Sigh. I swear that sometimes these folks have no clue about how an economy actually works! Without rehashing Part 1 and Part 2, it is clear that the comments were much more interesting than the actual post over at Treehugger (although it did set the stage – see title above). Another comment that was left was this:
This is just another reason why money isn’t really a good fit for the world any more.
Certainly Well, that elicited a discussion about money (always “bad thing” with watermelon environmentalists) and scarcity and the same guy above dug down another few feet:
Actually, lack of food production is not an issue, but wasting food stock is. The amount of people not working that could be isn’t necessary, but money is why they aren’t working. Useless jobs, like bankers and loan companies won’t be needed, so those people could better serve society. Destructive technologies would be eliminated from the world be cause of them being destructive. Junk products would disappear from the world too. It is really interesting how different perspectives look completely different. Money is wasteful and destructive…if you look at my reasons for not needing it.
Sometimes, you just don’t know where to start. Useless jobs? If someone is willing to pay someone else, directly or indirectly, then by definition a job is not useless. This guy also has no idea what the role of using capital has in our economy and that making loans (and getting paid for them) is one way of reallocating that capital. Or in socialist terms, redistribution (albeit with vigorish taken out). I also have no idea what “destructive technologies” even really means – after all, look at what the Internet has done to the print media. Or cars did to buggy whip makers. To take that one more step further – which one is the “junk product” in those cases? And why would they just “disappear” – or who would make them disappear?
Another commenter made what I believe to be a fairly well written rebuttal to it (emphasis mine as above):
Food waste is still representative of scarcity. You can have all the food in the universe, but if it’s not taken to the people who need it before it rots, there is a scarcity of food. And taking food to people requires time, labour, and resources, which again are limited resources. Scarcity.
You seem to think that money is a tangible thing. It is not. It is literally just a token we use to represent our labour, time, and resources. If you ever see someone say, “we don’t have enough money to do that”, in your head replace it with, “we don’t have enough time, labour, and resources to divert from other work we are doing to do that”.
“But we could just get the people who aren’t working to do the things we don’t have time and labour to do.” That would be great, if those people knew exactly what needed to be done and how to do it. But they don’t, so it takes money (time, labour, and resources) to guide and oversee them.
And bankers and loan companies aren’t useless. They are in fact quite useful. But I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convince you of that…
And then the original commenter went off the rails:
The scarcity issue is that stores want to maximize profits and don’t want to give away anything that they could make a profit from.
And this is a bad thing? This is not “scarcity”, this is seeking an ROI on their inventory investment (or at worst, cutting their losses). I just shake my head because it is people like this that show they have not a clue how the macro level economy works. But for him, stores that wish to maximize that investment is a bad, bad, no-good, thing or action.
My response:
If there is no profit, then there cannot be further investment in new capital goods or inventory to sell. Selling purely “at cost of goods” means that you can’t pay for your overhead costs. Simply giving things away is like lighting $20 bills on fire and throwing them into the wood stove – you will run out of money. A store just can’t afford to give things away and stay in business. Not charging for profitable prices means you can’t even buy replacement stuff for your store or business.
RIck, one question for you – have you been in the business of signing the FRONT of a paycheck? Profit IS moral – without it, your employees would not have a paycheck for long.
Very few of these “green on the outside, red on the inside” really have a grasp that a profit MUST be made to keep the lights on, keep inventory coming in, and services out the door. If you cannot replace what you have sold, or replace what goes bad, you are not a going concern.
Capitalism IS a moral venture – what most socialists / communists don’t want to understand is that there is no profit when you are not pleasing and serving your customers. Profit is simply one measure of that voluntary servanthood. A healthy company must have profit in order to better serve. Sure, companies can do wrong and those are the ones that the command-and-control-of-other-peoples-stuff concentrate on exclusively on anything else.
How can serving others NOT be moral? And what is so wrong in getting paid for it?
(H/T: Treehugger)
