thank you, price 'gougers'

[tylerdurden]

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Most (all?) significant transactions involve more than two parties who have an interest in the transaction.

Occaisonally a third party is "society".

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I've never been involved in one of these. Where does "society" sign on the contracts?

Why does "society" care how much I pay for hot dogs?

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[Jdanz]

jesus, come on i explictly said that was the main moral principal, i'm not capable of coming up with a complete solution for how economics should work, but there is a legitamate question to be asked here, and neither you or I are going to succinctly and sufficently wrap it up here today.

[tylerdurden]

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jesus, come on i explictly said that was the main moral principal, i'm not capable of coming up with a complete solution for how economics should work, but there is a legitamate question to be asked here, and neither you or I are going to succinctly and sufficently wrap it up here today.

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It's very succinct - I determine what my property is worth to me, given the alternative uses.

I have ice cream cones. I like to consume them myself (or maybe I just like collecting them, it doesn't really matter), but I'm willing to part with them in exchage for 10 hot dogs. I find a guy that has a bunch of hot dogs, and he's willing to give me 10 hot dogs for an ice cream cone. He values the ice cream cone more than 10 hot dogs, and I value 10 hot dogs more than an ice cream cone. I'd prefer to get 15 hot dogs per ice cream cone, and he'd prefer to get 2 ice cream cones for 10 hot dogs, but we negotiate and eventually we agree on a trade.

Who could possibly object to this?

How can some third party justify forcing me to only offer my ice cream cones in exchange for 5 hot dogs? Can he go further and force me to actually conduct transactions at this rate, or can he only prevent me from making transactions at other rates? Can he prevent me from eating the ice cream cones myself?

Why is it any different if we substitute some shiny metal or fancy pieces of paper for either hot dogs or ice cream cones?

[Cancer Merchant]

Conclusion: Governmental forms in antiquity were insufficiently politically enlightened, thus they failed when attempting to introduce a command economy. Only when the middle-clas capitalist system emerged could society's productive energy be guided into a value driven, instead of profit driven, marketplace.

Or, sample size too small.

[andyfox]

Did the Greeks and Romans have oligopolies and corporations that were bigger than most other countries?

[Jdanz]

because it completely ignores how you got your ice cream cones, ignores how the other person got the hot dogs, doesn't account for any distributional issue of who gets what to start with, and simply people accoun differently for issues of life and death than simple wealth aggrandizment (rightly or wrongly).

[Jdanz]

in another thread you said that people own the rights of their labor (we'll call this human capital)

I can agree with this.

You further said that they own the rights to anything produced thusly (non-human capital). That statement does not logically follow. Therein lies our basic disagreement i believe.

[tylerdurden]

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because it completely ignores how you got your ice cream cones, ignores how the other person got the hot dogs, doesn't account for any distributional issue of who gets what to start with, and simply people accoun differently for issues of life and death than simple wealth aggrandizment (rightly or wrongly).

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Why does any of that matter? If I legitimately own the ice cream cones, why should I be restricted in how I use them or dispose of them?

[tylerdurden]

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in another thread you said that people own the rights of their labor (we'll call this human capital)

I can agree with this.

You further said that they own the rights to anything produced thusly (non-human capital). That statement does not logically follow. Therein lies our basic disagreement i believe.

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If I own the materials, and I own the labor, how can I NOT own the product of materials + labor???

[Jdanz]

because you don't own the materials.

edit: cause that's sort of a jackass answer and i'll explain my thinking a little further. Your idea implies that there is some sort of original ownership of materials, which is frankly pretty silly. There is an entire market system that relies on inertia as to who owns what, but the orignial distribution follows no principal of "justice" or even "natural law".

The concept of ownership is a pretty arbitrary one in the legal sense. Most economist define ownership as the ability to profit from a(n) item/resource/attribute/etc. Ability to exclude others from using your property enhances your economic ownership as you can now profit by renting/trading, however economic ownership is never clearly defined over ANY object, and is rather a combination of ability to enforce and societal norms.

The idea that today's (or any days) property structure is seen as/or will be seen as legitamate is ridiculous. We all inherit the world the way it was passed down to us, but that's just the way it is, it doesn't convey any legitamcy on that strucutre.

There have been countless instances throughout history of people making claims on property and ignoring other's claims on property. Insomuch as a system of property allocation doesn't seem adequate to a large enough segment of the populace, they'll simply ignore it (revolution).

The reason why a person owns the rights to their labor is that they actual control such rights, and can act or not act. The reason why they don't own property in the same manner is that they only control the use of that property so far as the rest of the world recognizes the legitamacy of that ownership. It cannot nor will not ever have anywhere near the validity of ownership of labor.

property rights over anything but a person's own labor are inherantly impossible to completely delinate (and by that i do mean ANY property other than an individual's labor).