Capitalism and Evolution
Ilya Shambat
capitalism but not in evolution. They find it impossible to believe
that life in all its richness and intricacy could have "just
happened"
and believe that the only possible explanation is design by an
intelligent Creator. In fact it could have very well "just happened,"
and to understand this one needs look no further than the good ole
American capitalism.
People who have no knowledge of capitalist economics, such as ones
who
lived in the Soviet Union, frequently find it unfathomable how a
system like America's, which is not command-control, could have such
an intelligent design. That there is a store for everything, there is
something for every purse and purpose, and pieces fit together, leads
them to think that all this prosperity must have been designed by the
government. Of course that is not the case, and most of what is
bought
and sold in America was produced by private businesses with no
connection to one another. It happened because people kept looking
for
opportunities to make money - and found them by producing one or
another thing that people would want to buy. As they competed with
one
another, they put pressure on one another to produce quality goods.
As
they became wealthier, there consumed more, creating opportunity for
other people to produce other, new goods that did not exist
previously.
And that is how the American system was made possible, and
achieved greater intelligence and quality of products than did
centrally planned systems.
The exact same thing has happened in the natural world. Mutation by
mutation, different forms of life arose and either survived or
didn't.
As more life forms came about, there was more biomass for other new
life forms to arise. Competition perfected them all to an
exceptionally high level. And the result was a planet verdant, rich,
beautiful, exquisitely balanced, with millions of unique and
intricate
life forms existing in dynamic equilibrium - a process that took over
4 billion years, and that could easily have taken place all by
itself.
If a process like capitalism can over two hundred years create the
wealth and vibrancy of America - including such hi-tech contraptions
as supercomputers, nanotechnological devices, credit cards,
artificial
limbs, space vehicles - over two hundred years, then what can take
place over 4 billion years? Evolution may seem incredulous, but
becomes less so when considering what capitalism accomplished over a
vastly shorter period of time. Nature does not require an
intelligent creator to explain all its richness and intricacy any
more
than America requires an absolute monarch to explain the vibrancy of
its economy. Indeed, if one is to look at example of centrally
planned
economic systems, a nature put into place by the dictate of an
intelligent creator would be expected to be a lot less rich place
than
it is.
So this is the way to conceptualize it. If you respect capitalism,
then you should also respect evolution. The two processes have a lot
in common, and understanding one allows one to understand the other.
Nature no more requires an intelligent creator to make it possible
than
does capitalism require central planning to achieve what it has
achieved. Indeed, an intelligent creator would probably be seen by
plants and animals to be as much of a pest as many economic
players in America see the federal government. But that is a theme
for another essay.
Jonah Thomas
Ilya Shambat wrote:
> People who have no knowledge of capitalist economics, such as ones who
> lived in the Soviet Union, frequently find it unfathomable how a system
> like America's, which is not command-control, could have such an
> intelligent design.
I expect that people who have not been brainwashed by theorists about capitalism who look at
the US system with a fresh eye would conclude that America has a command-control system.
There was a time when we did not. In 1776 the average proprietorship had something like 1
employee in addition to the proprietor, and the average corporation had perhaps 6 employees.
But those days are long gone.
Now a large fraction of the economy is run by giant corporations. Most of them have great big
bureaucracies doing command-and-control. Not the government doing it, but does that make
it better?
> ... most of what is bought
> and sold in America was produced by private businesses with no
> connection to one another.
Well, no. Private businessmen develop relationships with their suppliers and distributors etc.
This is because they want reliability. There are businesses tht shop around for the cheapest
components and produce as cheaply as they can. These tend to be marginal businesses.
Mostly the point is to buy components that can be expected to be adequate for an adequate
price, from a source that can increase production if needed. Your distributor wants 100,000
units per month at a reasonably reliable price, and definitely reliable quality. A discount price
is not workt increased returns. A discount price this month that can't be repeated next month
is not worth a whole lot either. So these guys are working on the promise of repeat business.
