I agree that we've been sold a simplistic myth about freemarket capitalism, by swallowing the halftruth that it results in the greatest value for the lowest cost to the buyer. As you point out, that's only possible if sellers cooperate in their own relative impoverishment. What businessman in his right mind would voluntarily reduce his profits in order to maximize the benefit to the buyer?

And true too that anticompetitive collusion can arise without a conscious conspiracy. Why do all cell phone carriers demand two-year commitments and get away with ruinous early termination fees? They didn't have to collude, they all just had to notice how profitable it was for the first one to try it, and they all stampeded aboard that bandwagon. Nowhere in this process was any consideration about how consumers would like the deal, and why should there be? If all business engage in "best practices", nobody's guilty of anticompetitive behavior.

Classic laissez-faire free market capitalism has rightly been criticized for being premised on an open system, with inputs that were believed to be infinite, and no consequences to the infinite production of output. In a roundabout way conservatives admit this nowadays. I can't tell you the number of times that Tom has answered concerns about limits to growth by confidently assuming that technology will come through with an answer, each and every time, forever and ever, amen. He knows the problem exists, yet imagines a deux ex machina to make it go away again.

But here I think that you and I differ, because I believe that systems don't have to be open and sloppy. It's possible to build closed systems that depend on high efficiency to keep on working indefinitely. That's a sustainable economy.

And convervatives just hate that idea, because they've been promising that laissez-faire etc. will deliver an ever-increasing standard of living forever. An economic perpetual motion machine, in other words. And to admit the need for a sustainable economy is to admit that they were deluding themselves and/or lying to everyone else.

Sometimes it seems like conservatives would rather we all go down in flames than change and admit ideological defeat. Unless I posit simple insanity or gross stupidity, what else would explain the irrational denial of climate change? Better to die jamming one last french fry into your mouth than go on a diet, I guess.

Ah well, it's late, my own midnight ramble three time zones later, and it's time to put aside the battle...it'll still be there in the morning.