[TheOtherHobbes]

I'm not clear how that would be different to the top-down economy and moral pretensions of bankers and investors that we have now.

When phrases like "moral hazard" are used to describe gambling risk, "amoral" is hardly the most apt description of a system that actually tries to define social and political morality for the entire world of work and business.

The reality is that mainstream economics has always been more a branch of moral philosophy than of empirical science. It's a tool of persuasion that tries to propagate its values through rhetoric and the use of economic, political and physical force.

That's quite close to the usual definition of a priesthood. It's only "amoral" in the sense that the ethics of the priesthood are quite alien to those of many adult humans.

[mlangdon]

This is what I'm saying, only if you think unfettered free marketeering is an unalloyed good would you propose that the antithetical position is that the market is evil.

If I say I want restrictions on the market so that our planet is still liveable in 2100, I am not saying the market is evil. I'm merely stating my moral (in that there is a value judgment) position in contrast to the "free" market moral position. If I say that unfettered markets lead to evil, I'm merely contending with that value judgment, not whether there should a market in general. There's an incredible amount of space between a rampant libertarian market and Communism. It's childish to pretend otherwise.

[dawnbreez]

>I'm not clear how that would be different to the top-down economy and moral pretensions of bankers and investors that we have now.

To be fair, the economy is both so heavily regulated and so stagnated that it barely counts as a free market anymore.

Part of the problem is that nobody is willing to fight the "priests", as you put it. Why try to beat those massive banks? They have far too much money for you to ever defeat them. But having that much money and nobody to make them work for it is precisely why we need new banks to compete with the old ones.