At 09:30 AM 12/3/2002 -0600, Tom Lowe wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------At 18:38 -0800 12/1/02, Harry Pollard wrote:Tom,Issue No. One. This is the "freedom to buy" issue that often prefaces these market arguments.
The local people simply have to continue buying from the local merchants.
If you agree then there is no problem. Nothing will change.
If they prefer to buy elsewhere, but you think that is wrong, you must force them to buy locally.
That's a problem.
There is nothing inherently wrong with restricting what people may buy. It's done every day. Fact of the matter is that I have very little freedom to buy. I must purchase what is offered or manufacture it myself. I may not purchase what is banned by the law, and for the most part, that's healthy and right.there's no conceivable use of a machine gun that isn't outweighed by the threat to public safety of the proliferation of these weapons.
"You must purchase what is offered." Is it not more likely that you will have more variety offered if the market is free. Why bring in machine guns - not an everyday item for sale at my local Safeway (Vons in California).
In fact it is an obfuscation. Would you stay with milk, and bread, and tomatoes, and broccoli, and other things that are actually exchanged in 10,000 marketplaces around the country.
Or, maybe you feel you are not to be trusted to choose for yourself. You would rather have some authority do your choosing for you. That surely is the way for you to have "very little freedom to buy".
What is offered is what may be sold at a profit by and for the seller. The law implicitly realizes that when A and B negotiate a deal that it mutually beneficial, C may or may not benefit from the deal. As an extreme example, I represented a defendant in court yesterday charged with murder-for-hire. Clearly the principal and the murderer mutually benefited from the exchange at the expense of the victim.The "profit" is realized when a customer likes what is offered. Isn't that good? I've discussed profit with Selma and Brad. It's just an accounting term that is really wages. It isn't particularly significant except perhaps to accounting firms and the IRS.
I have never participated in such an transaction, nor do I expect to. Nor do I expect any of my neighbors, friends, acquaintances, or anyone else I am likely to meet to make such an arrangement. More obfuscation. If it is an "extreme example" forget it.
Getting closer to home, the SUV is the perfect example of a purchase that uses up a tremendous amount of raw materials, burns up a non-renewable resource, and pumps and inordinate amount of carbon into the atmosphere to the detriment of us all. The manufacturers defend their profit-maximizing behavior on the freedom-to-buy principle. The freedom-to-buy argument frequently overlooks the secondary and tertiary effects of what is supposed to be a mutually beneficial arrangement between buyer and seller.So? Again, you want to stop people doing what they want because you don't like it. You would make a great economic Czar. We all use vehicles that put noxious fumes into the air. Actually half the guck comes from about 10% of the cars. We could easily find these cars and change them to emit less if we wanted them to - including SUV's.
A free market doesn't mean that noxious emissions from producers should not have an effect on their bottom line. But this is a separate discussion - not part of the market discussion unless you are desperately searching around for an argument.
Anyway, the carbon you seem to be so worried about is plant food. It helps them provide us with the oxygen we need.
I don't have a lot of money. Walmart looks good to me. I would say that your nostalgic musings are not worth the costs you list. However, if people want the shops they'll continue. If they fail, it's because people prefer Walmart. Do I understand that again you want to force people to do your bidding.Maybe if you pay $60 instead of $260 for a VCR, that will leave you $200 to pursue "quality of life". The fact that the local guy gives $10 of the extra $200 to the symphony orchestra doesn't attract me to his store to pay $260.Imagine the network of small merchants and local distributors that exist before Walmart comes into a community. Inefficient if all you are looking at is the $60 VCR. The merchants have increased overhead in the form of higher rent per product, a proportionally higher payroll. and other expenses, such as taxes and utilities that Walmart either manages to avoid or minimize by virtue of its size.
But, why do you assume Walmart means an automatic decline in quality of life!
Virtually all of that "inefficiency" represents funds that go into the local community, instead of being harvested by Bentonville.Check it out. Downtowns can be gutted without a Walmart and they are. The less fortunate can hardly get less than minimum wage - downtown or at Walmart. The prosperity of the business persons is enabled by my paying $260 rather than $60. I'm perhaps not so prosperous that I can afford to subsidize them. You are free to if you want.
The result is a decline in wages among the less fortunate, fewer prosperous businesspersons in the community, a gutted downtown, filled with empty retail shops and an infrastructure based upon increasing consumption of petroleum that requires one to drive long distances to purchase even the necessities of life.
I don't remember saying that the market does anything more than set prices. Nor have I said that it increases the general welfare. I have likened it to machines, or new techniques of production.Efficiency must always be judged in light of the goal to be attained. Lungs are extremely efficient in getting oxygen from the air into the blood, but are very inefficient if seen only as pipes for air -- two much friction and turbulence from all those little pockets.
It makes a larger pie. If it is allowed, it continually produces better quality at lower prices. It does this by being a reflection of consumer desires and we are all consumers. It's highly efficient.
Irrelevant.
