Capitalism is a game; therefore it must be regulated as such by an authority.

Wallstreetatheist - since you're giving him conduct for no good reason, you might as well blow me in the process t(-_-t)

Just making fun of everyone who concluded that you won based on the refereee analogy, which I still maintain is both firmly in my favor and enough to prove my case against your rebuttals.

Huh?

Hey have you heard? The NFL is removing the referees from the game! Apparently, THEY WERE NEVER NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE! Who knew?

We agreed to post it on a site where it would be subject to voting. No one prevented us from debating it at, say, Sieben's debate homestead. Contractual, not authoritative :P

It would be impossible to have any *meaningfully important* game of football without a ref. I've played lots of pick-up football games with my friends and one out of every 10 plays or so comes down to a call that you just can't agree on ("You stepped out of bounds! No I didn't! That hit the ground! No it didn't!"). When you're playing for fun, you just say "what-ever" and whoever is most emotional about it will get their way and you just go back to playing BECAUSE THE OUTCOME IS MEANINGLESS. But in an NFL game - or a situation where we are talking about economics implications - the stakes are far, far too high for this system to work by itself. In an NFL game, the players and coaches do everything in their power (while still within the rules) to not only play the game to win but to act like they are winning in case they can catch an ambiguous call from a ref. There is no reasonable way this could be duplicated in a ref-less environment.

This debate is actually the perfect example. I say I won. Ragnar and the voters (effectually the referees) say he won. Now if it was just up to me and Ragnar to decide who won, we would have a problem, wouldn't we. In effect, by you all voting and participating in this debate, you have demonstrated the necessity for a "referee" to decide this debate (which is basically a game with rules).

**Con's** final rebuttal standing unrefuted. - Fixed.

Pro, you should have instigated a longer debate. You had great arguments and a unique perspective and I don't feel that a 1000 character debate did it justice. It was a back and forth all the way and Pro's final rebuttal standing unrefuted. A longer argument would have benfited both sides and allowed them to elaborate on their arguments.

Oh shut up Headphone you gave Ragnar points for conduct, grammar, and sources for absolutely no reason. If you can't even successfully fill out a voting form I don't know what you're doing on a website like this.

Interesting issue. I am excited that we are talking about this.
The problem as I see it comes from the idea of a central authority. In a game of football the referee is not the central authority the rules of the game are. He merely enforces them he does not create them. In this sense every system needs rules. The questions to ask are how many rules governing how many circumstances and how are they derived (to name a few). The rules of almost all games are extremely rigid and specific. For capitalism this does not work, because unlike a game (or most games if you prefer) there is no specific goal or end result you have to reach. Not only is there no real endpoint at which we can judge the results (take Walt Disney when he was bankrupt), but the results are semi-ambiguous. The goal is to find happiness. What happiness is (physically what is required for it) varies so greatly as to be almost indeterminable and how happy a person is cannot be judged like a game. I scored seventeen happy points and you only had sixteen. I win! No one can take that attitude towards anything like happiness and keep my credence.
Making laws about this is very hard. We would like to maximize the amount of happiness people have, but how do we do that? Many things cause contrary effects. Getting drunk (or so I have heard, I don't really know) causes happiness, but come the hangover and all the happiness has fled. Do we propose Prohibition because of this or do we let people choose which part of the experience outweighs the other?
I feel that almost no one person or group has the wisdom to make these decisions about even the things we know the consequences of, let alone the unknown things, for any one other than him(her)self. The reason we make our own choices is because we live with our own choices, others may bear some of the effect, but they choose how they bear that as well.
Thanks for reading my comment I hope that it provoked some thought. Thank you.