Tim, it doesn't necessarily make it efficient, just more efficient than the others. [You're funny......you always try to get in the last word]
Fine you get the last word on that point, rather than having us say "is not, is too is not..." If you consider this paragraph to be taking the last word then too bad but this specific sub point of the discussion has reached a dead end.
A true free market is 100% free. Our's is not 100%.
Free market defined that way is a useless term because no such economies exist or have ever existed. However your definition does not fit the normal definition of the term "free market".
However, sometime in the future, there may be an advanced system that can.
It would require that the managers have instant knowledge of any changes in the economy and I can't imagine how that would be possible except perhaps by having every economic transaction be instantly registered at a central information store, which would be difficult add a lot of cost and raise privacy concerns. Also the managers of the economy would have to have a level of brain power that excedes ours by about the same amount as ours exceeds a flatworm. Any development of human brains to that extent is in my opinion unlikely. If computer brains develop to that extent I think they would be our masters not our servants, esp. if we put them in charge of the economy.
Why do you read into what I am saying.........I never said replace our system with a socialist one but rather a better one that is more efficient.
There is no better one. There is a free market system, or government controls (in a small group the government can be a participatory democracy or maybe even government by consensus but that doesn't work for a country or the world and in any case is still control by what is effectively the government of that group). Both systems could be improved, and theoroetically government control could become more efficent then a free market system, but this is unlikely as it is harder to improve a government run command and control system, and almost any new technology or technique that goes in to improving a command and control system could also be used by the free market.
These are not always evil people who cut corners to make more profit....many are simply in need of more money because of bills or family problems and the like. With profit motivation, negative behavior is encouraged.......but not with all people, just the ones who tend to be weak.
Costs always have to be contained because our resources are never limitless. If someone tries to contain costs in dangerous ways then he is acting either foolishly or immorally. Both foolish and evil people will always be with us, as will people who occationally make a foolish or morally wrong choice, but are not normally foolish or evil. People will also need to contain costs in non market systems and history has shown that they are more likely to do so in dangerous ways.
I disagree.........very little went to consumer goods. And yes there was waste and corruption but the allocation was small as well.
The waste was massive. It was by many ways of measuring it larger then the actual production in many cases. Enormous quantities of grain would blow away from uncovered rail cars to because covering them wasn't part of the economic plan. Cotton was grown in areas so unsuitable to it that the needed irrigation caused massive ecological devastation and the resources put in to producing the cotton where less then the value of the cotton even if you ignore the cost of the environmental damage. Tractor repairs where done according to plans. If the repair facility met its quota it might refuse to fix tractors that needed to be fixed, if its quota was higher then the amount of tractors in the area that actually needed to be repaired then perfectly working tractors would be yanked off of farms so they could be "repaired" while broken tractors in other areas waited for months to be repaired. Whole factories produced goods that no one wanted and kept doing so year after year. A factory that made busses designed to be built on the same chassis as a truck could not buy the chassis because the plan called for the factory that built it to make and sell trucks. The bus factory had to obtain whole trucks and the cut the body off with saws and blow torches to get a chassis on which they built the bus body. The waste built in to the system
encouraged the corruption because the system wouldn't work right even if the people running it where honest. These are just a few examples of the stupidity of the system.
And we are talking about a nation that is richer than the US in natural resources.
Natural resources are a poor indicator of a countries wealth or well being. Free markets, property rights, the rule of law (rather then dictatorial fiat), a good or at least adequate education system, a culture that encourages entrepreneurial activity, these are the things that make a country rich. Many rich countries have very little in the way of natural resources but a lot in the way of human resources.
To a degree that's true but you put too much emphasis on the profit motivation. The primary emphasis is on survival.
You could (at least until the recent welfare reform and probably still if you know how to game the system) survive without holding a job in the US, let alone without starting businesses and running farms. Most people have far above minimal survival needs even most people on welfare. In any case if the desire for a wage of profits is motivated by the desire to have enough to survive then it is still a desire for a wage or profits.
My point was that there are more socialist trappings in the German and Japanese cultures and yet their products are better. How can that be if profit motivation is the primary driver of quality?
Easy the comapnies that make them profit from doing so and they profit more if they can make high quality cars that people want to pay a lot for. But actually profit motivation is the driver of meeting the demands of the market not specifically quality. American cars on the average are of lower quality but cost less. It might be argued that Korean cars of of still lower (but improving quality) and they cost still less. But all of the car companies from any of the countries hope to make a profit. They just sell in differnet niches (with a lot of overlap).
The Eastern Germans were subject to the same economic constraints, production deficiencies and inferior product designs as the rest of the Soviet bloc. Its no wonder their quality stunk but the truth is their products were better than the rest of the Soviet bloc, and their standard of living was higher. Not by a lot.......but still higher. How can that be?
I don't think they where ever among the most centralized and rigidly planned of the countries of the eastern bloc. Russia had not had a tradition of quality of a fairly free market even before the revolution. Germany did have a tradition of both, there where cultural differences and some left over capital and traditions from before East Germany became communist, and there was the example of West Germany. For that matter there is just normal variation, in a group of people, companies or countries facing pretty much the same incentives, some are going to do better then others.
Tim |
