Subject:
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Re: Break Out the Cristal (trickle-down economics explained with champagne!)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 28 Mar 2003 14:03:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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609 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Ross Crawford writes:
>
> > Perhaps RM erred in such a large snip, but I immediately took his comment to
> > refer to:
> >
> > > c) prepared to discuss how likely it is that " more importantly, that
> > > they're likely to deliver to their citizens in future." is true (the second
> > > part of my metric) about Canada. It's not enough to be ahead at the moment.
> >
> > which seems to be investigating the potential of a country to deliver
> > [quality of life] to it's citizens, as a metric for superiority. No doubt
> > I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, but it seems to fit better than any
> > reference to nuclear fission.
>
> Larry is talking about the probability a country will continue
> to deliver. I'm
> not really interested in debating semantics, but potential
> and probability have
> different meanings. At least my reference was to the same word.
Thanks for trying to clear this up. Use potential, use probability, whatever
you like... what I was trying to convey was the likeliehood that a system of
government will be able to continue to deliver (1) higher quality of life,
higher freedom, and so forth going forward. It's not enough to do so at a
moment in time, the potential to do so in future is also important.
More concretely, if a socialist government delivers, for example, free
health care by running a large deficit and borrowing huge sums from
international bankers, to the point where it's not likely they will stay
solvent long, I would rank their potential for delivering high quality of
life as lower in the long run than if they did not.
Also, if a "free market" government doesn't do things right, for example
support the rule of law, so that apparent prosperity is coming about because
thugs are stealing things from established owners, (like for example cutting
down forests in unsustainable ways without regard to the property owners so
that farms can be put in the clearcut areas) that can give a false temporary
prosperity but is not sustainable in the long term.
The wealth of a nation is measured by more than just what a particular
snapshot of consumption shows. Eating your seed corn produces full bellies
for a while, but empty ones in the long run.
I'll stand by my assertion. The US is superior to the DPRK(2) by this
prosperity based metric. The DPRK system isn't working now and has no
prospects of working better in future. It's also superior to the DPRK by a
human rights metric. Therefore, to say that the US and the DPRK ought to be
equal (for example both having one vote on the UN HRC, or both having one
vote on how UN funds ought to be spent) strikes me as false. I found an op
ed yesterday (but can't find it now) arguing this very point...that based on
what is being decided, different countries ought to get different sized
votes... the one I like was a vote based on proportional contribution to the
UN budget.
1 - For those that pounced on "deliver" as not being very libertarian...
deliver as I use it here has several senses. For a command and control
economy, deliver means actually be the provider of goods and services. For a
free market (or mostly free market) economy, delivery refers to the
fostering of an environment where the market will meet the needs of the
purchasers, that is, ensuring rule of law, ensuring laws against fraud and
tort actions against negligence are effective, not overly regulating
industries to the point that they cannot survive, and so forth. It doesn't
mean actually providing goods. For a mixed economy, like the US, it means
some of each of the above. We provide a lot of goods directly and foster the
provision of others.
2 - I'm singling out the DPRK as an example not because it's the only
country that the US is better than, but because there's such a huge gulf
between them that it cuts away the "US is better than Canada, no it isn't"
argument that distracts from the main point.
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