You watch your customers and your suppliers like a hawk, to predict what they can and will
do. You develop alternatives before a shaky contact causes trouble, but you go on throwing
business to the ones you've developed until they give you trouble, because the new guys
won't be dependable *for you* until you've had time to develop a continuing relationship, and
that's so valuable you don't want to let go of it unless they turn unreliable first.
> It happened because people kept looking for
> opportunities to make money - and found them by producing one or another
> thing that people would want to buy.
And increasingly by creating demand first, persuading people they will want to buy just as
your production is ready to supply that artificial demand.
> As they competed with one
> another, they put pressure on one another to produce quality goods.
Traditionally, a new product collects perhaps hundreds of competitors, and over a few years
or maybe a few decades most of them lost out until there were perhaps three left. The top two
would be quite prosperous. Was the competition to produce quality goods? Maybe sometimes.
Or cheap goods. Or they might compete at establishing brands (which could not be too
expensive or too poor-quality, but need not be better than just adequate.). Or the winning
competitors might be better at attracting capital. Or better at getting legislation passed which
favors them. Or better at compatibility with related products, which could be engineered for
incompatibility....
> As they became wealthier, there consumed more, creating opportunity for
> other people to produce other, new goods that did not exist previously.
The relationship between investment and comsumption is extremely complicated. As a first
approximation, everybody in the system gets to decidfewhether to consume or invest, and
nobody controls the ratio between them. If there is not enough consumption, investors cannot
on average make a profit because they can't sell enough of their great new products to stay in
business. If there is not enough investment, consumers are stuck with a decreasing variety of
commodities to buy, higher prices for lower quality. Banks can loan money to investors or
consumers either one; if they loan too much money there will be inflation. Similarly if there is
too much consumption then prices for consumer goods rises faster than availability. If there
is too much investment then there is increased competition for resources including labor, and
we again get inflation. Government can influence all this by buying stuff for government use
(notably munitions, there's no obvious right amount of munitions for the government to buy).
Government can also subsidise investment particularly investment that fits whatever criteria
government chooses.
All very complicated. Government has a great big influence in various ways that tend to be
strongly influenced by partisan politics with no real attempt at planning. Also the Federal
Reserve attempts to indirectly regulate banks according to economic criteria which must be
kept secret. It is widely believed that one of their criteria is that unemployment must not go
too low. When there are not enough people looking for jobs, then economic expansion will
result in inflation; short-sighted employees hop from one job to another at rapidly-increasing
pay. Then when the crunch is over they are grossly overpaid and the companies which were
stuck with them when the music stopped have to find ways to dump them.
> And that is how the American system was made possible, and achieved
> greater intelligence and quality of products than did centrally planned
> systems.
Centrally-planned systems were designed before there was much computing power
available. You got hordes of people trying to do planning on paper. Very slow feedback
loops. Large modern corporations do far better central planning, and they are often larger
than most communist economies were. This is because they now have the necessary
technology.
> The exact same thing has happened in the natural world. Mutation by
> mutation, different forms of life arose and either survived or didn't.
> As more life forms came about, there was more biomass for other new life
> forms to arise. Competition perfected them all to an exceptionally high
> level. And the result was a planet verdant, rich, beautiful, exquisitely
> balanced, with millions of unique and intricate
> life forms existing in dynamic equilibrium - a process that took over 4
> billion years, and that could easily have taken place all by itself.
Different.For the most part, there is an ideal size for each individual plant of animal. A species
increases by having more individuals rather than one big individual with a single genome. So --
ignoring a collection of important details -- a species with 1 million individuals has 10,000 times
as much diversity as a populatoin with 100 individuals, and if diversity is the limiting factor for
evolution, it can evolve 10,000 times as fast. A species with 1 billion individuals can evolve
1000 times as fast as one with only 1 million individuals, etc. But a successful corporation does
not split into two corporations that each share the methods that made it successful. Instead it
grows until it doubles in size, and if it can still be successful at the new size then it keeps
growing. And a corporation with 100,000 employees will not have 10,000 times the innovation
of a corporation with 10 individuals.
