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Comment by kubanczyk | Hacker News Reader

> the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values

There's no such elevation. The political process ultimately decides the law (including constitutional), and the law regulates (or frees) the market.

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To some extent? But then we have lobby groups, PACs, regulatory capture and astroturf campaigns that have proven to be quite successful techniques to subvert the political process.

I'd argue that those techniques put us back at the mechanistic system being elevated above other values.

You'll find a great many people on this very forum arguing that a given law is bad because it's bad for the market, dismissing the question of whether that market is actually producing good outcomes for humans as beneath consideration. So in practice a lot of people do elevate the market over more human values, and that influences the political process and the law.

Not to mention, economic factors are stronger than political or social factors. The market economy is winning for basic evolutionary reasons: those who engage in it are able to outcompete those who don't, whether it's at the "marketplace of ideas" or in the field of battle. And it doesn't even matter if, at individual level, the pro-market society is worse off. Much like with hunter-gathering vs. agriculture - the former lifestyle may be better for you, but if your group doesn't adopt the latter, it'll eventually be conquered by a group that does.

In the end, people end up elevating the market above all, whether they want it or not, because they underestimate the power of the system they're dealing with.

> the law regulates (or frees) the market.

and yet, black markets exists, especially in places where the law fails to provide or provision a sufficiently free market for some goods/services.

So i would argue that the law does not decide this, or you could call it law of nature that decides it.

Even these black markets tend to use the institutions of law and society, for example, money and they rely on the protection of law, too, i.e., law enforcement isn't typically free to do whatever to combat them. Where enforcement is strongest, black markets have a hard time forming.

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