1. Economic exchanges and the economic transfers of the terms of these exchanges form a system.
The economic system is not closed, although commodities are exchanged, most often by intermediary money, only for commodities29. In addition to the incessant creation of new commodities29, technical knowledge and legal apparatus are part of the environment of the economic system and participate in its steering. In turn, the operation of the system alters its environment.
2. Economics has as its object the open system that the practice of economic exchanges and transfers of market terms of trade establishes.
A major characteristic of the economic system is that it has as its subsystems a monetary organization and a fiscal organization, with all that these devices entail in terms of empirical approximations. This is one of the reasons why the notion of equilibrium applied to the economic system is unrealistic.
3. There are no specific subjective causes for the practice of economic exchanges and transfers.
Subjective causes which would concern only the economic aspects of social life would exist if the appetite for purchasing power were of a different nature from the appetite for power; the desire to possess through commodity exchange or the capture of an economic transfer of a nature other than that of the desire to possess; the need satisfied by means of commodity exchange of a different nature from the need satisfied by the self-consumption of its production; the mentality of a different nature from the social mentality; Homo economicus a real constituent of homo sapiens.
4. Since Jean-Baptiste Say, it has been repeated that the economy is the production, distribution and consumption of wealth.
This assertion, even when it is specified that the wealth in question is only that which has a economic exchange value, and therefore does not include "human capital", 30peddles a pseudo-definition of the economy. The argument in the following proposition explains why.