Large corporations get some economy of scale in production, sometimes. They usually get
economy of scale in marketing. They get economy of scale in bargaining at all levels. A
corporation that has half the market can blacklist you, and you are then cut off from half the
market. Etc. Large corporations get a disproportionate advantage at lobbying. In general, the
larger the company the less competition.
This sort of thing occasionally happens in biological evolution, but not often. In a few places
you get stands of giant sequoyah trees that each produce millions of seeds, biasing the
evolution of the species in that biome. They grow until their productivity is so low they can't
make all that many seeds, and so they waste space that could be used by productive trees --
but there is no way for anything better to replace them, short of human loggers. There are a
few fungi in which perhaps one clone has colonised very large areas, perhaps multiple
square miles. But again, this sort of thing is not common.
> So this is the way to conceptualize it. If you respect capitalism, then
> you should also respect evolution.
But not vice versa.
One obvious way to improve our economy is to set a maximum size for corporations. Perhaps
set a maximum size both in dollars turnover and in number of employees. If each individual
corporation must be small, then there is far more room for competition. You cannot get a
single corporation that is Too Big To Fail (TBTF), or a single corporation that holds a choke
point and gets its profits by choking the flow, etc.
So for example we might start by making a law that no corporation can have more than 1
million employees inside the USA. That law would affect only WalMart, which has around 2
million. Give WalMart a few years to cut its employee rolls in half. The obvious way for them
to do that would be to divide into two competing corporations, so that in most cases when
you look at two WalMart stores that are close to each other, one would belong to WalMart-A
while the other would belong to Walmart-1. Clearly the nation would be better off if Walmart
was two competing corporations. Certainly their suppliers would be better off. But possibly
WalMart might instead spin off corporations that do particular services. They could have a
transport company and a legal company and so on. And the transport company could then
take jobs from WalMart competitors or whoever....
A few years later, require that no corporation can have more than 500,000 employees. This
would affect nobody except WalMart and the US Post Office at around 800,000. Both would
be improved by splitting off some functions into separate corporations.
A few years after that, lower the limit to 250,000 employees. Now you also affect McDonald's
at 450,000, UPS at 400,000, Sears at 350,000, Target at 340,000, IBM at 330,000, General
Motors at 330,000, General Electric at 320,000, Citigroup at 300,000, Kroger at 290,000,
and Home Depot at 290,000. By this time these corporations would have had years to
prepare, and it ought to go pretty smoothly. McDonald's for example could expand its
franchises and reduce direct operation.
By the time we reduced the maximum employment to around, say, 250 employees per
corporation, we could expect the economy to be considerably improved -- not least because
individual corporations would not be large enough to do a lot of effective lobbying.
Jonah Thomas
> People who have no knowledge of capitalist economics, such as ones who
> lived in the Soviet Union, frequently find it unfathomable how a system
> like America's, which is not command-control, could have such an
> intelligent design. That there is a store for everything, there is
> something for every purse and purpose, and pieces fit together, leads
> them to think that all this prosperity must have been designed by the
> government.
But it was designed by the government.
Only first, much of it was designed by private individuals and
corporations.
Start with the banking system. Banks were invented by individual people.
Goldsmiths, they say. A goldsmith needs gold to make things from. So he
needs a safe to keep his gold in. Then he can rent out space in his safe
for other people's gold, people who want to keep their gold safe. And he
notices, people deposit gold with him, and people withdraw gold. On
average it balances out. People pay him to keep large stacks of gold for
an indefinite time. If he spends it, and keeps just enough on hand for the
occasional days that people withdraw more than they deposit....
Spending is so declasse, though. If he loans out the money, he can get
interest on it. And what do the debtors do with the money? They leave it
in the goldsmith's safe until they are ready to spend it. And when they do
spend it, they take it out of the safe and give it to somebody else, and
what does *he* do with it? He puts it in the goldsmith's safe until he's
ready to spend it. And so -- banks.
