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No, I mean that no one gets to decide what is a need or a want. Things are intrinsically a need or they aren't. A need can also be a want, and people can choo

No, I mean that no one gets to decide what is a need or a want. Things are intrinsically a need or they aren't. A need can also be a want, and people can choose to want things but you don't get to decide if something is a need. Calling something that isn't a need, doesn't magically make it need. You also can't arbitrarily decide you no longer need something. If you can then it was never a need.

pdonis 6y ago
> I mean that no one gets to decide what is a need or a want. If you mean that, for example, no one can "decide" that they don't need food, yes, I agree. But that sense of "need" is irrelevant to the question of how food gets allocated to people, which was the original subject of this subthread. The fact that food is a need, not a want, does not mean a free market in food is not possible or that it does not allocate food better than regulation would. Many countries over the course of human history have run the experiment of having a central authority regulate food allocation instead of letting a free market do it. All of those experiments failed--they resulted in famine, mass starvation and death. Some people confuse a free market in food with subsidizing food purchases for the poor, as, for example, food stamps do in the US. They're not the same thing. People on food stamps effectively get a certain amount of money each month that they can spend on food. It's true that "food" is, strictly speaking, a regulation of a sort, since, for example, gas stations or car repair shops or drugstores don't accept food stamps, so they're not exactly equivalent to money. But it still leaves a very wide scope for free choice; people on food stamps are purchasing food in a free market, even though their purchases are being subsidized by the government. They are able to choose what items they buy at the grocery store and thereby are sending price signals into the market about their preferences, just like everyone else.

pdonis 6y ago

> I mean that no one gets to decide what is a need or a want. If you mean that, for example, no one can "decide" that they don't need food, yes, I agree. But that sense of "need" is irrelevant to the question of how food gets allocated to people, which was the original subject of this subthread. The fact that food is a need, not a want, does not mean a free market in food is not possible or that it does not allocate food better than regulation would. Many countries over the course of human history have run the experiment of having a central authority regulate food allocation instead of letting a free market do it. All of those experiments failed--they resulted in famine, mass starvation and death. Some people confuse a free market in food with subsidizing food purchases for the poor, as, for example, food stamps do in the US. They're not the same thing. People on food stamps effectively get a certain amount of money each month that they can spend on food. It's true that "food" is, strictly speaking, a regulation of a sort, since, for example, gas stations or car repair shops or drugstores don't accept food stamps, so they're not exactly equivalent to money. But it still leaves a very wide scope for free choice; people on food stamps are purchasing food in a free market, even though their purchases are being subsidized by the government. They are able to choose what items they buy at the grocery store and thereby are sending price signals into the market about their preferences, just like everyone else.