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What if our fundamentals are exactly backwards?
New to The Motte, looking for constructive, critical discussion.
Here's an example of what I mean by a "fundamental":
Every economic system that has seemed credible to most people since the dawn of civilization has revolved around the legal establishment and safeguarding of property through the concept of ownership.
But what is ownership? I have my own ideas, but I asked ChatGPT and was surprised that it pretty much hit the nail on the head: the definitional characteristic of ownership is the legal right to deprive others.
This has been such a consistently universal view that very few people question it. Even fewer have thought through a cogent alternative. Most people go slack-jawed at the suggestion that an alternative is possible.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership:
Anyone want to brainstorm a viable alternative to "ownership"?
/images/17459352527399495.webp
I think the main problem is that sharing can be much more complicated. It's much easier to divide resources and manage them independently of each other, than to share their use, as interests often collide and conflict management is difficult. I would love to hear suggestions of viable alternatives to ownership. I have thought about this problem before in exactly the same manner. I think it might be easier to create more resources (even the resources currently thought to be "limited" like land) through technology and humanity's colonization of space than to solve the sharing problem.
It's "more complicated" if you unconsciously assume the perspective of an overlord responsible to make sure it works. If you're just one of the guys talking how you're going to divvy it up, naw -- not complicated at all. Plus, you're all in it together seeking the best outcome for everyone involved, so the entire proposition is radically different. I'd love to hear alternatives to principled preemptive deprivation, too.
Rationing doesn't solve the Economic Calculation Problem. Even with vastly better computers, the required informational inputs are missing to get a solution, and insofar as you add them, you end up recreating markets.
Solidarity isn't a magic wand you can wave over the issue of deciding how many ball bearings your economy requires.
No one here mentioned rationing.
You'd need to explain how the Economic Calculation Problem has any relevance in a situation where we'd adopted an alternative to preemptive principled deprivation for me to make sense of how it relates here. The Economic Calculation Problem is a systemic problem precisely because ownership is defined as preemptive principled deprivation, and it's only a problem to the degree that efficiency is the objective, which implies that scarcity is assumed. The relevance of efficiency in a system is inversely proportional to the presence of abundance, e.g., a billionaire burning a Benny just cuz they can. It's why American car manufacturers got away with such crude engineering that resulted in such atrocious gas mileage for such a long time: gas was cheap.
No one here has a magic wand, lol.
What could "If you're just one of the guys talking how you're going to divvy it up" possibly mean except rationing?
You quite literally are talking about some person divvying out ressources. That's what that is. You can call it something else if you want, that doesn't change the economics of the situation: that person has to make the ressource allocation, so they have to make an economic calculation, so they have to have some accurate metric of desire and feedback mechanism. Someone needs to decide what we're building here and how much of it people will want.
The ECP is not at all about efficiency. It's about the ability to have a functional industrial economy at all.
You're treating abundance as some magical font of wealth. This is demonstrably not how industrial economies work. There are many countries with abundant ressources that are poor today, because as Adam Smith demonstrated wealth does not come from having large ressources but from the economic activity that exploits them.
Why doesn't Sweden, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia or some other oil rich country have a booming car industry? Because there are far more inputs than fuel that go into the equation to make a complex good like a car. You need steel and labor, which means that you need energy for your steel mills and training for your workers, and so on.
All these activities are competing for the same pools of ressources, which means that you need some method to decide where those ressources go. Even if you had infinite quantities of steel, you wouldn't have infinite labor or infinite time. And if you don't solve the ECP in some way, you'll end up with no car because everyone wants to be a car salesman or CEO instead of a assembly line worker.
Abundance does not conjure wealth out of thin air. You need correct ressource allocation. Which Mises demonstrated is impossible at industrial scales without price signals.
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