Craig Haynie wrote:
It is not possible for any type of program to improve the welfare of all individuals, unless those individuals freely agreed to join the program.
If that were true, no program could help babies or senile adults, who are not capable of agreeing or understanding anything. Manifestly, many economic and social programs do help such people. Sewers, inoculations and public health programs benefit everyone, even people who pay no taxes to support them, and even people who refuse the inoculations.
Countless programs help you even though you do not even they exist. Some of them are in other countries, such as Japan, where the government helps develop industrial standards, product safety, advanced traffic safety, and hybrid automobiles. Yesterday the Kanagawa prefecture government announced they are buying hundreds of electric cars. That will help you eventually. You did not freely agree to this, but it will benefit you.
No system is perfectly efficient, fair or foolproof. All systems must change, or perish. Our economic system has changed many times. For example, there was a huge debate in the late 19th century as to whether money should be based on silver or gold. It is no longer based on either. It is hard to imagine a modern economy based on the gold standard, where the amount of money is arbitrarily limited by the amount of gold. People say this is a good system because the supply of gold is finite, and limited. You can say the same thing for the supply of electrons in the universe, the number of people, the number of clouds in the sky. Why not base the money supply on them, instead? People say gold is limited and inherently valuable. At present, rare earths appear to be more valuable in a practical sense since the Chinese are jacking up the price and restricting supplies. This will continue until the U.S. and Canada re-open their mines, which they are now hustling to do. We can always find more gold. We can improve recovery from mining and recycling, or extract it from seawater, by mining asteroids, or perhaps even transmutation. We can always find more of anything, up to some unknowable limit.
The economic system must change because machines will gradually replace most workers, and people will no longer be needed. The system can no longer be based on the exchange of labor for goods. It should be fair, and it should preserve freedom, capitalism and competition, but above all, it should work. It should give everyone what we need to survive. If it doesn't do that, it will not accomplish anything else, either.
- Jed
