I'm glad you decided to continue this discussion via email. I enjoy talking ideas with people who take them seriously. That often leads to heated disagreement, but ideas are _important_, so if there's no heat, somebody isn't as serious as he thinks. ;-)

Most of the ideas I've used in this exchange were philosophic ideas, not economic ones. That's not meant to disparage economics, but to underscore that economics is a derivative field. Every field of ideas takes for granted other ideas about how to judge what's real or unreal, what's true or false, and what's good or bad. Those taken for granted things are philosophic ideas, ideas from metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. - three of the five branches of philosophy (politics and aesthetics are the other two - my apologies if you know that already).

Good economics depends on good philosophy. Another way of saying that is to say that a precondition of a valid economic philosophy is a valid political philosophy, which depends on a valid moral and then epistemological philosophy. Production depends upon rights depends upon values depends upon knowledge. Economics isn't unique in that respect, because _every_ field of knowledge has the same dependencies. It's just that economics affects people much more directly in terms of life and limb than most other fields.

We have no quarrel over the "communist" vs. "sneaky" issue. I'm a literal minded man, so I tend to take things straight and ask for clarification, rather than to assume nasty motives and sulk.

I have to plead guilty to the charge of abrupt movement from broad to narrow on the issue you mentioned. It's often hard to judge the level at which to pitch an argument, especially if one doesn't know the other participant. If smoothing the movement requires a thousand more words than not, it's tempting to stick to the "not" - even at the risk of being unclear. In those situations, I expect to be challenged.

I would enjoy hearing your views about what Hazlitt has to say, and about any other issues we've discussed.

Best Regards,
Mark Peters

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