Well, replace “me” in this example with “the US government” and “homes” with “bank accounts” and you have your answer.
“… Proof? What if there had been private provision of defence?” Okay, I get that.
“… No. Governments do not know where to allocate funds, they merely arbitrarily dictate that this or that investment will take place.” Okay I would agree with that mostly. But after seeing Singapore’s dramatic advancement since 1960, (one of the poorest countries in SE Asia to now the 4th richest in the world), I cannot say that private entreprise could have done a better job. Has anybody read the book of the Singapore Story?
After being dumped by Malaysia and facing a 25% revenue decrease due to the British troops withdrawal amidst threats of invasion from the neighboring countries, Lee Kwan Yew and his group of people allocated the resources in such a way that I am not sure private enterprise could have done it because not only were the government projects economic in nature. There were a lot of intangibles such as leadership, motivation, patriotism, etc. that the government did to advance the country.
Thanks. This is a great answer. I get it now.
Again, how do you know?
-Jon
I don’t know. But do you agree, that you don’t know either?
But individuals do know their own preference scales, and the free market is the only way they can demonstrate their preferences.
"The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. " --Henry Hazlitt
Even if the glazier discovers a new way to replace windows, he has not created new empolyment. The shopkeeper is robbed of saving that money, investing and creating new employment within his shop, or spending and expanding the economy.
“…But individuals do know their own preference scales, and the free market is the only way they can demonstrate their preferences…”
As long as you agree that free markets may lead to a more or less prosperous society(because the subjective preferences of the people may not be to become prosperous in the first place) than what Singapore turned out to become, I agree too.
Don’t be ridiculous. It isn’t like DARPA people invented the idea of networking. The Internet as such may have developed a decade or so later, but it would have taken off faster, too, and we’d quite likely be further ahead today.
Interesting, since the ARPAnet didn’t exist until 1968/69 and the first email was sent in 1971…
What if, for example, the government had subsidized the videophiles’ preference for betamax over the cheaper, lower resolution VHS? Then we’d be stuck in the betamax technologies and nowhere near the evolution from diskettes to direct downloads.
As noted, it’s all argument from counterfactuals and therefore in the realm of pure speculation rather than logical analysis. What if we made every woman have 12 babies to increase the odds of someone being born who discovers the cure for cancer? Idle fancy.
I’m no certified expert myself; but it seems to me the answer would be no.
It would simply mitigate the amount of losses incurred whenever windows were broken; but they would still be losses nonethless.
And if such a turn of events led to people being more careless around windows, or make young vandals feel less guilty about (and hence more apt to) break shopkeepers windows, then I suppose it could be argued that it was even counter-productive.