Imagine a simplified situation. One bank. One community. The community's
net worth is $1 million. The bank's net worth is also $1 million. The bank
makes loans and more loans. After awhile the bank has loaned out $6
million. If you have the authority to look at the bank's books, you will
see that the bank has $1 million in cash and $6 million in loans that
various people have promised to pay back. How can this be? The economy is
booming. People make good money at their jobs so they aren't worried that
they have debts which they will eventually have to pay back. They have
things like houses which are increasing in value. And businesses are
thriving because people want to buy so much. The businesses had to take
out loans to expand, but they aren't worried because they can make money
so fast. The businesses that do not expand cannot compete. If your
competitor has $100,000 to spend and you do not, you are undercapitalised.
There are various ways that business is like a no-limit poker game, where
simply not having as much money as your competitors means you lose. The
surviving businesses are deeply in debt.
And then something goes wrong. For some reason the bank cannot keep
loaning more money. It must loan less. The economy shrivels. All the
poeple who are in debt find that they cannot pay. Their jobs are gone or
in danger, their businesses are not thriving any longer. They cannot pay.
And look at the unhappy banker! Six months ago he was worth $7 million.
Now he has only his $1 million in cash and the measly $1 million he can
get for his loans. He has lost $5 million! Horrors! He is surrounded by a
community that has nothing at all, that has debts to him it cannot repay.
And he himself has lost %5 million and has only $2 million left. He is so
sad. Perhaps he will be consoled by desperate men who offer him their
wives and daughters if only he will be merciful.
Perhaps there is a flaw in the way the banking system works. It was
designed by bankers, and every now and then this sort of catastrophe
happens, and the bankers have not found out how to fix it. They are very
smart men, but somehow they have not found any way to prevent this
horrible accident from repeating itself every two or three generations or
even more often. How sad for the poor bankers who must suffer through such
misery.
More later.
Jonah Thomas
> People who have no knowledge of capitalist economics, such as ones who
> lived in the Soviet Union, frequently find it unfathomable how a system
> like America's, which is not command-control, could have such an
> intelligent design. That there is a store for everything, there is
> something for every purse and purpose, and pieces fit together, leads
> them to think that all this prosperity must have been designed by the
> government.
Let's think about commodity markets.
A commodity is something that can be bought and sold, which is pretty much
interchangeable with itself. One gold ingot is pretty much like another,
unless one of them is counterfeit or alloyed with cheaper metals. One
bushel of Durum wheat is pretty much like another bushel of Durum wheat.
There are inspectors to reject it if it is too moldy etc. One share of IBM
common stock is worth the same as a different share of IBM common stock.
Etc.
How does a market work? Well, a market can provide a place where people
come together, and whoever wnnts to buy offers the money he wants to
offer, and whoever wants to sell offers his product, and whenever they
make a deal then a deal is made, and that's all there is to it, right?
No. Wrong.
When there is a market in something that will last, somebody will build a
warehouse or equivalent at the market. He will keep on hand a supply of
money and a supply of stored product. And he will set the price. If you
want to buy you buy from him. If you want to sell, you sell to him. He is
called a "market maker". It's possible that some pairs might work out a
deal without involving him. But they will do their deal at his current
price. Why? Because if they settle on some other price, whichever one of
them is getting the worse deal can go to the market maker instead.
Market makers have a natural monopoly. Whichever one is larger can
outcompete smaller ones, unless the smaller market has some sort of
barrier. So for example the NYSE dominates trade in the stocks it covers,
but the Pacific Exchange survives by being in a different time zone and a
canadian exchnage survives due to the national border etc.
A market maker sets the price. But he doesn't do that arbitrarily. He has
a stock of product and a stock of money. When his stock of product
dwindles he can raise the price, and when his stock swells he can lower
the price. It's really two prices, he sells for a higher price than he
buys, and the more he buys and sells the more money he makes. He makes
money whether the price rises or falls. He can make the price respond to
supply and demand. Why not let actual supply and demand set the price?
Because he can make money doing it.
