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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (5060)	11/7/2005 11:01:11 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541424

the normal operation of a capitalist market to seek efficancy. Unfettered capitalism leads to boom and bust cycles of increasing magnitude. Take for example, a mousetrap maker. Not trying to be your better mousetrap, but just a good mousetrap maker. You setup a factory, hire someone for the spring, someone for wood planks, and another for wirebending and bonding. You might need a few more for advertising, accounting, animal rights lawyer, and sales. The factory can make a million mouse traps a year, far more than all of the employees and their families can use in a lifetime. They make more than they use, but then they use a lot of other products. Does this make it even? No! Modern factories can make so much more product per employee that there just aren't enough products that people need to provide employment. How many products can you use in a year? 10,000 maybe? Anytime that efficiency is the only consideration there will be all the product that the whole world needs provided by a fraction of the population. Now what about the rest of the population? Either they get the products without a job, or they do without. It leads to a very unstable supply/demand cylce and a very unstable society. It's better to have some built in inefficiencies, The fairer, the better. These can be union rules, or regulation, or limits on monopoly size, or many other things. The point is, you can't just cut back on the population to fit the people with jobs, the factory overproduction demands a large market to keep the efficent production going. The only way it works is spread out the demand. Now this could be done with welfare, but that tends to run into all kinds of moral problems for both the workers and recipients of the welfare. Better to have more, but less efficient workers. There is a reason the 1950's were thought of a golden age, and it's not because it was the most efficient times. Walmart might seem to be a good idea, and it is for a few people, but for a society it is a recipe for disaster. TP