hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
The Invisible Hand - Not So Visible on its own
"LIKE most of you, I have come from a family that values hard work and that brought me up to take responsibility and appreciate the importance of enterprise. For generations my father's family worked the land as farmers and many Browns still do. So it's hardly surprising that I believe in markets, competition and rewarding creativity and effort.But I also know that we do not live by markets alone. I have long understood that markets rely on values that they cannot generate themselves. Values as important as treating people fairly, acting responsibly, co-operating for the benefit of all. And these values that our economy and society need in order to flourish are not born in markets, nor in states.
These values - fairness, stewardship, co-operation - are learned in families, neighbourhoods and communities and developed in the relationships we enjoy as a society."
::View Article::
What a nice surprise to hear a most senior politician recognise that the invisible hand, or the unbridled market, is not enough to secure social prosperity.
The idea of the invisible hand is one in which individuals (buyers and sellers) in pursuit of their own self-interests, i.e. in a free market, tend to maximise the good of the whole more than they do when they restrain self-interest for some sort of 'collective goal'. When each individual in a society maximises revenue for him or her self the total social revenue is maximised: implying that the sum of individual revenue equals the wealth or prosperity of society as a whole.
In fact the free market only maximises the social good if certain other values also exist and are practiced, values which are holistic (i.e. concerned with a realm greater than the individual) as opposed to purely individualistic. A society cannot function on the profit motive alone. It cannot function if citizens are purely self interested and do not share a consensus over anything other than an interest to get as much out of everyone else as is possible: this is actually the seed of the concept of 'corruption'.
I wonder if the above article is anything more than rhetoric, however, as it is out of character for politicians in the modern political climate of Liberalism to champion a particular set of values beyond materialism: even more to encourage their propagation in the places where they "are learned" such as families, neighbourhoods and communities.
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