There have been theoretical studies that claim that without a market maker
the market would have increased price swings. Random fluctuations in the
number of sellers and buyers will make random noise, they would cause the
price to jitter randomly. The market maker in theory smooths out the
prices which is supposed to be a good thing. It has been argued that in
practice, he slows random rises in price by intervening; he makes the
price rise slower and he pockets some of the profits that sellers would
otherwise get. But when prices fall, he lets them fall fast instead of
buying high selling gradually lower, losing money in the process.
When people buy and sell the product because they make it and need to
sell, or they use it and need to buy, then this method works tolerably
well. But what happens when speculators start to dominate a market? People
who buy because they think the price will rise and they can sell? That's
the market maker's job, not theirs. When the market maker thinks that's
going on, he can burn them. He can keep raising the price, and speculators
will keep buying at higher prices. He can sell as much stock as he wants
because they will never want delivery, they will trust him to keep their
stock until they can unload it. Then at some point he drops the price.
Speculators buy when the price rises and perhaps sell when their target
prices are met. They do not buy while the price is falling. So he can
ratchet the price down and down and down until the speculators panic and
sell at a loss. He makes lots of money. He can set the price to anything
he wants -- it's the absence of speculators that leaves him setting it to
demand and supply for producers and consumers. When there are enough
speculators he can create extreme price swings, to *attract* more
speculators and to *prey on* speculators. Of course these price swings are
hell on actual producers and consumers.
This is a system designed by market makers, and in normal circumstances it
gives market makers a wonderfup profit. When a market maker makes a
serious mistake he can go bankrupt and then must be replaced by a new
market maker. Sometimes markets are managed by market makers who try to
stabilise trade. For example the far east trade in tin used to be managed
by the British government, which settled for a reasonable profit.
Sometimes market makers try to grab whatever the market will bear. Do you
have a retirement plan? Chances are, your retirement fund is run by a
trader who will lose his job unless he shows sufficient profit each month
from speculation. He must continually move your money into stocks that are
currently going up, and out of stocks that have suddenly gone down. When a
month comes that he loses too much of your money at once, he will be fired
and replaced by a new trader who works under the same rules....
Does it seem right to you that banking is a game designed and run by
bankers? That markets are designed and run by private market makers, in
each case to ensure their own profit?
Should you trust some of the players in a game to run the game? is that
any saner than letting Catawumpus be the one who arbitrates whether he's
right and you're wrong or instead whether he's wrong and you're right?
But if it isn't players in the game who get to run the game, who else can
you trust? Currently the only other choice is government. This has its
problems too. But the alternative is clearly absurd.
Catawumpus
> Should you trust some of the players in a game to run the game? is that
> any saner than letting Catawumpus be the one who arbitrates whether he's
> right and you're wrong or instead whether he's wrong and you're right?
Over a thousand words in (I admit to skipping most of them
-- Jonah does run on) and hey, look: suddenly he's talking
about me. Why he wants to bring me in this thread I'm not sure.
Guess I'm just on his mind, despite all his old
announcements to the contrary. But long as I'm here I might as
well say a thing or two.
Jonah is playing one of his usual games by pretending I've
tried to make myself the arbitrator of our discussions.
Naturally I've added my two cents, maybe even a nickel, but the
idea I've put in any claim to be referee is one of the
misrepresentations Jonah specializes in: apparently one of his
favorites, since he's used it before.
Sometimes it's step one of a two-part maneuver where Jonah
tries to give himself the job ("Well, see, you think you're
the referee, when in reality I'm the referee"). An exercise in
futility and a misunderstanding of Usenet, where there's no
such position of authority; all you can do is put your cards on
the table and debate about who's won.
From Jonah's angle, his five aces take every hand -- which
might explain his long-standing anxiety (he's been going on
this way for years) about who sets the rules and who judges the
outcome.
-- Catawumpus
Jonah Thomas
> Jonah Thomas <jeth...@gmail.com>:
>> Should you trust some of the players in a game to run the game? is that
>> any saner than letting Catawumpus be the one who arbitrates whether
>> he's right and you're wrong or instead whether he's wrong and you're
>> right?
