Re: Remember the Housing "Bubble"?

In article <461bde49$0$961$8046368a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Bernard Peek wrote:
On 2007-04-05, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

There's a balance to be achieved. At one extreme you have a communist
system
where resources are distributed strictly on the basis of need. That
doesn't
provide any incentive for wealth creation, so productivity is low. So
there
are less total resources, but nobody starves.
I presume your "communist system" is a hypothetical one for whose actual
functioning you have no evidence. The actual systems called communist
resulted in large numbers of people starving--unlike the contemporary
systems called capitalist.
What if we exclude the people who were *deliberately* starved? That
might give us information about whether the problem is inability to
produce and distribute enough food, or if the problem is a murderous
government that happens to have chosen starvation as one of its methods.

That would be introducing an artificial distinction. The fact that you
don't
actually intend to kill someone is unlikely to be much consolation to the
survivors. I don't see that intentions have any relevance.

The results of the operation of a murderous government tell us nothing
about the ability of the system in that country to produce enough food.

Bernard's original comment was, I believe, about the advantage of
communism for distribution (see above) not production; he was conceding
its disadvantage for production. The fact that the government was able
to distribute the food in such a way that millions of people starved to
death--while simultaneously exporting food in substantial quantities--is
evidence that far from being an advantage of communism, the system of
distribution is a disadvantage.

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
.

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