Suggestions to have this thread die quickly:
1. be more polite, and don't treat people with different opinions like lazy ignorants that should read *your* reference textbook before talking. Hopefully no old-school marxist (and I know there are some on this list ;o)) has bothered us with citations from Castioriadis, Che Guevara and Bob Marley. Please don't let this happen : reply that you understand the relevance of the initial question and that you'd be happy to debate on an appropriate medium.
2. be more aggressive (for instance say that Marx should have taken care of his beard instead of writing nonsense), create a mailing list bored-camlist-free-market-argument@yquem.inria and announce a battle royale on it. Settle it like real men do, but elsewhere ;o).

And then, maybe we could go back to "stuff that matters", like mixins, GADT, ocamlbuild and camlp4 documentation, native opengl GUIs, LLVM compilation, batteries etc ... all those topics for which this list (and its members) are so valuable !

ph.




2009/3/17 <xahlee@gmail.com>
On Mar 17, 2009 6:56am, Markus Mottl <markus.mottl@gmail.com> wrote:
> As someone else here has already suggested, I encourage everyone that
> wishes to learn more about different models of economy to pick up any
> reputable, introductory textbook on microeconomics. It will teach you
> that markets, by and large, work well, that they can sometimes fail,
> can also fail systematically in certain areas, and that it is
> extremely hard to find good solutions for the latter that do not cause
> more problems than they solve. Ideological quick fixes do not exist,
> just as the optimal type sytem doesn't so no more flames please...

well said.

For those of you ignorant of the basics, i recommend:

Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
by Thomas Sowell.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465002609/

I read the first edition in the dot come age circa 2000, alone with other books that helped me understand stocks and related financial things. I've read Thomas's book 2 more times in the early 2000s.

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

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