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To: Perspective who wrote (25844)	10/9/2000 12:39:12 PM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 436258

bobcor - ...You'll notice I said that I generally have a laissez faire attitude. This is where most of the avid Libertarians will probably vomit. I believe there are certain things that the market fails to do well. For starters, the market ascribes an economic value to things based upon what they can be made into, but gives them no intrinsic value as a raw asset, whether fixed or renewable. For instance, the price of oil is determined largely by the cost to pump it from the ground and transport it to its destination. It has very little intrinsic value ascribed to it in the ground, only value from the perspective of its potential end products. ... Your problem is defective economics. One of the basic foundations of Libertarianism is the Austrian School of Economics, although not all Libertarians need to be interested in depth in economic theory. The primary foundation of the ASE is the Subjective Theory of Value, along with the Economic Law of Diminishing Subjective Marginal Utility. ( See Carl Menger, Principles of Economics 1871, Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, and Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy and State). There is no such thing as an intrinsic value for any economic good, including money. All economic values are subjective, and vary not only from one individual to another, but from instant to instant for every individual. As multiple units of a given good are acquired, every additional unit is assigned a successively lower value as less and less urgent needs are satisfied. The fact that the subjective marginal utility of a given good thus diminishes with accumulation, makes any idea of an absolute intrinsic value ridiculous even for a single individual, let alone among multiple individuals. Oil has ZERO intrinsic value in the ground, and its subjective value is derived from the aggregated subjective values of individuals of the final products in which it is used, as their manufacturers make economizing decisions about all of the raw materials and intermediate products used, and their associated costs to employ. The owners of the oil in the ground are free to ask any price they desire, maximizing their returns over time and availability variation, but they cannot make anyone pay their price. Regards, Don

To: Perspective who wrote (25844)	10/9/2000 2:00:21 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 436258

You left out questions like, what is the value of butterflies? What is the value of whales? What is the value of sage grouse? What is the value of snow geese? What is the value of Mallard ducks? There's no way to assign an economic value to these, so Libertarians don't care whether they survive or are destroyed, they only care about private property. The Libertarian answer to protection of things in the wild is that they should be made into private property. I wonder who will own butterflies and how they will protect them? This is the main reason I am no longer a member of the Libertarian party.