I see posts from Left-oriented people who don’t seem to realize that production is necessary at all. The assertion is made that abundance is the natural state of man, and scarcity is caused by capitalists fencing everything off to deliberately create scarcity.That golden goose belongs to us, and if we feel like it we can kill it! That'll show 'em!The natural relationship between mother and infant does not scale up well to society.
The natural relationship between mother and child also includes growth, passing out of the infant stage to increasing stages of self-sufficiency that eventually rises to adulthood and freedom. Part of the problem is the desire to freeze the relationship at some stage of childhood: infancy for some, for others that of children organized and constantly under the discipline of their mother. Never free adults who are truly the mother's equal.
ReplyDeleteYes, that's why it's not a model for society, and why socialism is nonsense.
ReplyDeleteI've listened to young socialists (14-18) talk, and gotten the impression that they see the world as a modernized version of the Land of Cockaigne, or the Big Rock-Candy Mountain, where good things appear from nothing, and one may do as one wills to "be my authentic self".
ReplyDeleteThey do admit that hams growing on trees might be a bit difficult to achieve, but "the government" or "society" will find a way to provide.
LittleRed1
Maybe the young ones think that way LittleRed1 but I'm not so sure about the older ones.
ReplyDeleteI'll reprise my comment from David's thread. It's more about a post from Ann Althouse's blog a couple of days ago but I think it fit fairly well with the idea that scarcity is caused by capitalism.
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I dunno that the issue is really economics.
Ann Althouse had a post yesterday morning quoting from a letter to the WaPo food editor on the subject of the OBBB ‘no tax on tips’ provision that made the following claim “Even though tipping mainly benefits employers by transferring to their customers a large part of the responsibility for paying their staff…”
A number of us who comment there immediately jumped on the illogic of saying the money to pay the bills doesn’t come from purchases made by customers. As David notes here, it’s even hard to fit this kind of logic into any economic theory of production. The famous quip from the USSR “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” comes to mind.
The impulse behind this isn’t economics, it’s authoritarianism with a smiley face (Somebody ought to ask Jonah Goldberg what he thinks about it). The authoritarian Left has discovered “being nice”. Demanding wait staff and table bussers get a ‘living wage’ is just an acceptable way of saying that the owner of the restaurant isn’t going to be allowed to retain the return on his investment of labor or money. What he gets to keep will be determined by the Leftists in charge in the same way the cooks and waiters pay will be determined.
I’m pretty sure most of the people spouting the BS quoted above [in the original post] don’t really believe life was idyllic for our hunter-gatherer forebears. What really chaps their hide is *they aren’t the ones deciding who gets to eat*.
I have relatives of about my own somewhat advanced age who still seem to think that the economic system should aspire to recreate the womb. I don't get it.
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