Objective vs Subjective Economic Value

For many years men sought in vain for some objective standard of value, a "fair" price, a "just" wage, an unvarying measure of the intrinsic worth of an object or service. But no such measure exists, simply because "value" has no meaning other than in relation to living beings; the value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, not to any characteristic of an inanimate object.

The most commonly proposed answer to their quest was that the exchange value of a product is the amount of time put into the making of it. For instance, if a baker worked an hour to bake a loaf of bread, anyone else should be willing to give up an hour's work for that bread. But this scheme leaves the baker with no way to decide how much of his time to devote to baking bread rather than cakes or tarts. Thus this "objective value" idea always led to economic nonsense - and it continues to do so today. The Marxian definition of value is absurd: all the work you care to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, with zero value. Likewise, unskillful work can easily subtract value: an incompetent cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess with a value of zero.

Eventually it was deduced (by Carl Menger) that the exchange value of a product is simply whatever anyone else will give for it in a voluntary trade. In a voluntary trade, each participant evaluates, in terms of his own personal scale of values, what he gives up and compares this with what he receives. The ratio at which these items compare can then become the basis for a price - the only possible realistic price. In this way the personal choices of each individual participant, all balancing against each other, comprise the dynamic flow of commerce which we know as the free market. Menger showed that the free market is just free people making free choices about their own values. From this was derived the concept of the market as an information system, and the realization that the evaluations underlying economic choices are of a subjective nature which makes impossible any objective measurement of the motivations underlying them. The related phenomenon of "cost" is also inherently linked to choice. It is that which the choice-maker gives up when he selects one alternative rather than another. Cost consists of his own evaluation of the benefit that he anticipates having to forego as a result of his choice.

History

During the 16th through the 18th centuries, maritime trade with overseas markets was at once a major field of economic growth and an area intractably resistant to medieval principles of political control. The efforts of the emerging nation-states to control maritime commerce lacked the universal recognition necessary to confer legitimacy and were, on the contrary, competing, contradictory, and mutually self-defeating.

The political/economic situation in China was quite a bit different. The Imperial Examination determined entry into the bureaucracy and thus assured the continuation of a centralized elite, drawing into itself the best brains of each generation. The basic ideology of the mandarinate was opposed to the value-systems of the merchants. Capital accumulation in Chinese society could indeed occur, but the application of it to permanently productive industrial enterprises was strongly inhibited by the scholar-bureaucrats, as indeed was any other social action which might threaten their supremacy. It may not be a coincidence that modern Japan, which led in adapting Western institutions to its economy, grew out of a politically decentralized feudal society.

For the European governments, the timing was wrong; they came to power too late to prevent the rise of capitalism, and their only recourse for expressing statist values was a gradual, Fabian assertion of authority over the aspects of capitalism not too mercurial to elude their grasp.

The Corporate Enterprise

The two great authorities of the Middle Ages were the feudal aristocracy and the Church. Neither produced the relationships of trust and confidence needed for long-term economic association. To the medieval merchant, accustomed to keeping his wealth protected against the hazards of political extortion or war, a tie-up of capital for a period far beyond the range of foresight would have seemed insane. But gradually, appreciable numbers of these merchants (those who invested in corporations) came to believe that other businessmen (those who managed the corporations) were honest, diligent, and could be trusted. As this trust developed, many business transactions that had formerly occurred in separate ways in various distinct ventures came to be included in one conceptual unit, the corporate enterprise: the publicly-held corporation with marketable stock.

Such trust presupposes a widely shared sense of business ethics, and that sense of business ethics could hardly have been inherited from the teachings of the Catholic Church or from the feudal aristocracy. The contempt which the clergy and the aristocracy felt for the merchant class could only have encouraged the merchants to develop a code of honor based on punctilious business relationships - a behavior strikingly absent from the aristocratic code and emphasizing the profound difference between the two.

Political Power vs Economic Power

On the one hand lies economic power, exercised by means of a positive: by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value. On the other hand is political power, exercised by means of a negative: by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the government's tool is fear.

