Depending on what your "goals" are, it's the most incredibly efficient instrument of money invented in the last millenium. Not great at protecting the environment or providing job security. But incredibly efficient at supplying cash to the corporate world. Because the pieces of paper are passed out in a very liquid form of money, where the exchange amounts to the trillions of dollars (remember that dollars are as arbitrary in value as are stock certificates), a lot of people are willing to invest in business.
Sorta begs the question of - what this 'independent equivalent of scrip' has also come to incorporate:

For our decision thus far to eschew joining the civilized countries of the Rich fraction of the world: *Medical Care* has been appended to the job roulette. The very same 'discretionary' choice of any Bizness of the 2000s: to treat employees like people or like commodity shit is a very *Large* discretion to have no social voice in regulating. Now you can lose your job AND your medical care at the arbitrary whim of a wannabe-Suit, making a name like Chainsaw ___ for his dossier.

Sorry but, however appealing might be the ideal of an "unfettered marketplace" (because it's so Kool not to be accountable AND it's so efficient as that machine you describe it as being). That Econ 101 definition for ""efficiency"" IS the problem; that and the fantasy that there is such a thing as a Free Market.

That there is not: can be measured by the combined weight of tomes on Corporate Law. And especially by [see MSFT history - to be really brief] the rarity with which this Law is ever invoked to feed the illusion of that Free AND Fair ?? as in Fairly-Regulated Market.

We shall eventually have to face the h\ufffdmorrhage of ~Trillion annual $ for 'health care' as the others have done: via some National single-payer scheme which recovers the literally Armies of middlemen overhead now toppling our vastly overpriced medical system. I suspect that there is as much deadwood in and aspiring towards --> the Executive Suited Suite in all Corporations -- as somewhat mirrors the evident waste within Med, too. (But that's just a WAG too).

Illusions. We Love 'Em. Free Market is a biggie. Distribution of wealth is the underlying theme and also explanation for: the current obscene ratios of Suited perks VS those of the average working serf. No Econ 101A platitudes can hide the evidence of the accelerating concentration of wealth in a shrinking %-pool -- and the purchase by this Elite of: our very legislative machinery. Our System is badly Broken IM (and many others') O. But like the Zombie - it hasn't realized it yet. There is Sooo much spin to try and deny the nakedness of the Emperor: Hey! that could make a good nursery rhyme (?)

Your summary is a nice textbook one - and about as related to the conditions which millions of people live under. An intellectual exercise - but bloodless and thus irrelevant to Life. Math is EVER an abstraction we love, maybe because it is the only human-developed methodology in which the concept of proof (of any old thesis) is actually realizable! But Math isn't Life either.



Ashton
(nor, I would aver: is consumption the goal of Life, contrary to our imagination that it Is.) Let Iconoclasm Ring!