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>Why not just create the benefit directly instead of going the roundabout way of having people act in their own self-interest, fostering mean-spirited relations

>Why not just create the benefit directly instead of going the roundabout way of having people act in their own self-interest, fostering mean-spirited relationships between people, competition instead of cooperation and general wastage of resources? Because people always act within their own self interest for the most part. One may take more than their fair share of the benefits of society while others will attempt to get out of paying theirs. Don't forget the officials whom will attempt to push those monies one direction or another in order to enrich themselves. Capitalism is the only system that takes this into account as far as I can tell, everything else is either predicated on people willingly giving to help society on the large scale (counter to human nature) or forcing others to do so at the end of a gun (that tends to lead to dictatorships and suppression of freedom as it requires near total government)

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>Because people always act within their own self interest for the most part. That's not really true. People are, roughly speaking, reinforcement learners. This means that, yes, they respond to rewards by seeking further such rewards, but there are multiple kinds of reward. Financial profit is only one of those, and it actually has a declining marginal happiness once personal income goes over a certain level. Other major rewards for real humans include being useful to other people, acting with personal autonomy, and exercising mastery (or learning towards mastery) in a domain of skill. When we talk about economic value, what we really care about is the intersection: good work is useful to others (meets the customer's needs), and it lets the worker autonomously exercise mastery over a skillset (or otherwise, save their energy for domains in which they can do so), and it's profitable or self-sufficient with respect to resources. That's the psychologically real self-interest of the person doing the work, combined with the psychologically real self-interest of the person who needs the work done. When you start disregarding working conditions and customer needs in the process of maximizing profit, your profit-maximization system has become useless for human purposes.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

>Because people always act within their own self interest for the most part. That's not really true. People are, roughly speaking, reinforcement learners. This means that, yes, they respond to rewards by seeking further such rewards, but there are multiple kinds of reward. Financial profit is only one of those, and it actually has a declining marginal happiness once personal income goes over a certain level. Other major rewards for real humans include being useful to other people, acting with personal autonomy, and exercising mastery (or learning towards mastery) in a domain of skill. When we talk about economic value, what we really care about is the intersection: good work is useful to others (meets the customer's needs), and it lets the worker autonomously exercise mastery over a skillset (or otherwise, save their energy for domains in which they can do so), and it's profitable or self-sufficient with respect to resources. That's the psychologically real self-interest of the person doing the work, combined with the psychologically real self-interest of the person who needs the work done. When you start disregarding working conditions and customer needs in the process of maximizing profit, your profit-maximization system has become useless for human purposes.