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> The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well. > The upper tier is 'justice'. I'm not s

by tdeck 6y ago

> The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well. > The upper tier is 'justice'. I'm not sure about this distinction at all. The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist. The "justice" of the system is just another link in the supply chain between a person and what they need to survive, it can be a bottleneck in the same way that low production or waste can diminish access. This means that issues that might seem abstract to us are concrete to people who can't access food, shelter, or healthcare and therefore can't meet their basic needs.

pdonis 6y ago
> The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist. If those things don't exist, nobody can "access" them. All of those things have to be produced before anyone can use them.
- tdeck 6y ago
  And yet producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless, which is my point. In fact, it's worse than pointless because effort and resources are expended in production.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless Your continued use of the word "access" obfuscates the issue. It isn't a matter of "access"; it's a matter of trade. Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves. If people are producing things that never get used by anybody, it's because some other entity (which would be a government) is paying them to do useless work. It's not because they are just deciding to produce things that others don't have "access" to. So the way to fix that problem is not to "improve access". It's to stop governments from handing out the taxpayers' money in exchange for useless work. You are also ignoring the other possibility: that governments pay various special interest groups to not produce things that would be used (a good example in the US is farm subsidies for not growing what the government thinks is "too much" of some crop). Again, that isn't a matter of the people who would be able to use the things not having "access" to them: it's that the government is preventing them from being produced at all, even though their production would be a net increase in wealth. And the way to fix that is not to "improve access"; it's to stop the government from paying people not to do useful work.
    - tdeck 6y ago
      > Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves. Citation needed. People do this all the time.
      - pdonis 6y ago
        > People do this all the time. Example needed.
        perl4ever 6y ago
        People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer. Think of all the produce which is thrown away unsold. The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand. Life and business involve uncertainty.
        pdonis 6y ago
        > People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer. Without complete certainty, yes. But nobody has complete certainty about the future. And I didn't claim complete certainty. I'm assuming readers are capable of applying common sense. > The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand. The reasons why life is uncertain aren't, yes. But the reasons why people would either produce something which they know nobody will want but they still get paid for it, or would not produce something that they know people will want? Yes, that pretty much comes down to senseless government actions.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff. To me, though, it sounds like the fundamental basis of the whole capitalist system - I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.

by tdeck 6y ago

pdonis 6y ago

> The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist. If those things don't exist, nobody can "access" them. All of those things have to be produced before anyone can use them.

tdeck 6y ago
And yet producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless, which is my point. In fact, it's worse than pointless because effort and resources are expended in production.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless Your continued use of the word "access" obfuscates the issue. It isn't a matter of "access"; it's a matter of trade. Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves. If people are producing things that never get used by anybody, it's because some other entity (which would be a government) is paying them to do useless work. It's not because they are just deciding to produce things that others don't have "access" to. So the way to fix that problem is not to "improve access". It's to stop governments from handing out the taxpayers' money in exchange for useless work. You are also ignoring the other possibility: that governments pay various special interest groups to not produce things that would be used (a good example in the US is farm subsidies for not growing what the government thinks is "too much" of some crop). Again, that isn't a matter of the people who would be able to use the things not having "access" to them: it's that the government is preventing them from being produced at all, even though their production would be a net increase in wealth. And the way to fix that is not to "improve access"; it's to stop the government from paying people not to do useful work.
  - tdeck 6y ago
    > Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves. Citation needed. People do this all the time.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > People do this all the time. Example needed.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer. Think of all the produce which is thrown away unsold. The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand. Life and business involve uncertainty.
        pdonis 6y ago
        > People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer. Without complete certainty, yes. But nobody has complete certainty about the future. And I didn't claim complete certainty. I'm assuming readers are capable of applying common sense. > The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand. The reasons why life is uncertain aren't, yes. But the reasons why people would either produce something which they know nobody will want but they still get paid for it, or would not produce something that they know people will want? Yes, that pretty much comes down to senseless government actions.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff. To me, though, it sounds like the fundamental basis of the whole capitalist system - I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.