Sad, I write as clearly as I can about a very complex topic and the only
response I have so far is Catawumpus arguing that he's right in general
and I'm wrong in general, with nothing about the topic. [sigh]
> Over a thousand words in (I admit to skipping most of them
> -- Jonah does run on) and hey, look: suddenly he's talking about me.
> Why he wants to bring me in this thread I'm not sure. Guess I'm just on
> his mind, despite all his old announcements to the contrary. But long
> as I'm here I might as well say a thing or two.
It seemed like an apt comparison to me. And here you are, sifting through
long posts on important topics for yet another chance to repeat yourself.
> Jonah is playing one of his usual games by pretending I've
> tried to make myself the arbitrator of our discussions.
You wouldn't be open to that charge if, when you say something like "Many
times I have proven Jonah wrong, but he has never ever made a plausible
argument that I was wrong about anything", you added "in my opinion".
Once you agree that this is a Usenet discussion with no arbiter and you
are expressing your opinions and not telling us the truth apart from your
opinion, then it's all smooth sailing. But it looks to me like you insist
that you are right and everybody else is wrong, and you are the one who
is objectively qualified to make that judgement. That may not be what you
intend, but that's how you come across.
Catawumpus
>>> Should you trust some of the players in a game to run the game? is
Jonah again, responding to himself:
> Sad, I write as clearly as I can about a very complex topic and the only
Jonah's typical inability to keep up his end of a dialogue:
he goes out of his way to attack me but then replies to his
own words while conveniently erasing most of my come-back. The
kind of cowardice and dishonesty that he's exhibited on a
regular basis -- and look, here's another example of his method
at work:
> response I have so far is Catawumpus arguing that he's right in general
> and I'm wrong in general, with nothing about the topic. [sigh]
A flat-out lie from Jonah. After deleting what I said, he
now fills in the space he made by substituting a glaring
misrepresentation. Rather than commenting on rights and wrongs
generally speaking, I pointed out the fraud in Jonah's
contention that I've claimed the position of referee. The only
one here who's tried to grab the job is Jonah himself, who
said, "Well, see, you think you're the referee, when in reality
I'm the referee."
> long posts on important topics for yet another chance to repeat yourself.
Old ground, it's true. Jonah's desire to make himself the
arbiter of rights and wrongs and his anxiety that somebody
else might steal the job from him is nothing new -- but if this
was something he didn't want to discuss anymore, then he
shouldn't have raised the topic. Very odd that didn't occur to
him.
> You wouldn't be open to that charge if, when you say something like "Many
Instead of giving some support for his claim, Jonah merely
assumes what he's failed to prove by implying I'm somehow
"open" to the accusation he hasn't backed up in any way or form.
Again, the only attempt to appropriate referee-status came
from Jonah, who said, "Well, see, you think you're the
referee, when in reality I'm the referee," making himelf guilty
of his own charge.
Message ID 20070525183735.1...@cavtel.net, on
the off-chance anyone cares.
-- Catawumpus
Jonah Thomas
> Jonah Thomas <jeth...@gmail.com>:
>>>> Should you trust some of the players in a game to run the game?
> Jonah's typical inability to keep up his end of a dialogue:
You do not *do* dialogue.
> he goes out of his way to attack me but then replies to his own words
> while conveniently erasing most of my come-back.
I am not here to argue with you about your come-back. I want to point out
to anybody who's gotten this far that my original simile was apt. We
should no more trust bankers to regulate the banking industry or
stockbrokers to regulate the stock market than we would trust Catawumpus
to referee an argument with Catawumpus.
Catawumpus
> You do not *do* dialogue.
You're projecting -- again. First you falsely implied I'd
tried to play referee, a job you're on-record insisting
belongs to you. More than obvious who wants to be "the one who
arbitrates," in your words.
Then you replied to your own comments while replacing mine
with one of your characteristic fabrications. Result: a
discussion between you, yourself, and the strawman that you had
constructed.
> I am not here to argue with you about your come-back.