The power of a politician is the power to impose punishment on people who fail to obey his commands. To the extent that he can grant rewards, those rewards consist of expropriated wealth.

The power of a businessman is the power to grant rewards (in the form of produced wealth) to people who cooperate with him. His only power to punish is the power to withhold the rewards. The businessman must produce something consumers are willing to buy at a price that consumers are willing to pay, and he must compete for the favor of the consumers in a market with other businessmen offering similar goods or services. He must persuade consumers to buy his product, while the politician can coerce them into buying something whether they want it or not.

Under government there are winners and there are losers. Unlike the free market, for every beneficiary of government action there is a victim. The values of the winners are imposed upon the losers, and the losers are powerless to reject them. But in a free market, majorities and minorities can both win, because a free market is not a zero-sum institution. In a market it is possible for numerous large and powerful economic interests to coexist and prosper in the same economic territory.

If you believe that government should do this or that, enacting laws against drugs, pornography, homosexuality, etc., keep in mind that government acts through coercion or threat of coercion. If you want the government to tax other people for your pet project, you are in effect holding a sword over those people and forcing them to pay for the implementation of your ideas. You don't wield the sword yourself, but the government agent wields it on your behalf. Remember too, that it is a double-edged sword: if the government can coerce others in order to achieve your goals, it can also coerce you in order to promote someone else's goals. Any scheme to loot "the other fellow" can work only if there are enough productive people around for each to be somebody else's "other fellow."

There is so little clarity in either economic or political analysis because in the minds of most people the two are all muddled up together and when people speak of "power" they make no distinction between the power to coerce and the power to produce.

Underlying politics is human choice. Underlying economics are the facts of reality (you WILL starve if somebody doesn't produce food for you). Politics can never be a science, but economics must be. The attempt to fuse these two disparate realms together is an attempt to assert dominance over (economic) reality by one's (political) hopes, wishes, whims or fears.

For man to achieve a human state of life and civilization, three conditions are necessary: freedom, capitalism, and a rational code of ethical principles to guide his social behavior. To men who use reason and are free to interact cooperatively, nature gives more and more. To those who turn away from reason, are not free, or who interact destructively, it gives less and less.

With the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the first two of these conditions were achieved, to a considerable extent. The result was the transformation of the world. It was the people of the USA, with a government too small and weak to significantly inhibit economic activity, who implemented the principle of laissez-faire capitalism - of free trade in a free market - to the greatest extent. In America, prior to the 20th century, men's productive activities were predominantly left free of governmental restrictions. The result was the creation, in the brief period of a century and a half, of a standard of living unequaled by the sum total of mankind's development up to that time. Capitalism - and civilization - are declining because men failed to achieve the third condition necessary for a human state of existence: a rational code of ethics appropriate to man's nature. It is the principled foundation for such a code that Ayn Rand has provided.

Most people today have not learned to distinguish between government wealth transfers and wealth earned in a free market. This ignorance, coupled with Christianity's inherent aversion to commerce, induces people to feel envy when others become rich through market activity. The consequence of this envy is a clamor for increasing government intervention in the marketplace. But that intervention is always counterproductive, causing more problems than it was intended to solve. The line which divides the realm of wealth from the realm of poverty is roughly that which divides freely produced and marketed goods and services from government controlled activities. The solution to economic problems caused by government does not lie in devoting still more wealth to an institution inherently unfit to be a producer.

The bottom line is that, just as people can use a TV without understanding anything about how it works, America has become wealthy but Americans don't know why. And in their ignorance they are destroying the economic foundations that made their wealth possible.

Much of the rest of the world suffers from a related form of shortsightedness. The belief that the wealth of the West springs from its factory system gives rise to an impulse in the countries of the Third World to equip themselves with the trappings of modern technology - an impulse exemplified by the Soviet Union's five-year plans a half-century ago. The severely limited success of these ventures results from their lack of appropriate economic foundations. In the West, the development of commercial relationships preceded the rise of modern industrial institutions by many years. Western economies had been growing with striking success for more than a century before the large industrial corporations emerged. This growth, and its concomitant capital accumulation, were the foundation for the subsequent immense corporate enterprises.

