Harry Pollard wrote: > You cannot make something true with mathematics. "Modern" economists can. Or so they believe!
> Georgists regard the air and water as part of the common > stock to which all of us have an equal right. If Cordell Inc. > messes up our air and water, it must either stop it or compensate > the rest of us for the damage it's causing to our air and water. Then why are you so fond of SUVs? What do you (or was it a relative?) as a SUV driver pay to "compensate the rest of us for the damage" your SUVs are causing? > The free market assumes by virtue of its name that there is no > interference with exchanges. There can be no market without interference -- if the interference isn't done by regulators (that is "everyone" in a true democracy), it is done by the biggest bullies or mafiosi. Your choice. Of course, in a cleptocracy, the regulators are manipulated by the biggest bullies or mafiosi as well, but to fix that, you should obolish the cleptocracy, not the regulators! > Normal health and safety laws apply quite properly in our society. Yeah right, that's why your society gets filled up with hormone-beef, irradiated junkfood, MSG, Aspartame, all kinds of drugs, etc. > Yet, how sensible safety restrictions can be related to > fixing the price of milk, or to preventing the importation of > ladies' bras is grist for the PhD mill. No, it's quite simple: If the price goes down the drain, so does food safety. Because the producers have to cut corners too hard. > I have no idea what are these "socially undesirable results". Exactly, that's the problem Harry -- you have no idea. > Usually, they are supposed to be, for example, imported tainted > meat. Yet, why should anybody import tainted meat. Because it's cheaper. It's an easy way to out-compete others in the rat-race to the bottom. > Our ordinary > health laws would forbid its sale. So an importer would waste his > money on meat he can't sell. Ha! Only if he gets caught! And since the FreeTraitors also abolished (or "opened") borders, getting caught has become very rare. For example, the biggest EU meat scandal only blew up because the crooks were stupid enough to also export a tiny part of the tainted meat to Switzerland (a non-EU and non-Schengen country), so they were caught at our border. > However, if government is derelict in its duties, there is a > further check and balance. A retailer, or fast food supplier, who > sells tainted meat is asking for bankruptcy. They have every > reason to the world to make sure their customers go away happy. Oh, that's easy -- mix that moldy meat into sausages, and people won't notice. There's so much unhealthy food, and so much fraud, how can consumers track down their illness to that particular sausage? Or mix beef tallow from the knacker's yard into butter and sell it throughout the EU -- you can sell that for years by the millions of tons unnoticed while your decent competitors go bankrupt. (a real case) In "Free Trade", selling NON-tainted meat is asking for bankruptcy ! The costs of producing good food are just too high. > Public goods are not usually part of the market process. We build > one road to somewhere, we don't build a half-dozen roads to > compete with each other. Tell that to those who are privatizing telecoms, railroads, electricity, water supply, ... > (There are ways to bring the efficiency of the market into > the public sector, but we'll discuss them another time.) I'm looking forward to that... > [Land prices:] > Henry George's method of dealing with this problem was simply to > put land back in the free market where the efficiency of price > mechanism control would handle allocation of available resources. Ohmygosh! Free reign for speculators and mafiosi! > His proposal was to tax 100% of the economic rent of land. Now that's a market interference... > This > value is produced by the local community anyway so it is quite > ethical to recapture it for community purposes. The economic > effect of this would be to end land speculation -- the holding of > land from the market, perhaps for decades. Then why introduce a free market for land in the first place? This just invites all kinds of fraud. Land shouldn't be private property to begin with (I thought there's supposed to be "NO Free Lunch"?!) Land is the most basic of the commons! Chris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SpamWall: Mail to this addy is deleted unread unless it contains the keyword "igve". _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
