Enunciados de questões e informações de concursos
'Debunking' Laissez Faire
My Atlantic Monthly essay, "The Capitalist Threat", has aroused the ire of Robert J. Samuelson ("Crackpot Prophet", JUDGMENT CALLS, March 10) for its perceived attack on the capitalist system. I wasn´t attacking capitalism, only its excess and laissez faire ideology.
I pointed out a curious affinity between laissez faire ideology and Marxism: both lay claim to scientific validity. The Marxist claim has been fully discredited. But laissez faire ideology is derived from the most respectable of social sciences, economics, and its claim to scientific validity still requires debunking. I suspect that Samuelson prefers to dismiss my ideas as jumbled, rather than to entertain the possibility that the scientific foundtions of laissez faire are less than secure.
Our understanding of the world in which we live is inherently imperfect. This creates difficulties for the social sciences from which the natural sciences are exempt. Scientific method has discovered universally valid generalizations that can explain and predict events in the natural world. To make such generalizations possible, the events must be independent of statements that relate to them.
But in society, participants must make decisions about events that are contigent on their decisions. The separation between statements and facts, a characteristic of science, is lacking. (...)
Since nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth, we need institutions and attitudes that allow people with different views and interests to live together in peace. Markets are the best mechanisms for correcting individual errors, but government intervention and collective action are needed to protect common interests and correct inequities in the capitalist system. Laissez faire ideology - which holds that the common interest is best served when each individual pursues his own particular interest - is inadequate for holding our open society together.
My main contention in the Atlantic Monthly essay is that the concept of open society, which not only recognizes the multiplicity of cultures and traditions but actively advocates pluralism, could serve as a unifying principle for our global society.
The trouble is that the concept is neither recognized nor accepted.
George Soros
Chairman, Open Society Institute
New York, N.Y.
NEWS WEEK APRIL 14,1997.
Das afirmações abaixo:
I. Segundo Soros, a ideologia marxista, ao contrário da do laissez faire, carece de validade científica.
II. A Economia é o mais respeitado ramos das ciências sociais, provavelmente por ser a única a que se possa atribuir validade científica.
III. "The common interest is best served when each individual pursues his own particular interest" contém aproximadamente a mesma idéia de "we need institutuions and attitudes that allow people with different views and interests to live together in peace" (5º parágrafo).
está(ão) condizente(s) com o texto:
Outras questões do mesmo concurso: ITA / Vest (ITA) / 1999