Property

What is property?

The right to property

Why must we recognize property rights?

All action takes place on a piece of real estate and employs some physical object. In the absence of criteria for non-conflicting ownership and behavior, men could not know who owns what objects, or which actions are consistent with this ownership and with the rights of other people.

The question "Why should people respect the rights of others?" amounts to the questions: "Why should people respect the facts of reality?" or "Why should people be rational?" But these are circular questions which presume their own answer. The concept "why" is applicable only to that which is already rational.

Since I have chosen to be rational, the questions do not apply to me; the logical consequences of my choice are the determinators of my behavior.

Since the thief has chosen to be a thief, the questions do not apply to him; he is not amenable to reasons. And THAT'S why we need a suitable social institution!

It is sometimes claimed that "The reason we need property rights is that we do not live in the Garden of Eden, where everything is in infinite abundance. Rather, some things are by their nature scarce, which means that there can be conflicts between individuals over who gets to consume and control various scarce goods. Because of the possibility of such conflicts and the necessity of humans using physical goods to survive in the world, we must have a system of property rights that solve such conflicts by allocating specific scarce goods to specific individuals."

Much modern ethics implicitly assumes that a fusion of Christian Original Sin and Marxist zero-sum economics leads inevitably to inherent conflicts of interest and the need for sacrifice. A frequent result is the thesis (presented above) that scarcity is the basis of property rights. This fallacious view regards rights as a function of material conditions rather than as being inherent in human nature. There is no "reason" for "needing" property rights. Rights exist, they are not created. The proper subject for discussion is not a reason for needing them, it is the correct identification of them and the reasons why we must recognize them.

Philosophical underpinnings

David Kelley:
Property rights exist because man needs to support his life by the use of his reason. His primary task is to create values that satisfy human needs, rather than merely relying on what he finds in nature, as animals do. Therefore the essential basis of property rights lies in the necessity of creating values.

Life, Liberty, and Property. These three are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To allow a man his life, but to deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes life worth being lived. To allow him his liberty, but to take from him his property, is to deny him all that makes life able to be lived. Depriving a man of property is depriving him of the means by which he maintains his life. This is why the right to property is as important as the right to life.

See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the nature of rights. See reference

Ownership

There are two forms of control over property:

• Possession with ownership is the Prescriptive (Normative) form of control.
• Possession without ownership is the Descriptive (Positive) form.

Security of ownership is contingent on the recognition by my community that I am the rightful owner, a recognition that will be based on whatever are this community's institutionalized procedures for securing ownership. If the social institutions of my community are not founded on the principles expounded above by Mr. Kelley and Mr. Peikoff, then there will be, in effect, no ownership.

If I held the property by force only, that would be mere possession, not ownership. It is ownership only when I am able to remain in peaceful possession. Thus ownership is more than mere possession. It's possession which is protected by social institutions that implement property rights.

The multiple uses of property may be controlled separately by different people, contrary to Von Mises' definition that implicitly assumes ownership must involve controlling ALL the functions of a thing. Many manifestations of ownership consist of shared or delegated control. Nonetheless, that which is controlled IS owned property. Ownership can be vested in groups as well as in individuals.

It is sometimes claimed that the idea of self-ownership is vulnerable to the charge of circularity, because the concept of ownership presupposes a relationship between an owner and that which is owned.

But if I do not own myself, who does/can own me? I possess my self. This possession can be negated only by destroying me.

John Locke on Property

He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask, then, when did they begin to be his? When he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? And 'tis plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could.... And will any one say he had no right to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated, because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his? Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him....'tis the taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state nature leaves it in, which begins the property, without which the common is of no use."

Some questions about the Lockean thesis

What is necessary is to mix in enough labor to "remove it out of the state nature leaves it in." When I have done this, I will have made my property observably distinct from the unowned.

"If you take a boat out to sea and catch fish, the fish are properly yours, since you used your labor to get them, but mixing your labor with that part of the ocean does not make the ocean itself yours."

But it is not the ocean I have mixed my labor with - it is the fish. If I were to gather in some of the ocean water and run it thru a desalinizer (or in any other manner distinctly separate it from the unowned), then it would indeed be mine.

