Enforcing contracts

Both ‘satisfaction/happiness’ and ‘fear/anxiety/anger’ aim for stasis: achievement or accomplishment or completion of an objective, and removal of danger or threat or frustration. That stasis is a characteristic of the decision-maker, not a condition (equilibrium) of the marketplace. 

The notion that markets are stable systems that seek equilibria and then maintain them naturally is a myth. Markets are good at simulating stablity so long as they pretend to scarcity in the context of actual abundance. Markets fail catastrophically when they try to allocate under scarcity when scarcity actually prevails, or when they try to accommodate abundance by relaxing the mechanisms of scarcity. 

Markets are good at pricing trade-offs when the trade-offs are mild, mild because abundance tempers their bite. Under conditions of true want and deprivation markets collapse into chaos. 

Markets do not mediate fairness, they mediate ownership. In situations of true scarcity ownership rights cannot be presumed as being a free good. Enforcing contracts becomes a political matter of severe contention. We define rebellion as the abrogation of ownership rights in favor of a different system better suited to exogent the needs of the moment when scarcity is too severe and the market allocates in a manifestly unfair distribution. 

Sheviit/shemitta is the regular, periodic re-distribution of ownership rights to serve as a pressure valve to release the social pressure that comes from a too-uncompromising dedication to ownership rights that would inevitably result in a distortion of the other, deeper values of the social order. The final situation – allocating according to abundance under conditions of true scarcity – is what A Paradise Built in Hell teaches us is how things actually get done.