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Why do we need to allocate resources efficiently? People having lots of resources hasn't really made us any happier. If lots of resources made a difference ever
by austhrow743 7y ago
Why do we need to allocate resources efficiently? People having lots of resources hasn't really made us any happier. If lots of resources made a difference everyone in developed countries would be euphoric 24/7. Yet we're chock full of anti-depressants and still sometimes intentionally kill ourselves.
- allovernow 7y agoNo, I'm talking about the manpower and materials that are necessary for food, water, transportation, medical care, and all of the other thousands of things that make society work. Ultimately, scarce resources, which take their own industries to produce, need to be allocated so the many goods and services we need and want can be designed, built, and/or executed/delivered. If you do not rely on merit to decide who does what, everything will absolutely collapse.
- salt-licker 7y agoTo clarify, I believe in allocating work based on competence, and even incentivizing such behavior when necessary with some monetary reward, which our current markets do an okay job at. By “meritocracy” I mean the idea that it is morally just for people to be rewarded in money or social status proportional to their economic usefulness — an idea most people implicitly hold to some degree and which some libertarians trumpet as a core tenet. I think the implied inverse to this belief — in the extreme, that lack of economic usefulness deserves poverty — is morally repugnant and dangerous.