You're right.

The solution - scrap markets.

The word "markets" is a shorthand for "the way people interact with each other".

I thought that was 'society'.

*Now* I see what Thatcher was trying to say...

"Society" is also a shorthand for "the way people interact with each other", yes. Well done.

oh god how depressing. Everytime I read about biofuels being carbon neutral I thought 'hmm, but what wasn't there someting growting their anyway - something that wasn't going to get set fire to?'. But I hadn't imagined that something was a rainforest.

jesus, that's like one of those paragraphs they put in newspaper adverts for proof readers.

Is having PETA advertising on your blog an unintended consequence of installing blogads, squander two?

One man's having them advertise on the blog is another man's taking their money.

Not like you to be reading a blog on an actual real-life non-RSS web-page, with colours and everything.

Yeah, I know. Too many colours, man :-)

Scrap markets! What a brilliant idea!

And while we're at it, why don't we end war!

And that stupid gravity law, it's got to go too. The workers should be able to float around if they want to.

And why should we put up with the cosmic speed limit? We should be able to move as fast as we wish, even if it is faster than the speed of light. The universe should be exactly as we wish it to be.

A certain idiotic flavour of Socialist thinks that scrapping markets is not only doable but is pro-worker. But of course it isn't. "Markets" simply means "the supply-and-demand pricing mechanism", which in turn means "the way people value their time and effort differently depending on various factors". You're going to want more money for working twice as hard; you'll want more pay for working longer hours; you'll want even more pay to work on Christmas Day; you'll want more money to make a product out of rarer materials that are more difficult to get hold of. This is all rational and normal, and it applies to poor people every bit as much as to the rich. You can "scrap markets" all you like, but it's always going to be easier to get hold of wood than coal, and people will always require more incentive to dig a 200-foot-deep hole than to cut down a tree. Scrapping markets means forcing farmers to buy more expensive seeds while paying them no more for their crops, forcing shop-workers to do unpaid overtime. I don't understand why this should be a Socialist aim.