Inventing

AMONG THOSE THINGS WHICH ACTUALLY DO NOT EXIST, but are convenient constructs of the human mind, are money, a perfect vacuum, the free market, and race. There are others, too numerous to mention. they all serve essentially the same purpose, to allow the human mind to impose order on a world of infinite complexity, too complex to comprehend with our weak and transient understanding. Our illusions give us comfort, helping us to make sense, however arbitrarily, of a complex world. They serve the further purpose of adding justification to what we fervently wish to believe. The price we pay for our intellectual liberties is, alas, truth. Science has long known that in every square meter of supposedly "empty" space, there adheres at least one subatomic particle, if nothing else. Matter spreads out, puts distance between itself and its cohorts, like to have its own space. Race? Every human being on Earth has a unique skin pigmentation, no matter how closely we think ours resembles somebody else's. The number of skin colors is exactly equal to the number of people on the planet, no more, no less. Place your forearm next to that of anyone else; you'll never have a match. Race is a convenient categorization, made popular only in modern times. With regard to money and the free market, there was a time when money very nearly existed. I once carried folded green paper in my billfold, and a few loose coins in my pocket, but no more. Money was invented as a convenient substitute for hard to carry cattle and grain, and it has value only because we agree that it does, even if its made of gold and silver, metals whose practical value is quite limited. now, money is nothing but a flow of electrons. it doesn't really exist at all, except in our fertile imaginations. The free market is much like our supposed vacuum; a convenient concept. A truly free, unimpeded, undistorted market has never existed, and will never exist, because of what economists call "externalities". Externalities are unpredictable factors which manifest in every capitalist economy and distort the perfect process of supply and demand, however slightly. These factors can be weather, an unexpected flood of refugees unbalancing the labor market, crop failure, monopolies, technical innovations which create monopolies, or a nearly infinite number of other manifestations. They are always with us. Racism, money, and perfect vacuums are also always with us, even though they really don't exist.