Your argument assumes an economics of scarcity, where meeting everyone's need is an unsurmountable challenge that can only be met by eating away at the existing capital. This is not the 18th century. If the need someone requiring dinner tonight can be met without sacrificing a chicken expected to lay 100s of eggs in its remaining days, it breaks down.
If you're proposing that there are so many chickens now that the guy can have eggs for dinner, so we won't kill any chickens -- we'll just confiscate a few eggs from the chicken owners instead of whole chickens -- then you aren't talking about what PyramidHead was talking about. It wasn't having no social safety net that he called insane and uncompassionate, but
a market economy. But the market economy
is itself existing capital. It's a major component of the social machinery that brings 100s of eggs into existence. Sacrificing that capital is not an avoidable consequence of trying to implement PH's theory three centuries too early. It's not a bug to be fixed.
It's a feature. His whole point is that he's demanding that we sacrifice a piece of machinery expected to lay trillions of eggs in its remaining days.
In any event, your argument presupposes that "meeting everyone's need" is a fixed goalpost to be reached. That's not how it works. "Need" is a moving target -- consult any of the "living wage" threads for proof. Leftists are ideologically opposed to inequality (at least when it's their outgroups living better than their ingroups). They define a person to "need" something based on whether it offends their sensibilities to see him without it when someone else has it; the more the other has, the more it offends them. Check out the "Favorite Economic Charts" thread -- you'll see poster after poster putting up charts that show ordinary Americans' lives are getting better as if those charts proved America is broken,
because somebody else's life is getting better faster. Theirs is not a hunger for "meeting needs" that can ever be satiated.
Moreover, even if we could agree on an objective standard for "need", an economics of scarcity is an inevitability. Meeting everyone's actual need is an insurmountable challenge -- it cannot be met with 21st century technology, whether by eating away at the existing capital or by any other means, except maybe nuclear winter. The problem is that people get sick and die. And no matter what heroic means we put into giving a dying man some extra time on earth, we could always have been even more heroic, sacrificed even more of our other wants to his need, and given him a little longer. As long as there are sick people who could live longer there will always be unmet needs to be prioritized over other people's wants. Need is practically unlimited.
You're also pretending there's only two things that can happen with every widget produced, with every dollar earnt: if it doesn't go too meet the consumption needs (of the poorest), it goes to increasing productivity. This is obviously false - pointing out any inefficiency in capitalism is enough to make this point.
Huh? Where did I suggest anything of the sort? I didn't say the chicken farmer would use all his income to make more chickens. Maybe the chicken farmer is going to use some of his earnings to go on vacation. So what? The point is if he isn't going to be allowed to send the egg to the guy who has the money to pay for it, then he won't have a reason to raise the chicken in the first place.
No, Marx is pretty explicit that communism only becomes thinkable after capitalism has raised productivity to a level where he imagines this is no longer an issue. There is no level of productivity where this is no longer an issue. The "background of a society where capitalism has raised productivity to hitherto unimaginable levels" that Marx proposes to seize and build upon might go away when Marxists make people's reasons to achieve that background go away.
There is no reason to think it will, unless you base your reasoning on the false assumption of a dichotomy between immediate consumption and re-investment that translates directly to productivity gains at a societal level.
Where are you getting that? There are all sorts of reasons to think it will. For instance, there's the fact that productive enterprise doesn't just run itself without the participants having an incentive to keep it running. There's the fact that a productive economy isn't a steady state but an ever-changing environment, so to maintain production the components have to be continuously modified to adapt to new circumstances. There's the fact that the folks trying to make other people's reasons to achieve that background go away keep giving indications that they have no bloody clue whatsoever as to how current production methods work, and can reasonably be expected to act on that ignorance in the event that they are given the authority to make changes. And then of course there's the common experience of mankind as to what actually happened when societies shot their capitalists.
To the extent that there are inefficiencies inherent in capitalist economy, the share of consumption can be increased without eating away at maintaining and increasing productivity.