"If you go to a forest, the fruit you pluck is properly yours, but this does not give you title to the trees."

True enough, but it's not the trees I claim - only the fruit that I have picked. The trees are indeed mine if it was I who planted and nourished them. And again they are mine if I cut them down and process them into boards.

"The land under a building is not properly yours even though the building is."

If the land under my house is not mine, then whose is it? And by what right can he claim ownership if I cannot?

It's all right with me if I don't own the land that my house sits on - as long as no one else owns it either. Thus no one would have the right to deprive me of its use.

"What claim do you have to water that flows across your land? Or to the wind which blows over it?"

Although while they are on/above your land you may have a rightful claim to them, and what you take out belongs to you, just like taking salt out of the sea or fish out of a river, you surely have no right to sully the water or wind which flow OFF your land and onto someone else's land. What flows beyond your land becomes the property of someone else. You would be dumping your junk onto your neighbor's property. You have no right to stink up your neighbor's home by burning trash in your backyard.

"The stuff you take out of the land is yours, but not the space the stuff was located in."

If I dig a gravel pit, the gravel I manufacture is my property. I do not make any claim to the resulting empty space (the hole), unless I put some manufactured object into it. But if the space be not mine, then whose is it?

"If you farm a plot of land, how much, if any, of that land is your property?"

Surely the crop I harvest is mine. But since I have mixed my labor with the top several inches of the land, is not that top layer my property?

"How far down shall this owned layer descend? As far as the reach of the plow? As far as the dampness of the irrigation? As far as the penetration of the roots? And what of the space above the farm? Do you own any of it, and if so, how far up?"

The notion that laboring on the land gives one ownership of the land itself does seem flawed. Would it perhaps be more acceptable to assert that laboring in a certain location gives one ownership of the SPACE associated with that location? If a man transforms raw land into a farm should he not then be entitled to the space occupied by the farm? I am not sure that this idea of "space" (by which I mean "liebensraum") is a valid distinction from the land itself. My concern is not with the land itself but rather with the notion of liebensraum - a place to go, a space to be, a location to live in, play in, work in.

Intellectual Property - Information as Property

Pournelle identifies a critically important fact: the problem of information as property cannot be solved "out of context," that is, outside the general context of the social institutions that shape our culture. Before such problems can be fully solved, society must be restructured away from institutions of government and toward ethically rational social institutions.

You will frequently hear the claim that intangibles such as ideas are the exact opposite of a scarce good: one person may learn of and use another's idea without diminishing his possession and use of the idea. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

But if the idea can be used without the owner's consent, that does in fact diminish his ownership of the idea. Ownership means "exclusive control over the use of the thing." A consequence of this loss of control is that if the idea has potential economic value (such as Tom's serpentine walls) then the loss of control over that idea will deprive Tom of some of his potential income.

Unless the owner's exclusive control over the use of his property is ensured, the right of ownership can be, and surely will be, violated.

We must keep in mind that property rights protect the security of one's control over his property, not its value, since value is dependent on what others are willing to pay for it. For example, your house may be more valuable on the market if your neighbor has a nice flower garden, but you do not have a right to this value, and your neighbor has every right to dig up his garden even if it reduces the value of your property.

Some false arguments

Property has traditionally been something that can be transferred from place to place or person to person. Theft could thus be defined as depriving the owner of the use thereof. But in an electronic environment, although a piece of software or a component of a data base may be valuable, the intruder who accesses it without authorization is not depriving the owner of its use, although he may well be making the product less valuable to its owner.

Knowledge is the only product that is not subject to diminishing returns. You can give software away over and over again, and you still have it. This loaves-and-fishes quality of information has no place among the parables of traditional capitalism. Our culture's economic system gets its axioms from the idea of property, but whereas property is by nature scarce, information has no inherent scarcity, consequently traditional economic ideas do not adequately encompass the phenomenon of "information as property."

