[eli_gottlieb]

Well, since I'm making ready for the day unusually quickly this Saturday morning, I think I'll take the time to properly explain my deep disagreements with your position.

* Markets cannot be claimed to "beat" Arrow's Impossibility Theorem any better than any other method of preference aggregation.

* Economics does not derive from foundations for ethics, nor form a foundation for ethics, nor say anything about ethics or meta-ethics. Value-neutrality is basically the whole point of economics, ever since Adam Smith codified the subject.

* In fact, to drive home that second point there, if two people agree on a preference ordering, it doesn't matter whether that ordering has any metaphysical or "foundational" significance whatsoever. Economics is making a weird assumption, from the anthropological point of view, that people won't agree on preference orderings -- what with all being humans and thus having very similar material needs.

* In further fact, "free market" systems, taken as foundations for morality and society, give rise to their own "paradoxes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox).

To unpack the first point, which is most likely the important one... The Impossibility Theorem says that no system of ordinally-ranked voting (in which candidates are listed in order of preference) can satisfy the following three criteria, and also something called Pareto efficiency we'll get back to later.

The three criteria:

* If every voter prefers alternative X over alternative Y, then the group prefers X over Y.

* If every voter's preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then the group's preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged (even if voters' preferences between other pairs like X and Z, Y and Z, or Z and W change).

* There is no "dictator": no single voter possesses the power to always determine the group's preference. Note that "dictator" here is a technical term: the hypothetical "dictator" would probably not know who he or she is. An informal term that captures the correct meaning in today's term would be closer to "swing voter" -- Asimov wrote a short story about the phenomenon (http://www.5novels.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27325.html).

So, how does a "market system" do "better" than a centrally-planned one? Well, firstly, it employs cardinal (real-number) preferences rather than orderings, and secondly, it allows for dictatorship (primarily of the wealthy, and in both the technical and informal senses). This of course means that any preference-aggregation system which is willing to bite these two bullets (preferences are numbers rather than orderings, and there may be one person in the population whose voice determines the outcome) faces no troubles from Arrow's Theorem. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem will still apply (any system must exclude some candidate, suffer from a potential (if unknown) dictator, or be vulnerable to tactical voting), but it of course applies to "market planning" just as much as to any other system (particularly since market planning bites the dictatorship bullet).

As to the question of efficiency, capitalism does not even claim to provide social efficiency in any sense, merely Pareto efficiency regarding things which can be owned as property. Pareto efficiency just means, "The best outcome that can be obtained without taking from the rich to give to the poor." Worse, markets are not known to converge to equilibria in real life -- they're far too stochastic for that.

And then of course we run into all the previously-mentioned issues of trying to combine freshman political science, wildly idealized economics, and right-wing ideology to claim to have formed a foundation for morality or to answer fundamentally moral questions.

[grinnbearit]

Hmm, thats a lot to respond to, I'm going to start with just a small part initially.

I'm not taking free markets to be a foundation for morality, I'm saying that I believe morality and values to be subjective. Markets are just one way to achieve consensus in a distributed system.

You mentioned earlier that you believe in moral realism, a definite objective moral code which ALL humans should follow and humans who do not are wrong/bad/broken. Do you believe the same about values? That there is an objective preference ordering all humans should have and those that do not are wrong/bad/broken?

I don't particularly favour capitalism or democracy as systems, but I do prefer them over central planning or dictatorship BECAUSE I believe values and morality to be subjective. Any alternate system should take that into account.

Is this where we disagree?

[eli_gottlieb]

>Do you believe the same about values? That there is an objective preference ordering all humans should have and those that do not are wrong/bad/broken?

That's a misconceived question in the first place. There are only actual feelings, preferences, etc. that actually-existing human individuals really have. To talk about "more objective" versus "more subjective", you have to talk about how well-informed those feelings and preferences are by someone's experience of the world: the objective, normative preference is the one you would form if you had all relevant experience of the world.

What values are not is subjective in the economic sense, of being both completely particular to each given agent and also arbitrary, unlinked to what sort of person you are or your circumstances. This is why it's often a better idea to inform and educate someone than to merely give them what their misconceived desires currently point towards -- for instance, to hospitalize suicidal people.

>I don't particularly favour capitalism or democracy as systems, but I do prefer them over central planning or dictatorship BECAUSE I believe values and morality to be subjective. Any alternate system should take that into account.

But again, you are completely ignoring both the definitions of the systems you're talking about, and how they actually operate. The questions you're trying to argue about are not fundamentally about "objective values" (a less misconceived idea) versus "subjective values" (a very extremely misconceived idea). They are about how you transmit information about what actually-existing people want or would want, and combine material inputs to give people what they want or would want.

Capitalism, especially of our current kind, is quite bad at giving people what they want, whether it's objective or subjective or naturalistic! This is why you are sitting here resorting to bad meta-ethics and bad history: you cannot justify your system by reference to the broad masses being genuinely satisfied with their lives, so instead you say, "Values are subjective, so capitalism is the only alternative to dictatorship, because Arrow's Impossibility Theorem." Every part of this statement is fractally wrong: there are more political systems than just "democracy" and "dictatorship", there are more economic systems than just capitalism and "central planning"/command-economy, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem demonstrates certain limitations that markets have to follow just like everything else, values are naturalistic, and the masses are mostly quite unhappy with their lives.

Please, learn more history, learn more political science, learn more economics, and learn them honestly. Avoid ethics, actually: it's a crappy field because it's founded on the false assumption that there are actually things called "values", which are either dictated by God, spring fully-formed from the Platonic Form of Reason, or are "subjective" to the point of meaninglessness.