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Buying that cheap T-shirt pays for your R&D through taxes and value produced. The item at hand is irrelevant. So long as it is consumable, in demand, and people
by confluence 14y ago
Buying that cheap T-shirt pays for your R&D through taxes and value produced. The item at hand is irrelevant. So long as it is consumable, in demand, and people are willing to pay for it - it will be supplied. The best you can do is tax negative externalities, and invest any market surplus via taxation into long term R&D.
All the crap that was produced post WWII paid for your cutting edge shuttle program. That shuttle program subsequently helped the research of all the crap that was subsequently produced.
It's a crap cycle. Embrace it. The cookie monster should be the cheerleader of capitalism - he eats, and eats and eats, but none of it ever goes down because he lacks the stomach to actually ingest any food - it all goes to waste - but he enjoys it anyway.
We need more cookie monsters.
- jonathanleane 14y agoHow many cookie monsters until we see diminishing returns?
- confluence 14y agoYou can never have enough cookies - the only upper limit is that of the second law of thermodynamics or the catastrophic end of civilisation. If people want cookies - it's cookies we'll make - because the markets one and sole purpose is to provide goods that people want, at prices they can afford, at the times they want it. The sole purpose of governments is to tax the negative externalities of said cookies (obesity/health etc.) and invest those market surpluses into the future safety and prosperity of said obese consumers through negative ROI R&D and scientific research that will allow us to make cookies taste like whatever we want on Mars. Both governments and markets exist to serve consumer demand. Everyone in the world is somebody's bitch. Ignore consumer demand at your own peril. The world runs on french fries - tax it for the health concerns, invest it into rockets that'll let people eat those self-same fries on Mars.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoActually, it was the cold war that led to all the cutting edge research. Call it consumption by governments to protect themselves from the bad soviets; crap redirected. Having a bogeyman to focus our attention from consumerism to nationalism was very useful in this regard (and is all to easily abused, of course). China should be today's bogeyman to get us to invest more in education. The cookie monster as a capitalistic symbol of consumption, I love it! I'm pretty sure this is not what the late Jim Henson had in mind, though.