Contrary to the proverbial wisdom, in a digital universe you can eat your cake and have it, too. You can keep your original but still digest it on your own terms: alter it, reformat it, transform its components, and, at the end of this process, the original can be summoned back with a keystroke. And because digital code is replicable without material cost, you can also give your cake away.

Printed books created the modern idea of intellectual property because they were fixed in form and difficult to replicate. One could therefore sell and own them, and the livelihoods of printer and author could be sustained. This copyright structure collapses when we introduce the changeable digital signal. We will have to invent another scaffolding to fit the new literacy. When books, in electronic form, cost a fraction of a dollar to reproduce but are priced as high as small appliances, be assured that a change is not too far in the future. Publishers, film companies and broadcasters will have to find new ways to cope with a distinctly different environment from the one that existed in the past. How are those publishers who recognize that their commodity is information, not sheets of paper, to make money? Traditional publishers have been involved in printing for so long that they have forgotten that they are a branch of the information and entertainment industries, and not the wood pulp and paper industry.

One suggested alternative:
The seller puts her titles on a disk in encrypted form, locking each title with a separate RSA key. She duplicates these disks in small batches, changing the keys after each batch, then sells the disks at retail. The customer decides, from the promos on each disk, which titles he wants. Over the phone, the customer can provide the job lot number, the titles desired, and his credit card number. The seller then gives him the appropriate decryption key.

In considering such schemes, keep in mind that most people pirate for one of two reasons: a large cost difference or a large convenience difference. Therefore it's not enough for the legal copy to be reasonably priced, it must also be convenient.

Digital information

Computer programs, like living organisms, evolve. So do ideas. They can do so most readily, however, only in the peculiar ecosystem of electronic technology where human designers and users, coupled with computers, provide the environment essential to breeding, modification and reproduction.

Thomas Jefferson's response to a charge of plagiarism: "My goal is not to be original, but to be comprehensive and accurate."

Ben Franklin, commenting on a preacher who had been accused of stealing sermons: "I stuck by him, however, as I rather approv'd his giving us good sermons compos'd by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture, tho' the latter was the practice of our common teachers."

Bibliography

Capitalism

I had also been thinking about the fundamental nature of rationality, and I observed that there is a connection between wealth-creation and rationality: before you can create material wealth you must know and understand at least something about reality. I realized that rationality and wealth-creation are two correlative aspects of human behavior. Rationality is the means by which man uses his mind to know and understand reality. Wealth-creation is the means by which man manipulates reality to fulfill the physical requirements of his existence. Rationality and wealth-creation go hand-in-hand and both are fundamental requirements of man's life.

One of the distinctive differences between man and the other animals is his much greater ability to conduct his behavior with reference to time periods of substantial length. From this observation there arises a useful, if not precisely specifiable, distinction to be made between two general categories of wealth-creation - a distinction which ensues from man's ability to act through time: is the wealth to be consumed immediately, or is it to be used later on to produce more wealth? If it is to be used later on, as a tool for the creation of more wealth, then it can be called "capital" and the process can be called "capitalism." Thus I will use the term to mean: "The process of using wealth not for immediate consumption but for the creation of more wealth." Conducting wealth-producing activities deliberately through time is the essence of capitalism. If you save your wealth and use it to create more wealth, you are doing capitalism. If you merely consume the wealth you are not doing capitalism.

Observe that capitalism is not a Boolean phenomenon. All human cultures practice at least a tiny bit of capitalism - even if it's only the manufacture of stone knives and arrowheads. The economic development of a culture depends on the extent to which this practice is implemented. A society can have more or less of it. The more it has (i.e., the more that wealth is accumulated through time) the more the society will prosper. Capitalism can be as small as flaking one flint knifeblade. Or it can be as huge as General Motors and IBM.

Observe also that this definition is politically neutral. It doesn't matter WHO does capitalism - nor WHY they do it. It only matters that the act is performed. Capitalism is an economic tool, like a hammer. Anyone can use a hammer: a Libertarian, a Fascist, a Communist. From a strictly economic point of view, in considering only the production of wealth, the political philosophy of the person who uses the hammer doesn't matter. All that matters economically is how efficiently he uses the hammer. If he uses it well, wealth will be created; if he uses it inefficiently, less (or no) wealth will be produced. Thus the term "State Capitalism" actually makes sense: a government CAN implement the procedures of capitalism. This will help explain why such dismal systems as the Soviet Union do not collapse outright, and why a mixed economy like the USA can muddle along for quite a while.

