At 18:38 -0800 12/1/02, Harry Pollard wrote:
Tom,Issue No. One. This is the "freedom to buy" issue that often prefaces these market arguments.
The local people simply have to continue buying from the local merchants.
If you agree then there is no problem. Nothing will change.
If they prefer to buy elsewhere, but you think that is wrong, you must force them to buy locally.
That's a problem.
There is nothing inherently wrong with restricting what people may buy. It's done every day. Fact of the matter is that I have very little freedom to buy. I must purchase what is offered or manufacture it myself. I may not purchase what is banned by the law, and for the most part, that's healthy and right.there's no conceivable use of a machine gun that isn't outweighed by the threat to public safety of the proliferation of these weapons.
What is offered is what may be sold at a profit by and for the seller. The law implicitly realizes that when A and B negotiate a deal that it mutually beneficial, C may or may not benefit from the deal. As an extreme example, I represented a defendant in court yesterday charged with murder-for-hire. Clearly the principal and the murderer mutually benefited from the exchange at the expense of the victim.
Getting closer to home, the SUV is the perfect example of a purchase that uses up a tremendous amount of raw materials, burns up a non-renewable resource, and pumps and inordinate amount of carbon into the atmosphere to the detriment of us all. The manufacturers defend their profit-maximizing behavior on the freedom-to-buy principle. The freedom-to-buy argument frequently overlooks the secondary and tertiary effects of what is supposed to be a mutually beneficial arrangement between buyer and seller.
Maybe if you pay $60 instead of $260 for a VCR, that will leave you $200 to pursue "quality of life". The fact that the local guy gives $10 of the extra $200 to the symphony orchestra doesn't attract me to his store to pay $260.Imagine the network of small merchants and local distributors that exist before Walmart comes into a community. Inefficient if all you are looking at is the $60 VCR. The merchants have increased overhead in the form of higher rent per product, a proportionally higher payroll. and other expenses, such as taxes and utilities that Walmart either manages to avoid or minimize by virtue of its size.
But, why do you assume Walmart means an automatic decline in quality of life!
Virtually all of that "inefficiency" represents funds that go into the local community, instead of being harvested by Bentonville.
The result is a decline in wages among the less fortunate, fewer prosperous businesspersons in the community, a gutted downtown, filled with empty retail shops and an infrastructure based upon increasing consumption of petroleum that requires one to drive long distances to purchase even the necessities of life.
I don't remember saying that the market does anything more than set prices. Nor have I said that it increases the general welfare. I have likened it to machines, or new techniques of production.Efficiency must always be judged in light of the goal to be attained. Lungs are extremely efficient in getting oxygen from the air into the blood, but are very inefficient if seen only as pipes for air -- two much friction and turbulence from all those little pockets.
It makes a larger pie. If it is allowed, it continually produces better quality at lower prices. It does this by being a reflection of consumer desires and we are all consumers. It's highly efficient.
There's also the question of whether or not the pie is actually getting bigger at this point. The negative externalities are piling up at an increasing rate. The human race is clearly soiling its nest, and the cost of cleaning it up must be subtracted from the profits, irrespective of whether the profits are "privatized" and the cleanup costs "socialized" as is usually the case in our free-market economy.
Also, I'm not even sure that "[i]t does this by being a reflection of consumer desires and we are all consumers." A counter-illustration: Apple consumption has declined by roughly 10% in the US over the past ten years. The reason: the buyers of apples, observing that consumers pick the largest, reddest apples free from blemishes, grade them by size, color and freedom from blemishes. The farmers complied with the purchasers' wishes and produced large red apples free from blemishes. Only problem: the apples didn't taste as good. Although consumers still pick apples at the store that look nice and don't have blemishes, they don't purchase near as many apples because they don't taste as good -- a clear example of overall choice being in conflict with aggregate choice. There are plenty of other examples just like this.
If I remember correctly, Ricardo believed, along with Malthus, that excess population would drive down wages to the point that many workers would simply starve and "reduce the surplus population," and he approved of the "iron law."
But the market doesn't distribute the pie justly because part of the economy is not controlled by the market, something Ricardo was close to discovering - but he didn't quite get there.
I'm not a neo-Classical adherent. In fact I'm highly critical of much they do. They may be "squalid, amoral, materialistic" but maybe they don't want to force people to shop where they don't want to.Yes, I know you are a Georgist, and I admire Henry George quite a bit. Nevertheless, your market-oriented arguments seem to me based upon most of the same assumptions regarding the "wisdom" of many buyers and sellers.
My experience is that they -- or their paymasters -- will do it in a heartbeat if it increases profits. Try to buy non-GM food at the grocery store if you don't believe me. You can't do it because it's not labelled.
Or, don't you think that is amoral - or perhaps it's flat-out immoral to coerce people - to force them to obey your preferences..Having finally returned once again to the "freedom-to-buy" principle, you have phrased it in such a way that opposing it makes one sound as though one were trying to abolish the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, the Bible and apple pie.
The question to be asked first is how to achieve a just, sustainable and prosperous society. Freedom of commerce is merely a convenience, not an end. It is secondary to the public welfare. I know that the public welfare is not something that we can all agree upon, but it is not identical with the free market, even in its pure form.
Our great cultural institutions--museums, libraries, symphony orchestras, operas--arguably are a part of the public welfare. Art is one of the few things that distinguish us from the cattle in a feedlot. A society without public cultural institutions is a wasteland.
More about that later.
Tom
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Tom Lowe One of the most powerful aspects of
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