Follower Redistribution

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Comment on: valuation dilemmas

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Hi, how's it going? I have a blog too...but you're a much better writer than I am. My blog only has 10 followers... :(   Noah Smith's blog, on the other hand, has 660 followers. It's follower inequality...and I'm all about follower redistribution. You too?

Ok, the socialist calculation debate. I like the part where you've been reading quite a bit about it. Unfortunately, you haven't grasped it.

Shopping is the process by which consumers communicate their preferences and circumstances to producers. If producers were omniscient...then we wouldn't need to waste our time shopping. But producers are not omniscient. Nobody is omniscient. You had absolutely no idea that I was going to spend any amount of time on this product of yours.  Just like I have no idea how much time you're going to spend on this product of mine.

Maybe you'll simply delete my reply? Maybe it won't match your preferences like your blog entry matched my preferences?

You know who really matches my preferences? Bastiat. I really love that guy. He destroyed Keynes before Keynes was even born...

This means that the terraces of the Champ-de-Mars are ordered first to be built up and then to be torn down. The great Napoleon, it is said, thought he was doing philanthropic work when he had ditches dug and then filled in. He also said: "What difference does the result make? All we need is to see wealth spread among the laboring classes."

If your blog entry was the equivalent of a ditch being dug and then filled in over and over again...then I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have spent any of my limited time replying to it. I would have just assumed that you were insane.  Just like if some guy offered to dig up and replace my lawn each week.

The market works because you're not going to spend your money/time on nonsensical uses of society's limited resources.  Shopping is a vetting/vouching group effort.

Command economies fail because...

A. it's assumed that "life condition" surveys will provide enough information to ensure that society's limited resources are put to their most valuable uses.

B. it's assumed that incentives don't matter. Effort does not need to be tied to reward. The kids will make the same effort whether they are looking for Easter Eggs or poop.

Mises got consumer sovereignty (dollar voting) right...but he got prices wrong. It can't be about prices because if it was...then I'd have no idea how much of my time to spend replying to your blog entry. There's no price tag on your blog entry...yet here I am spending my time.

Every war since the 1920s was a consequence of Mises fetishizing prices. If he had made more effort to expand the relevance of consumer sovereignty...then he would have grasped that the only thing wrong with government is the visible hand.

Eliminating the visible hand would be as simple as allowing people to shop for themselves in the public sector. Their valuations would be far more truthful than any sort of cheap talk surveys...

As was noted in Chapter 3, expressions of malice and/or envy no less than expressions of altruism are cheaper in the voting booth than in the market. A German voter who in 1933 cast a ballot for Hitler was able to indulge his antisemitic sentiments at much less cost than she would have borne by organizing a pogrom. - Geoffrey Brennan, Loren Lomasky

When it comes to spending their own money...war is nonsensical to the vast majority of people. Unfortunately, wars will continue as long as people like you fail to understand the problem with a top down approach. So here I am. Gambling my own resources on a long shot.