Oh, maybe I completely misunderstood based on use of the word “sacred”. If you’re just saying “these trades can easily go wrong, so I’m especially suspicious of them”, fine. That’s quite different from “these things are categorically special and even considering trades sullies them”.
Sacredness is a heuristic and the thing that it’s a heuristic for is defending against particular kinds of bad trades. The way it gets implemented in most human minds is the latter and the reason this isn’t completely dumb is the former, plus Schelling fences.
These two possibilities you are trying to distinguish, are not different things.
If trades in these areas are possible at all, then they will take place. The incentives, the market pressures, to extract rents, to profit, are so overwhelming that no amount of mere “suspicion” will withstand them—no amount, that is, short of infinite suspicion… or, in other words: sacredness.
Or, to put it another way: the property of sacredness is the mechanism by which we resist the incentives toward a certain sort of trade. It is the only mechanism which is up to the task (and even then it’s imperfect—in no small part due to iconoclasts, who look upon the sacred with suspicion).
Fair enough. Acknowledging that it’s a heuristic and exists to reduce the frequency of “most humans” getting taken by bad deals helps a lot.
I’m ok being an iconoclast on this topic, even if Pinky calls me “noodle noggin”. Understanding that this is just a social hack makes me much more comfortable using black markets when needed.
It’s worth noting that one can think that sacredness is an important and valuable tool, and still think that any given invocation of that principle, or regulation/restriction of the market, is deeply stupid or at least misguided.
My prior does remain that any given actually existing restriction on trading is net bad.
Oh, maybe I completely misunderstood based on use of the word “sacred”. If you’re just saying “these trades can easily go wrong, so I’m especially suspicious of them”, fine. That’s quite different from “these things are categorically special and even considering trades sullies them”.
Sacredness is a heuristic and the thing that it’s a heuristic for is defending against particular kinds of bad trades. The way it gets implemented in most human minds is the latter and the reason this isn’t completely dumb is the former, plus Schelling fences.
These two possibilities you are trying to distinguish, are not different things.
If trades in these areas are possible at all, then they will take place. The incentives, the market pressures, to extract rents, to profit, are so overwhelming that no amount of mere “suspicion” will withstand them—no amount, that is, short of infinite suspicion… or, in other words: sacredness.
Or, to put it another way: the property of sacredness is the mechanism by which we resist the incentives toward a certain sort of trade. It is the only mechanism which is up to the task (and even then it’s imperfect—in no small part due to iconoclasts, who look upon the sacred with suspicion).
Fair enough. Acknowledging that it’s a heuristic and exists to reduce the frequency of “most humans” getting taken by bad deals helps a lot.
I’m ok being an iconoclast on this topic, even if Pinky calls me “noodle noggin”. Understanding that this is just a social hack makes me much more comfortable using black markets when needed.
It’s worth noting that one can think that sacredness is an important and valuable tool, and still think that any given invocation of that principle, or regulation/restriction of the market, is deeply stupid or at least misguided.
My prior does remain that any given actually existing restriction on trading is net bad.