You're here to make empty accusations and to run away from
my answers, repeatedly erasing both my words and yours, in
particular your earlier statement, "Well, see, you think you're
the referee, when in reality I'm the referee," which you
deleted twice in a row. You can't even face up to the crap you
say in your own posts.
> I want to point out
> to anybody who's gotten this far that my original simile was apt.
If the criteria in your last post are valid, you're trying
to referee by claiming to be in the right w/out adding an
admission that's nothing more than your opinion. One might say
you're hoist on your own petard. But a referee is a neutral
third party, not just someone who talks firmly. So your petard
is a damp squib.
-- Catawumpus
Jonah Thomas
> Jonah Thomas <jeth...@gmail.com>:
>> I want to point out
>> to anybody who's gotten this far that my original simile was apt.
>
> If the criteria in your last post are valid, you're trying
> to referee by claiming to be in the right w/out adding an admission
> that's nothing more than your opinion.
You continue to do tu quoque as if it mattered.
But just for you, I will say that the statement you quoted above is my
opinion. I believe that if anyone has been following this, most of them
will have seen your replies as an example of the point I was making. I
believe that what you have done *looks like* an invalid attempt to set
the rules of the discussion and claim victory.
And this is emphatically not something that bankers and stockbrokers etc
should be allowed to do for real. The worst that can happen from somebody
listening to you is that possibly some religion might be correct, and
because you got them to believe some sort of heresy they might burn in
hell for eternity. That's pretty bad but I hope the possibility is
remote. The worst that can happen from bankers etc is that hundreds of
millions of people starve, and perhaps the US government switches to
something even more like an aristocracy running a third world nation.
let's not go there.
Latreides Amasa Carbuncle Corps
> Catawumpus wrote:
> > Jonah Thomas <jethom...@gmail.com>:
> > If the criteria in your last post are valid, you're trying
> > to referee by claiming to be in the right w/out adding an admission
> > that's nothing more than your opinion.
>
> You continue to do tu quoque as if it mattered.
I've been doing de gustibus this afternoon. I de gustibus'd an entire
pork rib with barbecue sauce.
Julian
Catawumpus
> You continue
You continue to delete your very own words -- specifically
the ones where you declared yourself referee: just the
reality, you asserted. "Well, see, you think you're the
referee, when in reality I'm the referee." (Third time running
you've erased that from your reply. You also clipped the
message-ID.) So it's plain enough who wants to be "the one who
arbitrates." You do.
> to do tu quoque as if it mattered.
Wrong again. I've never and nowhere claimed to be referee.
That was your invention. By contrast, you're on record
insisting that the job belongs to you. Rather than apologizing
to me and admitting you're guilty of your own charge, you
replied by offering more distortions while erasing the evidence
against you.
-- Catawumpus
Catawumpus
> Jonah Thomas <jeth...@gmail.com>:
>> You continue to do tu quoque as if it mattered.
> I've been doing de gustibus this afternoon.
That "tu quoque" was just another of Jonah's cock-ups. He
was and remains the only person here who's tried to play
referee ("You think you're the referee, when in reality I'm the
referee"), which makes him the only one guilty of his
accusation. Doesn't matter more than any of his other idiocies.
It's merely the latest one.
> I de gustibus'd an entire pork rib with barbecue sauce.
A certain churl calls himself a moralist, but his morality
ends where his appetite starts.
-- Catawumpus
Jonah Thomas
<snip>
Sadly, no one else is responding, so do you have any opinions about how
the banking system works or should work, or about how markets work or
should work, or how the insurance scams work or should work?
Catawumpus
> Catawumpus wrote:
> <snip>
What a fucking joke. You throw accusations at me, provide
absolutely no evidence, misrepresent my replies, and then
erase the entire dialogue when I show you're guilty of your own
charges.
-- Catawumpus
Jonah Thomas
So, you don't want to discuss the banking system, the market system, or
the insurance system?
Sad. It seems no on else here does either. I admit you were a long shot
but no one else was responding at all.
These are among the most important issues of our age. Or they ought to be
issues. But mostly people just yawn, or argue about who won a competition
about the Book of Job ten years ago.