You can see now why I must disagree with Rand. She always equated capitalism with the political system of her preference, but to do so deprives us of a valuable concept that can be applied to economic behavior regardless of the political context in which that behavior occurs. It also deprives us of a valuable cognitive distinction: that between economics and politics.

The phenomenon Rand spoke of should properly be called "laissez-faire capitalism." That is, capitalism practiced in the context of a more-or-less free market. Although this is certainly the most efficient social context for the practice of capitalism, it is not the only political context in which capitalism can be implemented.

Wealth

That wealth consists merely of possessing money is a popular misconception which arises from the primary function of money: as the measure of value. But real wealth consists in what is produced and consumed: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in. Yet so powerful is the verbal ambiguity that confuses money with wealth, that even those who at times recognize the confusion will slide back into it in the course of their reasoning and erroneously equate being rich with being wealthy.

A result of this error is that each man sees that if he personally had more money he could buy more things, and thus if he had twice as much money he could buy twice as many things; he would be "worth" twice as much. And to many the conclusion seems obvious that if the government merely issued more money and distributed it to everybody, we should all be that much more wealthy. What they do not see is that such a course of action would merely destroy commerce.

The Need For Money

One of the most significant factors in the failure of a national economy to develop, and also a major contributor to the decline of an economy, is the lack of a medium for the measured exchange of wealth.

Even if people are permitted to freely produce wealth, there can be very little rise in the general standard of living if they cannot exchange that wealth in any transactions more sophisticated than simple barter. To do so, they must have available a secure means of measuring the relative value (relative to each other individual's personal goals) of their products. This is the function of money.

There are fundamental reasons why gold and silver were the first money media. Nevertheless, every time a government seizes control of money, the media are changed and eventually the money's value is destroyed. In almost all nations today, money is based on the empty promise of a government rather than on the firm foundation of a known and durable commodity (such as gold or silver). And throughout the world today, inflation is everywhere destroying the possibility of long-term investments in wealth-generating commerce.

For a magnificent description of the function of money, see "The Root Of All Evil" speech in ATLAS SHRUGGED, Part 2, Chapter 2.

The Evolution of Money and the Nature of inflation

If you were to find yourself alone on an isolated island, you would have no need for a medium of exchange. There would be no one with whom to exchange.

You would go to work, as necessary, to produce the things you needed for your survival. You would produce some things that you would want to consume immediately, and you would probably produce other things to be stored for later consumption.

You might also produce some other things that would be called "capital goods" - things that make further production easier. But you would only produce when you believed it would lead ultimately to something you wanted.

Let's suppose now that there was one other person on the island with you. Each of you has his own area of the island and each of you is producing for himself.

Sooner or later, you would probably begin exchanging things with each other. Perhaps you have produced more than you need of something he hasn't produced, and vice versa. You exchange your surplus with each other - and both of you profit thereby.

Obviously, you won't trade your production for something you have no use for. Why bother working if your efforts don't eventually bring you something you can use? You'll trade only for those things you want to use now or can store for use at a later date.

And here we have a very important rule at work: You only produce and exchange when you believe it will lead ultimately to something you want.

But now let's suppose there are 100 people on the island - each with his own area. You will still have to produce to survive; there's no way to avoid that. But exchanges will probably take place on a much wider basis. In fact, it will be only a matter of time until a "specialization of labor" develops. That's where an individual no longer produces everything for himself. Instead, he concentrates on the production of only one or two items - and then trades his production with others for the products and services he wants.

These trades with others are called direct exchange - the trading of some of your property for another commodity you intend to use yourself. This is also called barter - trading without money.

But, eventually, you find yourself in a position where you're willing to accept in exchange an item you don't intend to use.

