Xero - you were promoting your website without permission. That tends to be frowned upon.
Deuce, in my comment I linked to three different websites...
- The Library of Economics and Liberty - What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, The Use of Knowledge in Society
- My blog - Pragmatarianism - The Dialectic of Unintended Consequences, The Opportunity Cost of Public Goods, Deontological Ethics vs Pragmatic Ethics
- The Coordination Problem blog - Team Keynes vs Team Hayek
...so I'm not sure if you're saying that I only need to ask permission to link to my website...or whether I need to ask permission to link to any website. Out of curiosity...have you ever shared a link on this forum? If so, who did you ask permission from?
The article is also stupid. What, some guy wrote an article a century and a half ago? Clearly it's gospel and can never be challenged, us stupid liberals just wont accept it.
Eh, actually, the prominent Keynesian/liberal economists that I know of all accept Bastiat's opportunity cost concept in that article. It forms the basis of our economic system. They agree that the invisible hand can, via "opportunity costs" and "partial knowledge", allocate resources more efficiently than planners can.
The disagreement is over the extent of
.... Liberals believe it's a big problem while libertarians believe that it only applies to national defense, the courts and the police.
In my comment on the liberal blog I was referring to liberals like you and anybody else who still erroneously believes that planners can allocate resources more efficiently than the invisible hand can.
Pragmatarianism has the same horrifying oversight that Communism has - failure to understand human nature completely.
Here are the possible scenarios on the individual level...
A. Somebody does not value any public goods. Why would they bother to directly allocate their taxes if they don't care about any public goods? It would be easier for them to just give their taxes to congress.
B. Somebody does value some public goods.
1. they do not observe any shortages of the public goods that they value....so they would just give their taxes to congress.
2. they observe shortages of the public goods that they value...so they would directly allocate their taxes in order to help try and address these shortages.
Where's the problem?
Here's the problem... You think that planners can efficiently allocate resources without taking people's true values into account. Do you know why this is impossible? It's impossible because your values are unique. Yes, the economy would do just fine if you never directly purchased another private good for the rest of your life. But each time you take a consumer's true values out of the economy the supply of available goods becomes more and more skewed. In other words...the allocation of public goods become more and more inefficient. This is why socialist experiments have always failed...and it's also why our "car" keeps ending up in the "ditch"...to steal Obama's favorite analogy.
It's just impossible for 538 people to adequately guess what all our values are. Compared to congress...you have a much better idea what my values are. Obviously I spend a decent amount of time (time=money) trying to promote a system that allows people to use their time/money to try and determine the supply of public goods. The only way we can effectively communicate our values is by putting our money/time where our mouths are. Which is why taxpayers should be allowed to directly allocate their individual taxes.
Society, as a whole, would be better off. But...I have no idea exactly how much better off we would be. All I know for certain is that it's good to have choices in life and pragmatarianism offers a new choice that's certainly worth some serious consideration.
