Thread: SO can we just throw the senate and congress out on their asses already?

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

No, you are talking ab out corporatism by insisting food should be valued based on its scarcity.

No, what I am talking about is allowing the free-market to dictate price.

Originally Posted by Laughing Man

No, we are discussing whether mechanization is going to cause unemployment, not whether there is a balance in population and jobs. Do not try to change the argument.

The entire reason I brought up mechanisation was to illustrate the lack of a balance.

A new industry emerges from the demand of a good or service. People want a music device that they can take on the go, ipods are made in the hope that people will buy them. Creating a commodity or supplying a service does not always infer success though. Like I stated before with the tooth solution, there could be people who do not like the solution and like having to go to the doctor. Preferences are not know in economics until action brings them about. I could like chocolate ice cream, I could like vanilla but an economist does not know which I like more unless I show that through action (ie. buying chocolate instead of vanilla or vice-versa) In economics action exhibit preference. Therefore people who buy my tooth solution prefer it over not buying it and those who do not buy it prefer not buying it to buying it.

...okay? I am not ignorant of how human desires and free markets work.

Whatever human desires that are in demand which machines cannot themselves do. If you are asking for specific jobs then I do not know and neither do you nor does anyone because no one knows the future with certainty. Plus why are you assuming that just because machines have the same if not more intelligence then people that it instantly translates into them having the job? Perhaps there will be people who do not want to deal with machines in their business.

I'm not interested in whether or not it's a certainty (although I do think it very likely and find it a bizarre implausibility that businesses in the free market would opt for more expensive and less effective workers), I'm interested in contingencies and general principles and philosophy.

Now, here is the problem: in the current system, the logical outcome will be a very small number of people owning the means of production, employing nobody. In a libertarian (by your definition) model, almost the entire population could be left with no means of subsistence (if there is insufficient charity). Does this seem moral? It certainly doesn't seem very free for the people arbitrarily born into poverty.

There are also basic economic problems; when ultimately nobody is employed, nobody has wages, so there is no longer anybody to sell goods and services too. The current system just wouldn't make any sense.

Originally Posted by Laughing Man

No, what I am talking about is allowing the free-market to dictate price.

Which means you base the value on scarcity which means you put farmers in competition with technology meaning only farmers that can produce incredible mass quantities can make a living, destroying the family farm and giving way to massive farms that monocrop to destroy the soil and use synthetic additives to destroy the oceans and larger ecosystem. And even then, they'd still find some other way to make people all over the world starve because they want their food to be as valuable as possible and that only works when there's people that can't get any.

What I'm suggesting is that the free market does not work with food production. It might have worked before the industrial era but it's time to realized our farming method can now deplete the soil so much faster than it renews itself that we're creating deserts. The natural motivations that would run a free-market based agronomy are detrimental not only to the poorest people but also to the environment. We need to be more responsible than that in this stage of our evolution. We need to stop figuring out how to obtain more profit no matter what and start figuring out how to keep a society running in a sustainable fashion.

Why would farming corporations want to destroy their own soil?

They don't want to, they have to in a free market in order to make their yield. Fishermen don't want fish to go extinct but because they're in competition with each other that's the way it plays out.

Well it's true that the free market driven by personal gains do drive fish stocks extinct. I wonder what Laughing Man has to say about that. To what extent is the produce of the ocean the property of a single person anyway?

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

Which means you base the value on scarcity which means you put farmers in competition with technology meaning only farmers that can produce incredible mass quantities can make a living, destroying the family farm and giving way to massive farms that monocrop to destroy the soil and use synthetic additives to destroy the oceans and larger ecosystem. And even then, they'd still find some other way to make people all over the world starve because they want their food to be as valuable as possible and that only works when there's people that can't get any.

