>Glenn seems to think not only that the economic system is irreducibly complex
>(it isn't--you can remove money and replace it with debits; you can remove
>regulation and we'd even have a BETTER system, etc. etc.) but that it was not
>in any sense designed. That would come as quite a shock to all the people
>involved in the establishment of fractional reserve banking,limited liability
>corporations, incentivized manufacturing, stock ownership, free trade
>agreements, civil contract protection, and the U.S. Patent Office, to name a
>few. Perhaps all these people were completely unaware of what they were doing
>(like monkeys on typewriters), but somehow I think they had their goals in
>mind as they contributed their intelligence to the design of the system.
>
Ah, Jim, it is good to have you back. :-) Your example of romoving money is
not at all what Behe does. Behe when talking of cilia points out that if you
remove the projecting cilia from the rotary engine which powers it, the cilia
system won't work. Bit if I am allowed to then replace the projecting cilia
with a propeller then I would be able, like you, to claim that the cilia
system is not irreducibly complex. Replacing money with debits is not at all
how irreducible complexity is sold.
>What do you say, Glenn? Was Alexander Hamilton a monkey?
Hamilton neither invented the bank, nor designed the economy. If he claimed
credit for designing the economy then Hamilton WAS a monkey. Banks, in the
sense of places where money could be stored and used to pay credits at
distant points goes back at least to the 13th century but no one knows how
much further back this goes. The merchant bankers realized that if they put
some assets into other countries, a payment could be made there for a
transaction here. This is how the Medici's and Rothchilds gained their wealth.
Deposit banks were developed in the 1500s long before Hamilton.
The Romans almost exclusively used silver for trade using up to 800,000
pounds stearling each year according to Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Great Books,
vol. 40, p. 23. This required some sort of Banking system for them.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm