> Hate to disappoint you, but I doubt very heavily that the public goods Doug
> mentioned make any significant contribution to economic growth.
Well, in some parts of the world health, education and communications still
come under the 'public goods' category. And anyway, even Eddie Luttwak
(hardly a bolshie) doubts its sensible to buy more of what you've lots of
(gadgets and digits) at the price of what you've already too little of (social
cohesion and classrooms without gunmen in 'em).
>In fact, assuming the country with the large expenditures had higher
>tax rates, it would have lower growth. Maybe you can convince me >otherwise.
I know a few Swedes and a lot of economic historians who'd asgue this natural
link between taxation and growth - one of the reasons Australia's growth has
just gone backwards is because government expenditure has undergone a dramatic
drop here. 'Growth' is complicated stuff. For instance, if my little boy
doesn't spill his neighbor's blood all over the classroom floor, no cleaner is
required to clean it up, and GDP stays unmoved. Alienated little American
boys are much more likely to contribute thus to 'growth' than Australian ones,
and Australians are prepared to live with that. I don't care how tasteless
that sounds right now, it's crucially true.
> As for our good buddy Epicurus, the masses like their (our) toys, especially
> the entertainment room with the big-screen. That will never change, even if
> the revolution comes. And probably explains why the revolution will never
> come.
Tastes ain't naturally fixed from birth, David. And, anyway, I, for one, will
never be able to afford an entertainment room with a big screen (and I'm not
at all poor by any reasonable standard), so I've no personal investment in
that stuff. I do in Epicurean standards, though. And there are more people
at my economic level (indeed 5 billion at lower levels) than there are at
yours. Sure, many in our two countries continue to fantasise, behave and vote
according to the great American dream, that honest endeavour all by itself
puts it all in reach, but that's statistically never been true, as indeed it
can't be true in a system predicated on the concentration of wealth and power.
We'll learn last, perhaps, but learn we will.
Whether there'll ever be a revolution in the sense that people consciously
transform their world, I don't know - perhaps you're right. Sadly, periodic
bouts of revolutionary change are part of the way of things, and the absence
of conscious collective transformation just means there'll be another sort of
transformation. In which case, let's hope that the fact that all the
assumptions basic to modern economics are empirically false is not enough to
make the theory wrong, eh?
Cheers,
Rob.