Suppose you have butter and you're looking for wheat. I have wheat, but I'm not looking for butter. Instead, I need corn. So you go find a third person who has corn and is looking for butter. You trade your butter for his corn. Then you come back to me and trade the corn for my wheat.

You have what you want; but it took two exchanges to get it.

This is the beginning of indirect exchange - the trading of one thing for something you don't intend to use yourself.

For example, one day Jones the nail-maker walks into the store of Smith the furniture-maker. Jones opens the conversation with, "Smith, I need a new workbench. I'll give you 2000 nails to make one for me."

"Sorry," says Smith, "I have all the nails I'll need for a while. Come back in about six months."

Jones goes on, "But I need the workbench now! Look, you're bound to use those nails eventually. But, even in the meantime, you can probably trade them to someone else for something you need. I'm always getting offers of trades from people wanting nails. They're a lot easier to exchange than furniture."

"You have a point there, I do seem to have a lot of trouble exchanging kingsize beds for clothes. This way, I'd use only as many nails as I need for each purchase... well, okay - I'll try anything once."

So he accepts the nails and makes the workbench for Jones. And then he goes out to find products for which he can exchange the nails.

And, lo and behold, it works! He finds that trades are much easier to make. As a result, he enjoys life a lot more with a few nails in his pocket. He can stop at a store and trade for anything he wants to - without having to arrange an elaborate, long-term furniture purchase with the storekeeper.

In fact, he merely points out to the merchant the advantages of nails as a trading medium in the same way that Jones pointed them out to him. And the final argument is that you can always use the nails sometime in the future; they won't lose their value. And if you don't use them, someone will.

The merchant realizes this; and so he accepts the nails, confident that he can use them or trade them for what he wants.

So nails have become money. And what is money?

Money is a commodity that is accepted in exchange by an individual who intends to trade it for something else.

Money is a commodity, just like anything else that's traded in the marketplace. What distinguishes a money commodity from other commodities is the intention of the person to keep it only until he trades it to someone else. It's only a means to a further exchange for that person.

Not everyone intends to trade it, however. Some people receive the money commodity, intending to use it for its own natural purpose (in this case, nails for construction purposes).

And this brings us to the key word in the definition of money: accepted. The commodity can become money only when an individual accepts it - when someone's willing to take it, confident that he can trade it ultimately for what he wants.

But why gold and silver?

There are five main attributes of gold and silver that give individuals good reason to accept these commodities confidently:

• 1. They are durable. They can be stored for long periods of time, if necessary, without perishing.
• 2. They are easily divisible. As we saw, it was easier to exchange nails than furniture because you could divide a supply of nails into small purchases. And gold and silver can be broken into smaller pieces or used as dust - without harming their inherent value in any way.
• 3. They are convenient to handle. Their naturally high market values make it possible to work with small quantities. Wood wouldn't do - because you would need so much of it to be worth a desired item that it would be inconvenient to carry and exchange.
• 4. They are consistent in quality. One ounce of gold is as good as any other ounce of the same fineness.
• 5. They have accepted value. They are used for such things as jewelry, dental work, electronics, art objects, ornamentation. soldering, photography, and other purposes. That previously determined value also tells you how much gold and silver are worth in relationship to other commodities. If the money commodity didn't have that separate value, you couldn't confidently accept it in trade for what you have produced, for you wouldn't know the worth of what you received.

Another ambitious chap opens a warehouse. "Bring your gold to me," he says. "I'll store it for you in my theft-proof vault. I'll give you a receipt for it, so you can claim it any time you want it. I only charge a small fee for the service of storing it for you." This means you can now keep your gold in a safe warehouse - rather than carrying it around or leaving it at home where it could be stolen.

And as the use of the warehouse beomes more widespread, and the integrity of the warehouseman becomes known, the receipts can serve an additional purpose. You can exchange the receipts themselves. Why bother going to the warehouse to get your gold, only to trade it to someone who will probably take it back to the same warehouse for safekeeping? Instead, you simply hand over the receipt to him.

