Demand Economics (Geeks and Greeks)

While classical economic theory posits that labor is the source of economic value, neo-classical theory assigns consumer demand to that value.

The new assignment of fundamental value to the consumer ideologically accommodates conservative philosophy of the risk in a post-industrial environment. Marx's theory of labor value, which all classical economists subscribed, is suppressed to accommodate a theory of value that supports arbitrage of the risk proportion. Market value is not how much work is imparted, but with the extension of credit (inflation, unemployment, and massive debt-to-equity), value is whatever the market is willing to pay for it. That way valuations are legitimately arbitraged (put at risk, remembering that the reward is legitimately commensurate with the size of the risk) without adding supply, exculpating the liability of gaining profit by causing detriment, the Great Recession being the latest example.

Assessing what caused the Great Recession includes, for example, the Community Reinvestment Act in which mortgages were written without the means to pay it. That is, market prices were based on what the market would bear, not the value imparted to labor (what wages and salaries could afford to pay). The entire system was put at risk. The risk proportion was huge, and the reward is proportionally huge (its political value currently estimated at ninety-nine percent of the probable risk assessment and rising). If there is blame to be imparted, Wall Street can claim the geek gods (the technocratic elite) of public and private finance modeled the risk with an inscrutable complexity that can only be described as fateful, but this claim of ignorance is not enough to exculpate the value consumed from risk that is fully assumed.

There has to be a philosophy to explain the legitimate value of the risk proportion. Although equities continue to rise in value, it is not being "expropriated" from labor as classically described, but legitimately "demanded" in the marketplace.

Profits are generated on demand and the supply of money available to demand it legitimately directs the risk according to market forces (the analog to Greek gods on Mount Olympus). Any Socratic challenge to this ontological mythology, you may have noticed, is tantamount to political-economic heresy...it is unpatriotic...it is counter-revolutionary!

We see then how demand economics provides technical support for a classical outcome that is philosophically outmoded. While we no longer consider the rigors of the free market a legitimate means of mass deprivation for the common good, the accumulated supply of money is nevertheless being directed by the top one percent to exact deprivation because consumer markets (the geek gods) demand it.

The power to exact detriment is in the lap of the gods, you see. Wall Street geeks crunch and tweak so fate befalls the weaker links. If success eludes the toil you bear, it is the self you must at first forswear. It's not geeks that put you in the streets, but looters, vandals, and freeloading Greeks.