Anyone care to help me tackle this clusterF of a comment about the free market? I can see several main errors, but some guidance would be appreciated. Thanks.
"Free-marketers do not, or refuse to take into account: free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately dooms the resource through over-exploitation. The costs of the exploitation are borne by all those to who the resource is available. Which is always, a majority of individuals than those who are exploiting it.
Which drives up demand for the diminishing resource at the same time driving up the price. A price consumers pay for.
Essentially youre saying, Socialists are wrong because they want to redistribute and share WEALTH. Whereas, you would prefer to redistribute and share COST.
It doesnt take a genius to work out the snowball effect of this. Prices go up, burdening the consumer with higher costs, at the same time the profit margin goes up.
Free-markets do not work, can not work theoretically, scientifically and philosophically, because fundamentally we have limited resources and an environment to consider."
One hardly knows where to begin with this kind of rant. Overexploitation from free access is precisely what is solved by the free market with property rights. That’s why cows are not endangered, and privately owned land is not deforested. When a good becomes more scarce, markets respond with a higher price, providing an incentive for conservation. What happens when the government distorts this signal?
The bit about redistributing cost is too nonsensical for a response.
This is interesting what he says right here. As prices go up, less is consumed, which directly goes contradicts,
This doesn’t make any sense.
This is the best right here,
As finite resources are used up and become too expensive to use, individuals go out and seek other resources that will fulfill the same demand. To quote Walter Block in “Defending the Undefendable,” (I apologize for the length, but I believe no one can say it better)
"Furthermore, in a free market, “using up” resources does
not pose a serious threat. As scarcities develop, powerful forces
automatically come into play to correct them. … In short, given a dearth of one
or even several resources, a free economy automatically adjusts.
As long as its adjustment mechanism, the price system, is not
interfered with, other cheaper and more plentiful resources will
be substituted, and those in short supply will be better pre-
served. But what would happen, it may be asked, if not just one or
several, but allresources were in short supply? What would hap-
pen if we depleted all our resources at the same time? This is the
stuff from which science fiction is made, so we will have to
indulge in a bit of science fiction ourselves to deal with it. But
we will stop short of assuming that everything magically van-
ishes from the face of the earth. In that eventuality, we would
have nothing helpful to suggest.
In order to make sense of the view, we will not assume that
all resources suddenly disappear, or that the earth suddenly
shrinks and shrivels away, but that economic resources get used
up and turn into ashes, waste, and dust. For example, we will
assume not that coal disappears entirely, but that it gets used up
and replaced by ashes, dust, pollutants, and chemical derivatives
of the burning process. We will also assume that all other
resources get “used up” in the same sense; that is, that they
become useless to us.
To deal with this horror, two things must be borne in mind.
First, there is good reason to believe that new sources of energy
will be discovered or invented as present sources are depleted.
There are no reasons to assume that this will not be the case.
The human race has passed from the stone age, to the bronze
age, to the iron age. When coal sources were depleted, oil was
used. After oil, there will be other sources of energy, possibly
nuclear. To ignore this technological phenomenon would be to
hopelessly distort the issue.
In the second place, we must realize that the direct and indi-
rect source of all energy is the sun. It is the source of every type
of energy presently used, and it will be the source of whatever
types of energy our technology may produce in the future. But
the sun itself will not last forever. When it goes, humanity goes,
unless we are technologically advanced enough to either re-
energize the sun or relocate on another planet with a younger
sun. Whether we will have a technology competent to accom-
plish this when the time comes depends on choices we are mak-
ing now. If we exploit the resources of the earth, use them, find
replacements for them, and learn from such exploitation, our
technology will continue to develop. If we do not, and are moti-
vated by fear, and have no faith in our ability to meet challenges,
we will hoard the resources we have at present, and we will not
grow any further. We will be waiting, ostrich-like, for the sun to
go out and the world to end, having forgone the advanced tech-
nology that only increased population and exploitation of the
resources the earth makes possible (219-220).
Thanks everyone. One thing I think could also be said-- how he says that as resources get scarcer, profit margins get higher and higher incessantly, but from what I understand this is erroneous. As I understand it, high profits are a temporary result of increased scarcity or shift in demand of a good. But as long as capitalist/entrepreneurs have free entry into the market, increased investment ( encouraged by the initial condition of high profits) brings the return on capital back down to the going rate of return throughout the economy, bringing profit margins back down to “zero profits” essentially .
Someone let me know if I said that right, or could say it better. It sounds too theoretical they way I’m trying to explain it, and I’ d like an explanation that’s not as easy to just dismiss.
I also just realized that an overall criticism of his entire cockamamie thesis would be to point out that he criticizes the voluntary market for not being able to solve the problem of scarcity, so he advocates socialism–yet he completely ignores the fact that socialism produces nothing and that if it weren’t for the private markets, there would be nothing for socialism to redistribute in the first place!
Essentially youre saying, Socialists are wrong because they want to redistribute and share WEALTH. Whereas, you would prefer to redistribute and share COST.
Ah, and it just hit me (like a wet noodle) what his point might be with this seemingly nonsensical statement: He might be trying to make the point that the private market rations goods by price, as opposed to central planning which rations goods by (insert whatever bullcrap rationale he gives for justifying socialism). I could come up with a response to that, but I’m interested in what people here’s response would be.