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Since we're doing walltexts. I started wanting to do just three lines, but it turned into paragraphs about net neutrality and shit
I enjoy these discussions though
 Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
I like how the most rational distribution of resources is a firm known while a healthy diet is a fuzzy concept to you, Renton. Both are fuzzy concepts, but you never allow yourself to admit the things you don't or can't know when you predict a free market future.
The capitalist mechanism isn't fuzzy. It's all just arithmetic and algebra. There is a capital cost for everything, sustainability of production of anything is dependent on costs not outpacing prices, and costs are affected by supply and demand of production, which is affected by a myriad of other factors like innovation and cost curves.
Capitalist distribution of resources isn't perfect, but it is the most consequential and with the most numbers of possibilities, which means the most capacity to solve problems. In the lecture I linked, Bryan Caplan puts it perfectly when he says when you ask economists how to solve a problem, they look for ways to get rich by solving the problem. If they can think of ways to get rich, then they don't worry about it, because capitalism is the known mechanism to do that. But when they can't figure out how to get rich by solving a problem (perhaps like fixing the ozone hole), they worry because capitalism may not solve that and it may require state intervention.
Plus, Capitalism becomes an umbrella for a whole lot of stuff when you say "has already gone a long way to solving starvation". And if you really dug into it, it would be only one factor and likely not the largest.
Bigger factors than capitalism? This guy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Some inventions could be said to not be motivated by capitalism, but engineering them and bringing them to market sustainably is. Even so, the vast majority of inventions are a product of capital incentives. The internet is a good example. Many like to say that non-capital incentives invented the internet, but I think that is mostly wrong and misses the history of the internet. First off, the invention was gathered through wealth created by the capitalist process and it would be hard to say that it wouldn't have been invented by private developers shortly after the military did regardless (timing on the invention was a technology thing, not a "the govt was working on it" thing). After this initial invention, however, the internet didn't do much. For years it sat around being something few people used. Technology kept advancing, yet the internet still sucked. It was only through the spark of something within the free market framework that it turned into a juggernaut that everybody needed. I don't understand this all too well, but it had something to do with Kazaa, Napster, and increase in demand for broadband in order to fuel mp3's through those sites.
Today, we would say the internet is going crazy. Growth and innovation is off the charts. In fact, traditional GDP measures are falling way short because they don't account for this sort of innovation. Costs of all sorts things in just a decade have fallen by factors of ten or more just because of the internet. This is the best example of the free market we've had to date. Granted, government has been hindering it a lot (any poker enthusiast knows that intimately). But outside of poker, municipalities have been crushing internet growth and the masses are trying to get the FCC to go even farther. On this net neutrality debate, most people think it's better for the government to step in and mandate access and speeds for all, but that is precisely the opposite of what would benefit us the most.
Government intervention at the municipal level has already crushed broadband expansion because of special interest voting blocs that have to do with unions, zoning, and some other factors. We can blame government intervention for why Google Fiber isn't already available everywhere. Now everybody wants the FCC to make things even worse than municipalities have by declaring the internet as common carrier, which will basically eliminate any incentive for companies trying to enter the market. Net neutrality will make speeds faster today and tomorrow, but five years from now, speeds would be faster if government just let the market work. The best possible thing for us is Comcast and Time Warner to really go ahead with a fast lane. There's no quicker way to get Google and Apple to drop 200bn on creating their own networks, which will either make Comcast raise speeds or die. Without a competitive process, twenty years from now, the internet will be similar to what it is today. But with a competitive process, today will look like the stone age
I like this parallel because you're to unregulated free markets what a believer is to the keto diet. Has all the answers, believes it's the best diet because he sees it's effects all over the place, really thinks its in everyone's best interest to adopt it and I'm just sitting here thinking I don't expect to be eating meat and cheese for 3 square meals a day.
In the lecture, Caplan says that every Marxist economists he's talked to even agrees that capitalism should be used for kidney markets.
Capitalism isn't so much an ideology as it's a way of describing economics. Even the most left-wing economists are far more capitalist than the general public. The kinds of disagreements economists have tend to not be about markets, but about how to use government intervention that already exists. I think the media has incorrectly given us the impression that anti-capitalism is something some economists think has merit. Even Keynes, who is considered by the public to be super pro-government, wasn't. He was quite right-wing. As far as I can tell, his pro-government bent was really just about using government to spur aggregate demand if there is a time when the private market doesn't. Outside of that, he was very pro-market
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