The Discovery Institute, the promoter of ID, is no different than the Sierra Club or Greenpeace. It's a "non-profit", bringing in serious cash to push a specific agenda for true believers. None of them give a rat's behind about truth, because that wouldn't fit their agenda, or bring in money from the believers.
isn't this similar to dialectical materialism? It is a theory (adopted as the official philosophy of the Soviet communists) that political and historical events result from the conflict of social forces and are interpretable as a series of contradictions and their solutions. The conflict is believed to be caused by material needs. Or that there are driving factors in the world which cause similar things to happen, and all that we have to do is to recognize and use those factors.
This is utterly incorrect. The free market operates "as if guided by an invisible hand" because buying and selling simply is the state of "economic nature," as designed by God and imprinted in human nature. Trade is as old as recorded history, as is the notion of private property, which is implied in the divine admonition against stealing.
Historically, other governmental systems imposed against this natural order either collapse or generally exist in a parasitical relationship with the market.
The Left proposes an Intelligent Designer be put to work regulating the economy.
As I said at the outset I'm not a fan of mixing Economics and Biology and I don't think much of the arguments of ID proponents but I wouldn't stoop to comparing them with leftist economists.
On a related note, I don't understand the left's inclination to treat Darwinism as a refutation of religious belief. They fall into the old Nazi trap of bringing Darwinism into the moral realm, where it inevitably leads to mayhem.
Treating humans as just another chemical species, and more similar than different to animals, kind of reduces morality and self-restraint to a quaint superstition. If evolution alone explains humanity, then an individual's sole objectives ought to be spreading DNA and preventing others from doing so, and any other purpose in a purely material world is for suckers.
I wouldn't use either of these two characterizations as the first is patently wrong and, with respect to the second, I would use the phrase "Useful Idiots" instead.
I can see some connections between ID and leftist economic thinking.
Many IDers think it's impossible that life as it exists today could be a result of natural selection of random mutations. It seemingly defies common sense. They don't see how simple competition for reproduction combined with a vast number of possibilities over vast periods of time could possibly result in what looks like the ordered complexity of human life. So they credit a supernatural hand that just waves a wand and creates people.
Similarly, many socialists think that it's impossible that the poor would be better off as a result of each individual acting in his own economic self-interest. It seemingly defies common sense. They don't see how simple competition for resources combined with a vast network of labor and a vast market of demand could possibly result in a wealthy society for all. So they advocate using the hand of government to simply hand over resources to the poor.
Both take the common sense approach. What's the simplest way to explain an animal's existence? Someone made it that way. What's the simplest way for a poor man to earn a living? Hand a living over to him. In reality, careful analysis has shown our intuition to be the wrong approach in both cases. Both underestimate the power of vast systems driven forward by competitive engines.
Direct hit. Target destroyed.
In Panda's Thumb by Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard Evolutionist, on page 66 he states " In fact, I believe that the theory of natural selection should be viewed as an extended analogy-whether concious or unconcious on Darwin's part I do not know- to the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith."
It's not deliberate. Galbraith really is that ignorant of economics. A reading of any of his books will indicate such.
the economy isn’t a machine at all, but an ecosystem. And ecosystems aren’t designed, they evolve.
Unfortunately for the thesis of this article, economies aren't "blind, purposeless processes of trial-and-error, specialization, and complexity (the hallmarks of the Darwinian algorithm)."
Rather, among other things an economy is better described in terms of a large number of informed, purposeful decisions on the part of those who partake in the economy. Further, it's not possible to divorce an economy from the rules imposed upon it by politicians, among others -- another breakdown in the thesis.
I stopped reading at this point -- if he's wrong on this fundamental point, the rest of the article's gonna be headed off the cliff.