| The inevitability of profit | |||
| Re: The Impossibility of Profit -- David Arthur Johnston | Post Reply | ![]() |
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Posted by: crossbowman 07/14/2008, 19:16:47 (About author)
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Two posters have promptly pointed out the flaw in your reasoning: it involves the assumption that the pie does not grow. Zero-sum reasoning. The alternative runs something like this: I work for an hour. You work for an hour. I produce one loaf of bread. You produce a tool that can let me make a loaf in half-an-hour. You charge five loaves for your new tool - valuing your work at five times mine. Shocking!! However, if I pay it, I can now produce bread in half the time. In the long run, I save more time than I spent. We both win. We both profit. If I insisted that our work was equal, and therefore forced you to sell for a single loaf, I would have your tool for as long as it lasted. You would have only one loaf, one meal for it, and you would have nothing else to offer me. I would profit, you would suffer. Now let's look at your utopian society. I produce one loaf of bread. You produce a tool - but so does John, and Fred, and George, 'cause making tools is just easier and more fun than making bread. I only need the one tool, and now I'm making bread twice as fast, but I'm feeding 4 times as many people because there's no method to persuade John or Fred or George to do anything but what they find fun. Except of course that we're all going hungry 'cause I can't make bread fast enough by myself to feed us all. And, frankly, why should I go hungry feeding people who aren't doing anything useful for me? So, abandoning socialist principals, I deal with George (who gives me the best rate for tools) and tell the rest of you to go get a real job - maybe make some bread, like me, or maybe make butter, something that makes me want to TRADE my bread with you instead of you just acting like you're entitled to the fruits of my hard work. And thus is reborn the trade economy. "Robbins’s claim fails because the Hobbs Act does not apply when the National Government is the intended beneficiary of the allegedly extortionate acts." WILKIE ET AL. v. ROBBINS. David H. Souter, Justice, U.S. Supreme Court
with John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy,
Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito concurring. |
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