At 1:30 PM -0500 18/12/08, Charles Bennett wrote:
>Services have whatever value the market places on them.
>
>You may be the best commodore 64 programmer on the planet.
>
>Your service is still valued near zero.
I am pretty sure I know one of the best commodore 64
programmers on the planet, actually. And while there aren't a lot of
people who care about that particular skill set (he is pretty good at
PS3 coding too), it is worth noting that the difference between 'very
small market' and 'worth nothing' are actually quite different.
But then, that is the sort of sloppy thinking about economics
that characterises the whole thing, really.
>The doctor sells his service for compensation in a competitive
>environment.
Plenty of doctors don't really. I've just been living in
remote Australia (moved back to somewhat less remote Australia today)
and there are plenty of cases in which there will be only one doctor
for a 500 km area or so. Doesn't sound competitive to me. Does that
mean that suddenly those peoples productivity is more, or less, or
>The government has no competition.
Sure it does, for many of the individual services it
provides. In particular, there are lots of other ways to fund
research.
Again drawing on my experience of living remotely, there are
a lot of cases in which remote communities, particularly mining
communities and other quite profitable ones, negotiate with
government as to whether various services that we think of as
government services (police, fire department, rubbish collection,
roads,
> No incentive to be efficient (in
>fact, quite the opposite)
>and whatever services it provides,
The thing is that
1) they have some incentive to be efficient - you can't vote out the
CEO of your local monopoly and replace them (at least, not as
easily). Sure, it is more difficult
2) generally, governments are under heavy pressure to bring in
deficit or low surplus budgets. Not as heavy pressre as the threat of
bankruptcy, but still significant. Admittedly, you may not have
noticed this, as you seem to have mastered turning a blind eye to
Republican grotesque budget deficits, but I assure you in many
countries in the world it is in fact true.
It is actually a big issue in arguing politics with people
from the US -- you often imagine the deficits of your particular
government (which I will happily agree is broken in many waya) apply
to all governments. They just don't.
3) in many cases, the reason the government provides a particular
service is that when you take into account the costs required in
collecting rents, the collective costs to the community from lack of
provision, the difficulties involved in solving the 'tragedy of the
commons', etc it is actually more economical to just have the
goverment do it.
Take fire services, for example. After experiencing the
'efficiency' of competing commercial fire services, people decided to
get the government to do it because it actually seemed like a better
idea.
Or take making every road a toll road, or a private road that could
arbitrarily forbid carriage for whatever reason they felt like (say,
having trucking companies build a few roads and forbid competing
trucking companies to travel on them). People didn't decide that the
government should provide these services because the government made
them at gunpoint, as the right wing fantasy has it -- people decided
the government should provide these services because it seemed like a
really good idea. The same goes for police forces, the postal
service, hospitals -- governments provide these services because
someone decided it was a really good idea for them to do so, not
because the goverment viciously drove its competitors out of business
or whatever.
> it does so with monies that it did
>not *earn* but merely took.
Sure, they earnt them. The bit of the taxes that pays for
hospitals is earned by providing hospitals, the bit that pays for
roads is earned by supplying roads, and so on. You may not have
individually assented to them supplying you with individual roads,
but that doesn't mean the road isn't there and the money was just
taken and spent on cookies.
This seems to be the core of your argument -- that economic
productivity doesn't count unless someone gives explicit assent to
that particular transaction. Its nonsense, like saying if you get a
book out from the library you didn't really read it.
>
>Try an opt out of the social security system because you are not going
>to need their *service* and see how far you get.
There is no easy answer to how to avoid tragedy of the
commons type problems -- and actually, one of the reasons why
participation in schemes for the common good has to be enforced by
law is because people will otherwise opt out of them for reasons that
are fatuous like this. If you are sure you won't need the social
security system, you can see the future. And if you don't need it
personally, you still gain value from it by living in a society where
peoples aren't left to starve in the streets -- means you are less
likely to have to live in an armed compound, for example.
And sure, you may not think that particular bargain, as a
society, is worth making -- but it can only be made as a society, not
as an individual, and you lost the argument.
>The government proper can be never be more than a middle man and not a
>very good one is a lot of cases.
For a start, it is a pretty good middleman in many cases too.
For another, governments provide some services that are
vastly more difficult for anyone but a government to provide
For another, governents can, and do, engage in plenty of
other economic activity besides simply spending income taxes. It is
just that income taxes turned out to be the most common way of
funding services on the current scale of government.
>
>>
>>
>> We better watch out! This reasoning leads to hardcore Maoism/Stalinism
>> and Chuck has guns.
>
>
>Maoism/Stalinism two great examples of gun control no?
>
>How many lives were lost because of those two guys following a
>philosophy of the government providing ALL services?
The idea that if one extreme is wrong, the other extreme must
be right, is beyond silly, but yet people still try to use it.
Cheers
David
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