Well you are imposing subjective concepts like "make a living" and "incredible mass quantities." Also imposing the idea that farms have to monocrop which is not the case at all. Nor do they have to use additives. In fact food that is "organic" costs more money (because it is higher valued to the consumer) then non-organic food. Also do you not see this contradiction in your idea. Farmers have to sell "mass quantities" yet they do not look for new markets in order to sell "mass quantities" because they want their food prices to go higher thereby making them higher profit and yet they cannot "make a living." Am I understanding your idea correctly?

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

What I'm suggesting is that the free market does not work with food production. It might have worked before the industrial era but it's time to realized our farming method can now deplete the soil so much faster than it renews itself that we're creating deserts. The natural motivations that would run a free-market based agronomy are detrimental not only to the poorest people but also to the environment. We need to be more responsible than that in this stage of our evolution. We need to stop figuring out how to obtain more profit no matter what and start figuring out how to keep a society running in a sustainable fashion.

Now you are complaining that we are destroying the earth because we make too much food and before you were complaining that farmers were not making enough food to keep prices up. Can you give a coherent argument as to why free-market food production is a bad thing?

Originally Posted by Xei

Well it's true that the free market driven by personal gains do drive fish stocks extinct. I wonder what Laughing Man has to say about that. To what extent is the produce of the ocean the property of a single person anyway?

The ocean is not privatized so there is no incentive in long-term interests. You calling a resource based in the commons, in which it is illegal to bar off private property, a result of free markets is interesting though. We could start establishing fish farms in the ocean itself in which businesses fence off parts of the ocean for fish breeding and farming. Most of the environment of the ocean (the coral and coruscations) are near the inland. People would then have a invested interest in conserving resources for long term goals. When it is a commons, it is just "grab, grab, grab" with no thought of what is going to happen beyond the season.

Originally Posted by Xei

The entire reason I brought up mechanisation was to illustrate the lack of a balance.

Markets never achieve equilibrium so there will always be a "lack of balance." That is how the concentration of capital is an impossibility. It would be like throwing an apple in the air and it never coming down.

Originally Posted by Xei

...okay? I am not ignorant of how human desires and free markets work.

Then why are you asking me how new markets emerge?

Originally Posted by Xei

I'm not interested in whether or not it's a certainty (although I do think it very likely and find it a bizarre implausibility that businesses in the free market would opt for more expensive and less effective workers), I'm interested in contingencies and general principles and philosophy.

Now, here is the problem: in the current system, the logical outcome will be a very small number of people owning the means of production, employing nobody. In a libertarian (by your definition) model, almost the entire population could be left with no means of subsistence (if there is insufficient charity). Does this seem moral? It certainly doesn't seem very free for the people arbitrarily born into poverty.

There are also basic economic problems; when ultimately nobody is employed, nobody has wages, so there is no longer anybody to sell goods and services too. The current system just wouldn't make any sense.

Explain how the concentration of capital will happen without a government to inhibit entry into markets. How are people just going to become "unemployed?" I thought you "knew human desires" and "how the free market worked?" Human desires are ever evolving. Technology is always progressing/digressing. You seem to be under the impression that every business will have robots, why? Not every individual is "homo economicus." Some people will pay extra because of different psychic values. If this small group of individuals with capital push aside every other human being and they have no one to sell goods or services to then what are they going to do? You are setting up this fantasy of a static society and saying "look! that is what is going to happen!"

Originally Posted by Laughing Man

The ocean is not privatized so there is no incentive in long-term interests. You calling a resource based in the commons, in which it is illegal to bar off private property, a result of free markets is interesting though. We could start establishing fish farms in the ocean itself in which businesses fence off parts of the ocean for fish breeding and farming. Most of the environment of the ocean (the coral and coruscations) are near the inland. People would then have a invested interest in conserving resources for long term goals. When it is a commons, it is just "grab, grab, grab" with no thought of what is going to happen beyond the season.

Fish is an example for how the free market works in general. What kind of strawman was that? Have you forgotten what we're talking about here? You are dodging this point but I'm not going to let it go. The Free Market causes efficiency and profit to overwhelm sustainable measures of collection/production. Every aspect of the economy is turning into "grab, grab, grab" not just the oceans.