Jim, you suggest "the need for and necessary perpetuation of scarcity and hierarchy... because the price to be fetched... is based on scarcity and demand."

Let me open this up, view its components.

1. The Price To Be Fetched:

Agent Deletion here. Who arranges this fiat, "to be"? What might "price" be? This word "price" reveals a museum, an abyss underneath it. Try this: the profit the seller wants. The pleonexic seller wants to maximize her profit; that is axiomatic, though only about 300 years old as an institution. Enoughness, meaning a finite supply that fills needs, is not acceptable.

The Right To Unlimited Appropriation vs. The Right To Enough To Eat in a social world. The former won, wins, by moral concensus. The moral factor is the "work ethic," the "earning" factor-- never mind that the hungry may have no access to the means of labor or life.

The price the holder of the means of production wants to fetch. Regulated, said Adam Smith, by the invisible hand, competition. Before corporations arose in all their power, and monopolies, and high tech industrial technology.

You and I are free also to start a business, use advertising judiciously, buy, sell, and get rich. We are also free to paint a masterpiece like Titian did, or Monet, though canvas and paints are bloody expensive. Or run faster than Ben Johnson on steroids-- running shoes are affordable if we dedicate ourselves.

"Scarcity and demand": I would venture to say that every single human being is by design a "demand" for nutritious food, decent shelter, etc-- the living essentials, and furthermore, to access to amenities of, for the soul. Do you think there is no "demand" among the starving of Somalia or New York? Go for a walk there and find a gun barrel "demanding" your wallet; not an organized mass of disenfranchised demanding social justice. Good market demand, then, for prisons and their builders, administrators, employees.

So I think "market for" is a more appropriate term.

No market for labor now, at least in our part of the fierce competitive world. Lots of demand for a provision of it, by those with nothing else to sell; lots of Pollyanna-ticians "promising" jobs. Their rhetoric reminds me of an insect in a hot pot, running round and round frantically. No exit!

The price "to be" fetched is based on scarcity and demand-- OK. But does it have to be? Can we not envision another way?

There is no need to perpetuate artificial scarcity to preserve a "trading economy." Human imagination has come up with more beautiful ideas. However, a step forward would be the two-tiered society: let's distribute the basics (U.S. Constitution, "right to life") and then let the competition and hierarchy play with artificial scarcities of luxuries. It seems to me that from the Pisgah of Living Essential Enoughness For All, it is easy to view the land beyond, in which citizens will demand a share of access to our accumulated culture, as a right.

The alcoholic needs his alcohol; what for? To keep down fear, rage and grief. Capitalism needs the injustices of artificial scarcity of the living essentials-- for the same reason! Pleonexia is now being considered a Personality Disorder by some psychologists (Nikelly, Individual Psychology Vol. 48, No. 3, September, 1992) (pleon, more; ktisis, acquisition); the alcoholic's "enabler" has a vested psychological interest in enabling the addict to continue his addiction; the "enabler" of Capitalism, the laborer, is just such a co-dependent: liberty is just too terrifying-- one's fear, rage, and grief might come up! (The devil finds work for idle hands? But the "invisible hand" of the market has become A) a fist, B) a "fuck-you" finger, C) a begging palm.

"Enablers" of addicts get therapy, find they have needs, desires of their own. They quit supplying the addict, quit taking responsibility for him. Each go to pursue their own destiny.