…people do. The difference is who makes the decisions.
7 thoughts on “Markets Don’t Ration”
It would seem that persuading sufficient quantities of voters that certain people should never be allowed anywhere near the reins of power would be easier than it is. See what I almost posted.
Er, the very pupose of markets is to allocate resources efficiently (more efficiently than a Soviet planner can). Of course they “ration.” It’s just that your “ration” is whatever you can afford, but the effect (You get X, and no more) is the same to the consumer.
It is not the same to the consumer. Brock, how can you not understand the difference?
Yeah, B, you’re off your tree. Rationing involves a third-party interloper stopping the trade between a willing buyer and seller. You’re trying to tell us that vanilla’s a three-way.
Rationing used to be one of those things that people on the home front feared about going to war.. but hey, there’s no consequences to going to war now.
This is a bit of a straw man. Your moderately intelligent collectivist doesn’t really think collectivization increases the total resources, and doesn’t really doubt that rationing — allocation — needs to be done. As long as he’s a modern socialist, and not a genuine 19th century Marxist, he probably also even agrees that market prices mostly reflect the real cost of delivering a good or service, and would like to preserve them for that purpose.
Where he has the problem is in what those price signals mean to the consumer. He sees Oprah being able to blow $10,000 on Botox on careless whim, while Bob Cratchett works overtime at the mill to afford a stick of wood he can carve into a crutch for Tiny Tim, and thinks there is something deeply wrong about the fact that Oprah can care so much less about market prices than Bob. This makes him want to steal money from Oprah in order to give it to Bob. But if political reality prevents him from doing just this, then he would settle for having life’s necessities (e.g. health care, but housing or food on another day) declared a “right”, and taxing Oprah to pay for both her and Bob’s “rights.”
In short, it’s the market price of labor that troubles the modern collectivist. He does not trust that the market sends the appropriate signals about the true value of everyone’s labor. Clearly some people, e.g. the chairman of BP and Chevron, Sarah Palin, the Koch brothers, all the deadbeat dads, are having their labor wildly overvalued by the free market, while some others, e.g. SIEU members, public school teachers, and community organizers, are having their labor wildly undervalued. It’s this fact — that, left to itself, society perversely insists on valuing the labor of a first-class major league first baseman far higher than it values the labor of a social worker — which really grates on the modern leftist. He sees himself, and his fellow travelers, as our natural intellectual aristocracy, who should be telling other people what to do. It enrages him that we do not value his advice, of our own accord, and would gladly pay others who merely entertain or charm us much more.
but hey, there’s no consequences to going to war now.
It would seem that persuading sufficient quantities of voters that certain people should never be allowed anywhere near the reins of power would be easier than it is. See what I almost posted.
Er, the very pupose of markets is to allocate resources efficiently (more efficiently than a Soviet planner can). Of course they “ration.” It’s just that your “ration” is whatever you can afford, but the effect (You get X, and no more) is the same to the consumer.
It is not the same to the consumer. Brock, how can you not understand the difference?
Yeah, B, you’re off your tree. Rationing involves a third-party interloper stopping the trade between a willing buyer and seller. You’re trying to tell us that vanilla’s a three-way.
Rationing used to be one of those things that people on the home front feared about going to war.. but hey, there’s no consequences to going to war now.
This is a bit of a straw man. Your moderately intelligent collectivist doesn’t really think collectivization increases the total resources, and doesn’t really doubt that rationing — allocation — needs to be done. As long as he’s a modern socialist, and not a genuine 19th century Marxist, he probably also even agrees that market prices mostly reflect the real cost of delivering a good or service, and would like to preserve them for that purpose.
Where he has the problem is in what those price signals mean to the consumer. He sees Oprah being able to blow $10,000 on Botox on careless whim, while Bob Cratchett works overtime at the mill to afford a stick of wood he can carve into a crutch for Tiny Tim, and thinks there is something deeply wrong about the fact that Oprah can care so much less about market prices than Bob. This makes him want to steal money from Oprah in order to give it to Bob. But if political reality prevents him from doing just this, then he would settle for having life’s necessities (e.g. health care, but housing or food on another day) declared a “right”, and taxing Oprah to pay for both her and Bob’s “rights.”
In short, it’s the market price of labor that troubles the modern collectivist. He does not trust that the market sends the appropriate signals about the true value of everyone’s labor. Clearly some people, e.g. the chairman of BP and Chevron, Sarah Palin, the Koch brothers, all the deadbeat dads, are having their labor wildly overvalued by the free market, while some others, e.g. SIEU members, public school teachers, and community organizers, are having their labor wildly undervalued. It’s this fact — that, left to itself, society perversely insists on valuing the labor of a first-class major league first baseman far higher than it values the labor of a social worker — which really grates on the modern leftist. He sees himself, and his fellow travelers, as our natural intellectual aristocracy, who should be telling other people what to do. It enrages him that we do not value his advice, of our own accord, and would gladly pay others who merely entertain or charm us much more.
Stick around — the century’s not over yet…