And this sort of thinking is called "dialectical materialism", is it? Assuming the way some theory models production is correct, that theory implies that somewhere in the solution space there exists a point of greater efficiency than the currently known optimum. Therefore if we abandon the optimization process that arrived at the currently known optimum, then "there is no reason to think" whatever new point we jump to won't be that theoretically existing point of greater efficiency? Please. You're expressing pure unadulterated
idealism. If you're a materialist,
exhibit a material mechanism that will cause the hitherto unimaginable level of productivity to continue to be maintained or increased after people's previous reasons for maintaining and increasing it go away. The "Have political commissars tell the workers to improve efficiency" method doesn't work. Judging by the engineers from the USSR I've worked with, what they mostly optimized for was covering their asses.
But patents are not intrinsic to capitalism -- they're just a little piece of mercantilism that got retained when the bulk of mercantilism was being flushed, because people figured pure capitalism would have some problems and retaining patents was a better way to alleviate one of those problems than any then-feasible alternative. Maybe there's a better alternative now. A patent is after all just an unconventional type of tax, so maybe invention should be financed with conventional taxes instead of government-enforced monopoly profits. Whatever. You're making a tail-wagging-the-dog argument. Patents just aren't an important enough aspect of capitalism to base an outlived-its-usefulness argument on.
Fair enough. I don't however see you or many other proponents of free market capitalism go around arguing that intellectual property should be done away with and product-ready research should be publicly funded.
Hey, no worries -- there's no reason you should have read every post I've ever made. But yes, I've argued on this forum that there's no such thing as intellectual property. It's an 18th-century French concept with no precedent in English Common Law. What there are are copyrights and patents, which each have their own independent statutory history. The original purpose of copyrights was press censorship; later they were adapted as a mechanism to enrich publishers, and used that way for a hundred years before anyone thought of enriching authors with them. "Letters patent" on the other hand were straight-up mercantilism, crown-granted monopolies unrelated to invention, intended to enrich the King.
The Constitution makes it clear that patents and copyrights are not
property in the U.S. -- they're "unilateral contracts", just like a lost-dog reward poster, between the federal government and inventors/authors. As the government offers firemen money, confiscated from the public, in exchange for putting out fires, it offers inventors and authors the public's common-law right-to-imitate, confiscated from the public, in exchange for inventing and writing books. Then the inventors and authors make a living by selling little bits of the public's confiscated right-to-imitate back to the public.
That's not a condemnation, just a realist description of what's going on. The point is,
product-ready research is already publicly funded. So whether that's done by the government taking away money and giving it to inventors, or by taking away something else and giving it to inventors, is a mere technical detail. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and I expect the optimal system is "some of each". Either way, this perspective makes it clear that patents are an inessential aspect of capitalism, that time limits on them are an essential aspect of their legality, that copyrights last far too long, and that Congress's repeated retroactive extension of copyright terms is unconstitutional. And that's not just me playing lawyer on the web -- John Paul Stevens said the same thing.
That's "Corn flakes are fine. What a waste to have thirty kinds of breakfast cereal." thinking.
Not at all. If one company does all the research to optimize the production of plain corn-flakes, while another does all it needs for sugar-coated corn-flakes and another for corn flakes coated in hazelnut crumbles, having each develop their product and the entire production pipeline from scratch is still a significant waste of resources.
Well, sure, if we assume that somebody in a position to make the call would have picked one development team up front, known in advance they would succeed, redeployed the other teams, promised the first team's results to the other producers, and persuaded the selected team to do their best work on the same aggressive schedule without either the hope of winning or the fear of losing to motivate them. Otherwise the resources weren't wasted; they were simply expended to get results other people value more than you do.
Competition is what causes multiple choices, and quality, and coverage of niche markets, and high probability of success, and all manner of good things.
Indeed, to a degree. I am not aware that I claimed otherwise. Though whether it is the only thing that can cause those things remains an open question.
See above. Exhibit a material mechanism that will cause those things without competition.
Redundancy is a small price to pay for those benefits.
That appears to be an empirical question the answer to which is situation dependent. Claiming that it will
always be a net positive sounds every bit as religious as denying that competition has beneficial effects.
I don't think I claimed it
always will. There are all manner of products for which we've decided competition isn't a net positive and chosen not to produce them competitively. The electric power grid is an obvious example. You're the one who said capitalism is "inherently wasteful from the collective perspective". That sounds like you making an
always claim, not me.
