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> Neither claim has foundation. I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on t

> Neither claim has foundation. I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount? > Freedom has many meanings. I made it clear which meaning I refer to, and it isn't the one you're using. And yours is very idiosyncratic. And mostly redundant with "market economy", except a market economy doesn't technically require people to be selfish.

chcknsammich 5y ago
> I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount? Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people. The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China. Markets coordinate capital for the betterment of people at large.
- anoncake 5y ago
  > Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people. Or possibly builds rockets and other vanity projects. Or bribes politicians. Whereas if that money was used to buy bread, it would definitely end up at a bread making company. > The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China. In a discussion about economics, the probability that someone will bring up the Eastern Block and ascribe all its ills to whatever happens to be the not orthodoxly capitalist position being discussed somehow even exceeds the probability of someone bringing up Hitler.
- notahacker 5y ago
  Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation. The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve to death under feudalism.
  - makomk 5y ago
    Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.) Suppose we take that $200 billion from Bezos, who only spends a tiny fraction of that on actual things for his personal use that use actual resources like land, materials, workers' time, etc, and instead try and spend all of it on stuff that uses those actual resources like food, healthcare, etc. The only way to do that is to find people who'll do the reverse trade - who'll take hundreds of billions of dollars they'd otherwise have spent on things made with actual resources that'd make their lives better, and instead buy shares of Amazon with them. This actual money that represents an actual claim on limited resources cannot come out of the pockets of Bezos or other billionares, because they don't have that much - it has to come out of ordinary people's pockets. Same with the shuttering of businesses during coronavirus; it's ordinary people who'll have to feel the consequences of all the goods not produced and services not provided, because they're the ones who consume them. The approach where people like Bezos become billionaires through coming up with ways to supply goods and services to people more efficiently doesn't have this problem, because it works by making the pie bigger for everyone rather than just trying to change the size of people's slices. And I'd personally trust Bezos to do this much more than all the people who seem ideologically opposed to the idea such a thing is even possible...
    - notahacker 5y ago
      > Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with no expectation of any return on it (or even a person of comparatively modest means who never has to look at the right hand side of a menu) and as such, diminishing returns to disposable wealth may exist. Clearly actually addressing this claim is a lot harder than demolishing straw men and accusing everyone that suggests that diminishing marginal returns to money are a thing of being a communist. Personally I'd trust people whose belief that markets are useful in generating wealth (again, not in dispute here) stops short of assuming that if people don't have money they probably don't need to survive as much as others need to conspicuously consume.

chcknsammich 5y ago

> I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount? Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people. The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China. Markets coordinate capital for the betterment of people at large.

anoncake 5y ago
> Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people. Or possibly builds rockets and other vanity projects. Or bribes politicians. Whereas if that money was used to buy bread, it would definitely end up at a bread making company. > The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve in Russia and China. In a discussion about economics, the probability that someone will bring up the Eastern Block and ascribe all its ills to whatever happens to be the not orthodoxly capitalist position being discussed somehow even exceeds the probability of someone bringing up Hitler.
notahacker 5y ago
Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation. The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve to death under feudalism.
- makomk 5y ago
  Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.) Suppose we take that $200 billion from Bezos, who only spends a tiny fraction of that on actual things for his personal use that use actual resources like land, materials, workers' time, etc, and instead try and spend all of it on stuff that uses those actual resources like food, healthcare, etc. The only way to do that is to find people who'll do the reverse trade - who'll take hundreds of billions of dollars they'd otherwise have spent on things made with actual resources that'd make their lives better, and instead buy shares of Amazon with them. This actual money that represents an actual claim on limited resources cannot come out of the pockets of Bezos or other billionares, because they don't have that much - it has to come out of ordinary people's pockets. Same with the shuttering of businesses during coronavirus; it's ordinary people who'll have to feel the consequences of all the goods not produced and services not provided, because they're the ones who consume them. The approach where people like Bezos become billionaires through coming up with ways to supply goods and services to people more efficiently doesn't have this problem, because it works by making the pie bigger for everyone rather than just trying to change the size of people's slices. And I'd personally trust Bezos to do this much more than all the people who seem ideologically opposed to the idea such a thing is even possible...
  - notahacker 5y ago
    > Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. Luckily, nobody in the discussion has claimed this. What they have claimed is that it is possible a hungry person who died of starvation may have needed an incremental dollar more than someone who spent $42 million of their incremental dollars on a project to build a clock with no expectation of any return on it (or even a person of comparatively modest means who never has to look at the right hand side of a menu) and as such, diminishing returns to disposable wealth may exist. Clearly actually addressing this claim is a lot harder than demolishing straw men and accusing everyone that suggests that diminishing marginal returns to money are a thing of being a communist. Personally I'd trust people whose belief that markets are useful in generating wealth (again, not in dispute here) stops short of assuming that if people don't have money they probably don't need to survive as much as others need to conspicuously consume.