M.A.S. Report

Now this will certainly put an end to the assumed secrecy of our small discussion meetings at my place.

I have a major problem with setting the topics for the dicussions. H pops up two days before the meeting and requires me to come up with a topic within a few hours. I then suggest something that is seeming so interesting at the moment, but two days after I am either not interested in it anymore, or I have forgotten the context in which it was interesting, or I have entered too deep in a context of which the others have no clue. Therefore the discussion on the concept of "objectivity" was not quite successful. I think we need a mechanism to involve everybody in the process of topic selection. Probably everyone should suggest a topic and then we could choose among the so created set of topics. Maybe even starting the meetings with topic selection will give them that air I wished to achieve from the beginning.

Probably the most useful thing that came up from saturday discussion was F's statement on the laws of the market and the morality. Paraphrase: the laws of the market have the same level of objectivity as the laws of physics - both being laws in the sense of a cause-effect relation and not in the sense of legislative acts. Thus they can be judged in terms of neither legitimacy nor morality. To say that the market is "immoral" is as nonsensical as to say that the morality of gravity is unsatisfactory.

My addition: indeed what we can state to be moral/immoral or proper/improper is not the market itself but the state interventions and attempts to regulate it.