There's also the question of whether or not the pie is actually getting bigger at this point. The negative externalities are piling up at an increasing rate. The human race is clearly soiling its nest, and the cost of cleaning it up must be subtracted from the profits, irrespective of whether the profits are "privatized" and the cleanup costs "socialized" as is usually the case in our free-market economy.Also irrelevant - The same soiling occurs whether the economy is free or controlled.
Also, I'm not even sure that "[i]t does this by being a reflection of consumer desires and we are all consumers." A counter-illustration: Apple consumption has declined by roughly 10% in the US over the past ten years. The reason: the buyers of apples, observing that consumers pick the largest, reddest apples free from blemishes, grade them by size, color and freedom from blemishes. The farmers complied with the purchasers' wishes and produced large red apples free from blemishes. Only problem: the apples didn't taste as good. Although consumers still pick apples at the store that look nice and don't have blemishes, they don't purchase near as many apples because they don't taste as good -- a clear example of overall choice being in conflict with aggregate choice. There are plenty of other examples just like this.Overalls and aggregates don't buy apples. People do. I get my good tasting slightly blemished apples from my local produce store - about 120 yds across the parking lot from a major supermarket, where I am sure I can get unblemished apples at a higher price.
But, of course such market freedom bothers you.
Not quite. My note to Brian is about to be sent and it will show the difference between the two.But the market doesn't distribute the pie justly because part of the economy is not controlled by the market, something Ricardo was close to discovering - but he didn't quite get there.If I remember correctly, Ricardo believed, along with Malthus, that excess population would drive down wages to the point that many workers would simply starve and "reduce the surplus population," and he approved of the "iron law."
I must say I don't care. I've spent a lot of time over the years showing how fear is instilled in the population for a variety of reasons. (Maybe the Alar nonsense is responsible for the drop in apple sales?)I'm not a neo-Classical adherent. In fact I'm highly critical of much they do. They may be "squalid, amoral, materialistic" but maybe they don't want to force people to shop where they don't want to.Yes, I know you are a Georgist, and I admire Henry George quite a bit. Nevertheless, your market-oriented arguments seem to me based upon most of the same assumptions regarding the "wisdom" of many buyers and sellers.
My experience is that they -- or their paymasters -- will do it in a heartbeat if it increases profits. Try to buy non-GM food at the grocery store if you don't believe me. You can't do it because it's not labelled.
Well, the Bill of Rights is supposed to limit the government's ability to coerce. The Magna Carta allowed the nobles to keep their lands and other goodies without having to pay for them. Without Bibles, motels would have to find something else to put at the bedside. My number two son makes the greatest apple pie - now we are getting serious.Or, don't you think that is amoral - or perhaps it's flat-out immoral to coerce people - to force them to obey your preferences..Having finally returned once again to the "freedom-to-buy" principle, you have phrased it in such a way that opposing it makes one sound as though one were trying to abolish the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, the Bible and apple pie.
The question to be asked first is how to achieve a just, sustainable and prosperous society. Freedom of commerce is merely a convenience, not an end. It is secondary to the public welfare. I know that the public welfare is not something that we can all agree upon, but it is not identical with the free market, even in its pure form.Agreed! To realize your first sentence, justice requires that people be free to choose. That is the public welfare - or part of it. I've said it often, but here it is again. The market merely records the confluence of people's opinions. The VCR price is not decided by the manufacturer. If the market says $60 it is recording the opinion of the people. Interfering with this is interfering with their franchise. That is why the market must be free.
Some of our friends (rather derisively) have called it idealistic or utopian. But ideals are what keeps us on a particular road. Without them we are rudderless. I don't expect a free market next week, but if a free market is good I would applaud moves toward it and decry efforts to stifle it. Then perhaps we will find it closer than we think.
Perhaps a principle reason for reelecting Bush in 2004 is his announced international trade policy. On the other hand, corporate antipathy to a freer trade policy may knock him off.
We'll see.
Our great cultural institutions--museums, libraries, symphony orchestras, operas--arguably are a part of the public welfare. Art is one of the few things that distinguish us from the cattle in a feedlot. A society without public cultural institutions is a wasteland.All my kids are aware of classical music and they have hundreds of CD's full of the good stuff. I told Ray how this happened. Our home high fidelity equipment played classical music all day long. They weren't forced to listen to it (a good way to turn them off completely) it was just there. So they grew to like this different sound.
I knew it had worked when one of my sons was whistling a tune and he didn't know it was from Mozart's "Serenata Notturna". The kids were seduced into the world of classical music. (They are now well beyond me.)
However, if these things are not supported by many people, they will not be viable.
To say these institutions are part of the public welfare is to say they are using public funds for the benefit of a few. In the last two weekends the latest "Bond - James Bond" has taken more than $100 million of people's money. Should those cinema goers be forced to give money to what we regard as worthwhile things?
Is the policy that distinguishes us from the cattle in the feedlot the one that forces some people to pay for what others want?
I suggest the way to distinguish ourselves is for many of us, rather than a few, to enjoy what are called the "arts". So, how do we do that?
Harry
******************************
Harry Pollard
Henry George School of LA
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tel: (818) 352-4141
Fax: (818) 353-2242
*******************************
