The morality of the free market

Sorry you choose to ignore my post and offer that. Your prerogative.

 

I think you are spot on, JG, as usual.

In my experience, again, people tend to use the terms interchangeably and make blanket statements that imply that self-interest is a bad thing. Maybe others experiences are different, but enough have noticed what I have that I have read many others expounding on this idea.

Nothing could be farther from the truth about self-interest being an evil thing, the way some people believe. It's people's self-interest that gives them the motivation to innovate and create things for profit (or for their own sense of well being or whatever utility they gain from their actions), and we all benefit from the ingenuity and productivity gains that result from that sort of self-interested work. It accounts for almost every major advancement in industry, science, food-growing technology, etc. that the world has seen, and it has been particularly pronounced the last half decade, as technological gains have outpaced what we saw in several hundred years before.

One interesting exercise for a lot of people is to look up the definition of "selfish." Common parlance has stigmatized the word and added a negative connotation to it. But its base definition means little more than a concern with your own well-being--or self interests. And that is not, nor should it be, an inherently negative thing. It is actually quite rational behavior. There is actually a lot of good in that, because of the reasons I described above.

 

Fenian, if you spent less time trying to characterize me -- which you never correctly do -- and more time adding something positive and original to your own thoughts to the board, I could happily ignore you. Funny how I *never* characterize you and use simplistic (and wrong) buzzwords like Randian to do it. My posts represent MY ideas. Your posts represent your obsession with me, and it frustrates the hell out of me because instead of allowing me to speak for myself -- which I have been doing -- you insist on mischaracterizing me. It's sad. Why not just post your own ideas? For my part, I promise not to distort them or obsess over them the way you do with me.

 

Thanks Alley. Economics starts off with one simple truth: we live in a world of scarce resources. All economics tries to do is look at the different possible ways to allocate those resources. But you are still stuck with the fact that we don't have, nor will we ever have, the resources to give everyone everything they need or to end suffering and misery. We don't have the resources to do it, NO MATTER the economic system at work.

When I post things like that, I get smarmy responses that unfairly paint me as uncaring. It isn't a lack of caring, and I'd like to think that my actions off this board prove me to be a very caring person. It's just reality.

That leads to a fundamental question: Which economic system is the most efficient and allows us the most bang for the buck? I won't give a treatise, and this is a generalization. It is too complicated to deal in specifics on here. But systems that try to "manage" distribution of wealth are inherent with inefficiencies that take those scarce resources and leave more people out in the cold than other methods. It's primarily because of the "self-interest" conversation we were having. You take away all incentive for people to innovate and create and things stagnate as a result. Also, without profit incentives, you inevitably get corruption and theft -- something that has been demonstrated time and time again in the various forms of managed economies we have seen.

People on here will start a thread like this, look at the world in which we don't have enough resources and in which there is suffering and misery and make an incorrect correlation between that set of facts and "free markets" being the cause. But that is a fallacy. For one thing, we don't have truly free markets anywhere, and for another, many of the places that are suffering the most are the ones being kept under an iron grip by a dictator or dictators who enrich themselves while their populations suffer.

It's complicated enough, though, so that even if we opened up the world's markets -- allowed free and open trade, global deregulation, etc. -- there would still be haves and have nots, as you put it. We simply don't have enough resources to make the world the prosperous place everyone would like. Pointing this out doesn't make me uncaring. I'm not HAPPY about it.

 

In that case, I apologize. I am overly sensitive because of some of what I get on threads like this. But I should have given you the benefit of the doubt. I'm not humorless. Just beaten down a bit by certain people on here. I am really sorry I responded that way.