Originally posted by: mwtgg
How can some of you people be for social freedoms, but not for the freedom of the market? It boggles my mind.
Because the freedom of the market
sometimes hides or mis-allocates true economic costs to society as a whole. For example, a logging company can get very rich cutting down all the trees in a forest. However, when erosion caused by the lack of those trees leads to the loss of vital nutrients and nothing can ever grow in that forest again, the public at large bears the cost of that, not the logging company.
If I build a coal-fired electrical plant, and put a tall smokestack on it, the sulphuric acid exhuast does not come down near my plant - but states or even countries away. Who should bear the cost of the economic damage that acid does? If it ruins a vast stretch of farm land, should I still be allowed to operate the electrical plant? Strict Ranyian theory says yes - but a more rigorous economic/social calculus says no, because you are not bearing the true cost of the plant into the profitability equations. You have managed to generate revenue, and shifted some or most of the cost onto someone else. Basically, that's considered stealing in most Sunday schools - or any moral system worth mentioning. And it's THAT that results in many with social conciousnesses to have reservations on sheer, unbridled capitalism - because the ONE way to consistently get rich is to make someone else bear the cost of something that benefits you.
These cries of "class envy" should really be cries of "education envy" of those screaming it the most. Rand was an author - not an accomplished economist, either applied or theoretical. In her perfect world, her coal-mining protagonists never destroyed huge tracts of farmland that would never be arable again, nor did her railroad-exec heroines ever run a mainline throught the center of someone else's town and destroy their property via "eminent domain". Because that just wouldn't be the perfect picture of unbridled capitalism that she so wanted to infuse on impressionable, uncritical minds. Hell, I read all of her works myself when I was younger, and loved them...until I started taking upper level business and econ courses, and realized how much of a simpleton she was. A simplistic author for simplistic people trying to look cool...too bad most people reading those pages didn't simply pick up a few good 200/300-level economic texts instead...
Future Shock