around with political soap opera bullshit that won't matter in ten minutes, we waste so much time on semantics.And if you're wondering how capitalists don't compound their way to infinite money, well, it doesn't work that way. They get eaten by the other capitalists. It's a continual process of transformation, of recursive accumulation and distribution. It's just like a heart beating, I love it. Natural Selection: Evolution. Death: Change. That is why we die: this is why we are alive. Those jaundiced journalists and career politicians, I feel sorry for them, because they will never realize that the System is elegant.