Again, productivity is subjective. What is more productive, a pen or a pencil? When a thief steal resources from another person, the thief gains productivity but the person from whom the resources were stolen loses productivity. How exactly do you go about calculating the net productivity from this event?
It is nonesensical to define productivity in such a way. The thief did not produce anything of value , either by him or by someone else, in order to make the exchange for the spacecraft. His spacecraft was only possible by the productive output of someone else. That other person that was looted had to produce something of value, otherwise, the thief could not make a gain; the stolen goods would not be worth anything.
The thief cannot be productive. He can benefit himself, but he cannot he can never be productive. This is evident by the fact that there is always a net loss after theft; The spacecraft was built and something else was not. Demand for the spacecraft was a result of theft, not production!
The government then cannot be productive even in theory.
Let’s suppose the following scenario. He is the best engineer ever. He stole the materials, and built the spacecraft. The stolen (an individual or a group) could only build a car with those material. The thief, instead, could build a spacecraft. So the thief was productive, because even with the “seen and the unseen” idea, the net result was “higher”.
When we talk about the ineficiency of government, we talk about their inability (or unwillingness) to be economically productive. They just do things for political reasons, not for economic ones. We should also consider the fact that they have a monopoly on lots of services, making profit and loss a very weak market signal, distorted by the government itself.
the thief was literally destructive of property. and what he created was different, not better.
How exactly do you go about determining who is the best engineer?
I understand that many of you cannot endorse any scenario in which aggression is used as a means to an end. My question was meant NOT to be a moral question in that sense. I suppose what I was trying to get at is that I see a lack of pragmatism in the views of people on this board. I understand that there are theoretical problems with determining value independent of individual preferences (as one poster said, social gains is a meaningless concept because values cannot be understood beyond the individual). But where is the room for pragmatism, given that we live in a real world and not a theoretical world? For the record, I am merely playing devil’s advocate; i find most of the Austrian and libertarian ideas persuasive. Can there be no allowance for the possibility that government could do some good things? Or is any government action (funded through aggressive taxation) equally sinister? I would liken this to the religious person who says all sins are equally evil. I get the concept, but common sense says murder is worse than lusting after somebody.
I hope that made sense.
Present values, as formulated by individuals, are always ex-ante and diverting funds away from consumer demands can never be productive prior to the fact. Theoretically however, you could argue that in ex-post valuation (looking back) the individual might have derived a greater benefit from a variance in consumption - in this case a government could, in theory, provide productivity that would outstrip consumer demands (in ex-post) if values were to suddenly change in the individual.
No. Any action by the state, such providing a common defense, presupposes that the resources used to provide the common defense were ill gotten. Or do I have the right to steal you car do provide with you defense?
Why was the result higher? value is determined by consumer demand, not by your standards of engineering. But let’s play it your way for a minute:
Let’s suppose this brilliant engineer can produce a spacecraft using the same amount of capital it takes to make a car and the market is expected to value that spacecraft more then the car.
The logic doesn’t follow. Why do you need to steal capital for something that apparently there is a market demand for? Capital will voluntarily flow to where highest profits are expected; where there is greatest consumer demand. From this, I think we can safely infer that if capital is to be acquired by theft, then the thief is trying to build or design something that there is no market demand for. Something that will personally benefit himself or his friends. Once again, there is NET loss. The thief did not acquire his capital by production and exchange, but by taking from somebody else. He then uses that capital to build something that there is no market demand for.
Why should there be? I’m not even tackling this from a moral angle, but merely a subjectivist one.
Then you’d have no problem with being tortured so long as there was some benefit to “society”. Deny that and you’re a hypocrite.
In the existing situation we have now:one in which there is a fairly strong central government with heavily subsidised science, with the probably too many rules and regulations on the market, and the decent anti-market propaganda it may very well indeed be more effective to use government to “save more at the cost of the few”. I certainly wouldn’t be suprised if that were the case.
Likewise, in any condition, it is theoretically possible that government could hit some unkown market demand with fantasic successful results just as it is theoretically possible to hit green on roulette three times in a row.
Either way, it can be useful and enlightening to discuss other arguments rather than moral ones.
Yes, seriously, this. Mises’ point about the impossibility of socialism wasn’t that the government can’t put resources to the most urgent wants, but that it can’t do so rationally. If you were to tell a three year old child to square a 20 digit number and he blurted out a random number that just to be correct, you wouldn’t call it rational, the analogy applies to government planning. The government could possibly allocate all resources in the exact way a free market would, it’s just not rational and it’s not likely to happen.
Of course, the idea of gains and losses is purely subjective, and is based upon every individual opinion. Again, a thief can be productive (we should define what productive is, I defined it as having a more valuable result (more market-valuable, that is, more expensive) than another possible result). Then, when we talk about the government, it’s still possible to satisfy consumer demand, but it’s an exception, not the rule. Finland subsidized Nokia, and made it one of the biggest and more successful companies in the world, but there probably existed thousands of failed attempts. The issue here is that the government is not a market participant as any other, as it have a monopoly on force, and can get financed by violent means. Their enterprises are driven for political reasons, they almost never check profit and loss constraints. That’s why they fail. Let governments be financed voluntarily and see the difference. So, it’s the market who ultimately determines what is a gain and what a loss; if you follow market signals, you can know if you’re being productive or not (that is, if you don’t have a monopoly on the production on that good).