--- Sandwichman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In correspondence with a right-wing libertarian, he > mentioned that he would defend 'til the cows come > home the proposition that "human wants and desires > are unlimited." > > I corrected him, pointing out that wants and > desires could only be unlimited _in principle_. To > assert that they are actually unlimited ignores the > basic condition that each desire must have a > duration. >
I am surprised that a libertarian takes this view about wants and scarcity. The Libertarians that I have debated hold that scarcity is subjective. Below are some quotes for some neoclassical textbooks on my bookshelf. But, libertarians like Heyne, Boettke, and Prychitko, who are followers of Mises and Rothbard, have nothing quite similar in their text "The economic way of thinking." Instead they write: "In the economic way of thinking, something is good if, in the eyes of the chooser, more of it is preferred to less. It's that simple. ... Your voluntary purchase of oranges, for example, suggests that oranges are a good to you, and, moreover, they're a scarce good because you sacrificed something else you value (the 3 dollars) to gain ownership of the oranges." Clearly these guys didn't understand Marx's point in the the Grundrisse that it really is _not_ that simple, but aside from this, the Heyne, Boettke, Prychitko view that "scarcity is subjective" is different from the neoclassical view that scarcity is objective or "in nature." "All these wants are insatiable, or unlimited, meaning that our desires for goods and services cannot be completely satisfied. ... We do not, and presumably cannot, get enough." --McConnell/Brue "The management of society's resources is important because resources are scarce. Scarcity means that society has less to offer than people wish to have. Just as a household cannot give every individual member everything he or she wants, a society cannot give every individual the highest standard of living to which he or she might aspire." --Mankiw "All economic questions arise because we want more than we can get. ... What each one of use can get is limited by time, by the income we earn, and by the prices we must pay. Everyone ends up with some unstratified wants. ... Our inability to satisfy all our wants is called scarcity." --Parkin "You can't always get what you want. ... So they must make choices ... Why do individuals have to make choices? The ultimate reason is that resources are scarce." --Krugman/Wells "Even in rich societies like the United States, scarcity is a fundamental fact of life. There is never enough time, money, or energy to do everything we want to do or have everything we want to have. Economics is the study of how people make choices under conditions of scarcity and of the results of those choices for society." --Frank/Bernanke __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
