>>Once upon a time there was a theory which said there can't be a value if there's no usage value (i.e. a thing can't have a value if it has no usage) and that extra value can come to be only from labor, which creates added value. The total sum of all value in a country should be expressed with total sum of its currency, at least without a major discrepancy between the two. Introduce stock and fiat money (one of these would be enough, but let them both in, for good measure), and it all becomes very creative. Creative, but not in the sense that there are new ways to increase value (there are some, like using science, improving productivity), but rather in the sense that value seems to find new and highly imaginative ways to get expressed in currency without actually being added to the thing/service of which the value it is.
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>First, economics is not science - it is money seen through the eyes of sociology and hubris ;-)

It's not, but it likes to pretend to be :). They somehow managed to get a Nobel prize for economics, eh? I just wish I had the time to go over all the awarded theories and see how they failed. Almost any theory will work for a while, given enough hype, gullibility and enthusiasm, until the usual culprits find a way to work the system. Which is probably the reason economy is not a science - it didn't learn the lesson of the relativistic physics, that there's no neutral observer. Every new theory posits a solution based on the situation created by its predecessor, and assumes that whatever new it did will stay new and have the same effect in a few years as it had on day one. Well it won't. Every action will have a reaction.

>Marx's misunderstanding of history and real-world economics and Lenin's subsequent digestion of Engels' view of dialectic materialism never bore any relation to actual human behavior

Actually they did... human behavior in capitalism they understood; what they didn't understand was what would the behavior be if you remove capitalism, and what would it depend on. And guess what, nobody really knew...

>(and seemed pretty disconnected from Lenin's understanding of power, which was much less theoretical and more sophisticated ) and represented millenarian thinking akin to the French Enlightenment's understanding of Freedom. Both required a redesign of humans and human behavior but had no real path to producing such a transformation.

...and when they stumbled upon a path they didn't recognize it, because they were already blinded by their own dogma. So they didn't use the practical means already at their disposal because those would mean to confess that some parts of the theory were wrong (and of course, would validate the "critique of everything in existence"), but they took a religious "Party was always right" rigid stand, and so didn't apply their own method to their own praxis. Screw them, therefore.

So yes, the people just want to live better, whatever they perceive as such. Any powers that don't recognize that are doomed in the long run. The trouble is in the definition of "long" - they may just outlast us, which isn't much of a condolence, eh?

>Whatever one thinks about the capitalist model - or the stock market that is the crap shoot side of it - there is no doubt is represents human behavior as it exists in the humans we have and does not require the creation of a New Man for it to work.

But it does. And it's already done. Just look at how pampered the people are. How willing to fork out money at slightest whim. How unready to add a few numbers and see who's stealing from them. How ready to accept yet another layer of middlemen in an operation which worked without them for millennia. How easily accepting whatever is spewed from the TV sewers. How willing to amen the mantra that they are like that just because that's human nature. But it's not, they are nurtured so. Their grandparents didn't have half of this attitude and these habits. Just think of anything that you don't do because someone may sue you if it turns out wrong. That behavior didn't exist before the first such lawsuit. So that changed The Man into The New Man, gradually. And the ads did. And Hollywood did.

It' not that capitalism is loathe to use agitprop to reshape The Man. On the contrary - and it has better means, the technology, the psychology, the media, the omnipresence, everything.

>As to loaning money money to people one shouldn't loan money to and then trading those loans like collectible beanie babies or cabbage patch dolls and then finding out that was a bad idea - probably even Marx would have said "Vell, duh!"

Now if Greenspan said he didn't quite understand those instruments... how did then the buyers understand? And how did so much money go into it, against common sense? This circular madness of "everybody is doing it, it must be working somehow", that's the scary part. You can be smart all you want and have no part in it, but your customers are shooting their feet off.

>That said, it is a game that pays off in real money if you bet right (and costs you real money if you bet wrong) That's not illusory.

Greater fool is no theory. It's just a matter of identity ("who, me?"... or not).