There are basically two types of organization characterizing human social existence: rule of law and rule of person. Rule of law is a codified system of behavior obeyed by polities of significant democratic sensibilities. Rule of person finds its genesis in village chief type political arrangements growing hierarchies of command and control.
Rule of person is an organic logical development of anarchy, not a stage but a resolution. Anarchy always resolves as authority figures and spheres of influence, the village chief and the village. This is arguably the native state of human society. From this we create civilization by the transformative apparatus we call markets.
There are villages with deficiencies and surpluses of the product of their material activities and there are peddlers, merchants, addressing and matching these deficiencies and surpluses at some aggrandizement of their worth. This arrangement is peculiarly human. Chimpanzees do not particularly trade. They share. We trade, and we trade to the extent that Adam Smith, the economist, thought it a congenital aspect of human behavior. I happen to disagree. Logic as Kant developed in his philosophy is a priori and logic plus game, which is arguably a priori also, gives us trade, arbitrage as it is generally known.
The end results of trade are twofold: money and commercial codes, and these define a market, an exchange using a value calculus, a currency, and regulated trade. There are two advantages to money in trade besides a store of value. It allows the discovery of comparable prices and by so doing allows the profit of a trade to be estimated. Money enables the calculation of ROI, return on investment, which informs all opportunity cost tradeoffs. The economic cost of money is the commercial code which governs the transactions in which it is used. Merchant law arose out of bazaars and dinars. It is the absolute instance of the Rule of Law beyond anything Greek or Roman. There are no edicts or cults of personality in merchant law, just common sense regulation.
Does the reader see where this goes? Markets are the apparatus that creates civilizations, vaguely in Greek and Roman terms and absolutely since Adam Smith. They transform the barbaric Rule of Person anarchy into the civilized Rule of Law even though arbitrage, which does not deal in ethical prices, drives markets barbarically, markets themselves are subject to ethical pricing as it affects the opportunity cost of society at large. They are, however vicious the criticism, the essential element by which philosophy, including science, is reified into objects and the souls of humankind transformed from jungle to farm to temple of reason.
Do Well and Be Well.
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