remarkably for a purportedly scientific doctrine, relations between cause and effect themselves are suspended because the possibility that the market structure could be less than the best of all possible economic structures for all societies everywhere is inconceivable to believers. That is why other causes for these disasters are always pro-claimed, even though the other alleged determinants of the economic catastrophes (e.g., "crony capitalism") had long before existed with no such effects. Confined to self-referential formulae and equations which cannot be falsified by what occurs in the actual world, analysis remains within the doctrine's closed circuits of calculus with none daring to move beyond them at the cost of professional reputation and consultations. Out-side the autistic econometrics, state policies reiterate the closed program of prescriptions, one for all sizes, and redouble the demands for their enactment as the only solution to the world's problems. The more these prescriptions fail, the more their rigorous prescription is thought necessary to succeed. Beneath the chaos and the distress of victims, there is one constant - the unstated master assumption of the market's infallibility.

It is here that we see the theological logos most clearly at work. To ask, as we do of every other doctrine claiming scientific validity, what evidence would show that even one of the market's self-defining claims of superiority of efficiency, development, wealth production and freedom might be mistaken, is not a question that can occur within market orthodoxy. For, at bottom, it is not a scientific doctrine, or even a rational comprehension of the production and distribution of life goods by a society. It is a religio-moral metaphysic presupposing its regulating structure of the world as good a priori. Challenge of its system-deciding assumptions cannot make sense within the doctrine except as blasphemy or falsehood.

The Principles of True Belief

There are, of course, many variations on the one system of belief. Many adherents to the market doctrine explicitly defend and advocate its rule as the moral command of God � televangelists, the religious right, and recent Republican US presidents, for ex-ample. Others of more scientific temper advocate and justify it as akin to a natural or biological system, which is understood as an inalterable and providential order of nature. Still others presuppose it as scientifically self-evident mechanism of human production and exchange which can be mathematically represented in the form of number holding sway over the flux. There are diverse hermeneutics of the market's revealed truth. But what is in common among the variations of creed expression is an underpinning set of absolute tenets which are not questioned. At the highest level of generality, we can deduce these principles as market doctrine's normative grammar of affirmation and negation. All thought conforms to its principles of true belief (in particular neo-classical "science"), or it is repudiated as nonsense or subversion.

1. Private property is good in all things, without right to limit its legal acquisition in any possession or in money demand;

2. Freedom to buy and sell in money exchanges is the basis of human liberty and justice;

3. The market's money-price system alone optimally distributes goods and ser-vices through society;

4. Profit-maximization is the engine of social well-being, and is not to be hedged in by public regulation or ownership;

5. Government intervention in the market is bad unless it promotes profitable market activities;

6. Individual consumer desires are permanently increasing, unlimited and good in their satisfaction;

7. Pursuit of maximal income for oneself is natural, rational and required for society to work;

8. Economic growth is permanently desirable and necessary, with no inherent environmental or human limit to the conversion of planetary and human life-organization into salable commodities;

9. Protectionism of domestic production of any kind is bad and ruinous on both national and international levels, and to be repudiated wherever it is counselled or raised;

10. Whatever facts of life disaster may seem to contradict the necessity and validity of these market principles for the production and distribution of goods in short sup-ply, these facts merely appear to conflict with market principles and can always be explained and corrected by their more rigorous understanding and application;

11. Those who doubt or criticize the supremacy of the market system, the efficiency of its production and distribution of goods, or the freedom of its agents are adversaries of human liberty and civilization.

Any and all societies, parties or governments which seek to live by any alternative order of economic organization are, to the extent of their deviance, irrational, enemies of the market's benefits to humanity, and to be opposed by all means available, including armed force.

If we consider these principles in the light of current global market rule under US trade and military supervision, we may recognize that the race of the planet towards ecosystem and civil meltdown is everywhere a hyper-expression of this closed mind-set. As the market theology increasingly advances towards the comportment of a global theocratic state, we may see the origins of our problems in this simple-minded fundamentalism.

John McMurtry, F.R. S.C. Professor of Philosophy University of Guelph

�from Economic Reform, July 2002