Gnome, thanks for the

 Gnome, thanks for the support!  (why are your smiley faces here soooo cute? That alone makes this forum better than all the others. ) ALB, I have moved from parecon to other ideas but I think even if I had not that isn’t reason for that person to have been condescending. 99.9% of people don’t see eye to eye with our ideas and I think we have to be patient and respectful or it will give people just one more reason to dismiss us. Easier said then done of course and I’ve been not so nice before myself! Thanks again Robin! I think that Hobson quote is a bit over my head but I look forward to your post on the ECA forum to hopefully get a better understanding. The first half of your post makes sense to me. Just a follow up question, though…You said: “It makes a lot of sense in such cases to allocate such inputs to high priority end uses first and foremost and then to other end uses lower down your ranking system.  As I said this is a matter best left to the intuitive judgment of individuals on the ground ; there is no need for society to formulate some kind of elaborate and explicit hierarchy of end uses and it would it would be absurd even to attempt that.”  By “individuals on the ground”, who are you talking about? My guess is you’re talking about the workers in the workplace that produces the good in question. They would have orders/requests from various other worker collectives and they would sort through the various orders/requests and decide which was most important using their own common sense and consideration of a hierarchy of needs. So for example if I work at a steel plant and we have too many orders/requests to meet them all, we sort through them and decide to fulfill the order for the train manufacturer 100% and for car manufacturing only 80% because we decided that public transit should trump individual transit. Is that it? Or by “individuals on the ground” were you thinking of something broader?