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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6332717" data-attributes="member: 4937">I agree for almost all of that, but I never argued against the demand for magic much less what you describe here which is the demand for placebo magic.  Indeed, I'd fully expect fake magic to be treated as a commodity to buy and sell.   So sure, belief in magic creates a demand for magic and the resulting market in fake magic looks exactly like a commodity market for other non-magical goods - because the fake stuff is just another non-magical good.I'm arguing that if magic was real, it would be fundamentally different than anything that is actually in the world.   Real magic is postulated to have properties that aren't actually observed in the normal matter and laws of the universe.  Indeed, the whole point is that it doesn't obey those normal laws but defy them.  If it defies fundamental laws of the universe like gravity and interia, if it possesses perverse, animistic, non-deterministic, personal, esoteric, and gnostic characteristics there is no reason to expect that its relation to human behavior is going to be like that of non-magical items (and every reason to suspect otherwise), and therefore it is doing all these things no reason to suspect that an observation like, "Well, there is supply, and demand, so it will be a commodity like any other good." is true of it.     But by that I never argued that no demand for it would exist.   Again, the demand for Tony Stark's suits of armor is basically infinite, it's the supply side that falters.  No supply exists regardless of the price anyone places on it.Why?  First, because there is someone out there that believes that they can profit by doing so.  But what does profit mean in this sense?  Just because it generally means economic profit doesn't mean that this is the only measurement actual people use of profit.  Second, this happens because a product or service actually exists to meet the demand - that is to say that there is a supply.  But in the case for the real world demand for magic, there is no supply so people buy the substitute good of placebo magic believing that it is real magic.  In some cases both buyer and seller believe it is real magic, but critically they behave as if real magic is placebo magic.The supply-demand curve isn't a fundamental law of the universe in the same way that inertia or gravity is.  It's a strong observation on the basis of human behavior.  It's true only for the vast majority of human economic transactions that we observe in this universe, although its true only in a very loose sense in that it generally involves at least two unknowns since there is no perfect way to turn supply or demand into a quantity.  We see a price move and we go looking for reasons - supply must have gone done, or demand must have gone up.  There is no guarantee however that it will govern non-human economic transactions, no guarantee it works for all universes, and no guarantee that it works for all hypothetical goods.   But even to the extent that we can apply the law to singularities like Tony Stark's armor or Excalibur or the Rod of Seven Parts, there is no reason to expect that the result of supply and demand is to produce human behavior treating these as commodities.   Suppose I want to buy the Statue of Liberty.  What's the market for that like?  Suppose I want to buy the Lincoln memorial?  What's the market for that like?  Suppose I want to buy a Time Machine?  What's the market for that like?   Suppose I want to buy Eternal Life?  What's the market for that like?   The whole thing breaks down and gets fuzzy or just falls apart when you are dealing with items that aren't commodities.   You seem to think that the law of supply and demand turns everything into a commodity.  You've got it entirely backwards.   The law of supply and demand applies - at least in the simple way you are using it (as long as there is a demand curve, there will be someone out there to supply products and services to meet that demand) - only when things are commodities.   In order for us to expect that magic will be treated as a commodity in the world in which it exists, we first have to make it behave like a commodity to a greater (Discworld) or lesser (Harry Potter) extent.   But there is no reason to apriori assume it is a commodity, and certainly much reason to assume for most narratives we might be inspired by (other than Discworld or Harry Potter) that it isn't one.More briefly, demand for something that isn't a commodity can very well create a market for a commodity fake of the thing actually demanded, but this is no proof that the thing that isn't commodity is a commodity and actually quite the contrary if you think about it.</blockquote>

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