At this important stage in the evolution of the money system, we must remind ourselves of an important point: It is the gold that is the money; the paper receipts are not money! Gold is money because it's a commodity with accepted value and is convenient to use in exchange. Paper could NOT be useful as money because the relative ease with which it is produced makes it inexpensive by nature; you'd have to use tons of it to obtain the same result served by a few ounces of gold. The paper takes on value only as it can be exchanged for gold. If the warehouse were to refuse to make the gold available, the receipt would eventually be worthless. It's similar to storing furniture. You can't sit on a furniture receipt; you can only exchange it for something to sit on. The paper receipts are not money; they are money substitutes.

Along with the normal paper receipts, it is possible to have tokens. A token is a money substitute in metallic form, rather than in paper. The present U.S. copper-nickel tokens are a good example. These are not coins, since there is no significant inherent value in them (perhaps two cents worth of metal in a quarter). Like paper receipts, they can only have lasting, constant value if they can be readily exhanged for something of real value.

Suppose you left your gold on deposit at the bank (warehouse) and received a receipt that you intended to spend in the marketplace. And suppose the dishonest banker issued a second receipt for the same gold to someone else. Two people are now trying to spend the same gold at the same time. You now have inflation - two receipts for the same supply of gold. One consequence of this would be the well-known "run on the bank." As soon as anyone became suspicious that the banker was doing this, he'd get jittery about his own money. If very many people became suspicious, you'd have a run on the bank. And those who arrived there last would be out of luck - if the bank really were cheating on the receipts. If it weren't, everyone would get his gold and the bank's honesty would be proven. This would probably result in increased business for the bank. An honest bank would not have to fear a run. So let's coin another definition of inflation, one more to the point: Inflation is the counterfeiting of money substitutes.

Suppose you and I form a partnership, a company that prints paper receipts. We print 1000 new $20 bills. Then we go to Seattle where we are not known to anyone. We start spending the bills and are immediately praised by the local merchants and the newspapers. They proclaim that it is a great thing for Seattle that we have come to town, for we're bringing prosperity to a city that was in a recession. Two weeks later, we leave town with $20000 worth of goods. The townspeople bid us a grateful farewell for all the business we have brought to them, It's obvious the WE have benefited from the situation. We traded paper dollars with NO real value for products that HAVE real value. Assuming that no one ever learns our little secret, has our gain actually hurt anyone else? In other words, does anyone ever pay for our benefits? The merchants who received the counterfeit bills did not lose. They could pass the bills on to others for things they wanted. We gained; the merchants didn't lose. Apparently no one lost. But we've overlooked a few people. Not just a few, in fact. We've overlooked everyone else in Seattle. For everyone else will lose in order to make this gain possible. We can see this easily as we imagine our car leaving Seattle - loaded with goods removed from Seattle's marketplace. We leave Seattle's residents with less property than they had before we came. There will be fewer goods available to divide up among the people there. In exchange, they received additional money substitutes that will circulate in the community. But money substitutes are not wealth. This simply means there are now MORE money substitutes to pay for FEWER goods and services. Since the money supply has gone up and the goods and services have decreased, the result can only be higher prices in Seattle. The price increase will be irregular. Those who get their hands on the counterfeit money first will gain from it; for they'll have extra spending money, and prices will not have gone up yet. But as those extra money substitutes pass through the community, they will bid prices upward. The other people in the marketplace will be paying for our gain - and they will do that through the higher prices they pay for each product.

Suppose our arrival and departure were not noticed. In other words, no one was aware that an extra $20000 was suddenly coming into circulation. The individual merchants who received our $20 bills would have no reason to suppose that there was anything unusual or temporary about the increase in business. They would simply suppose that their long-standing promotional efforts were finally paying off - that success was on its way at last. They would most likely hire extra clerks to handle the increased business, maybe order a new sign and a better paint job for the store. And they would enlarge their inventories to meet the increased demand, of which we appeared to be an example. But as soon as it became evident that the sudden dose of new business was purely temporary, they would have to retract their expansion plans. They would lay off the extra clerks and cancel the orders for remodeling. The painter who was to have done the remodeling would, in turn, have to fire his new helpers. And what would he do with all the extra paint he had ordered? The net result throughout the area would be a state of gloom. Everyone would have extra commitments to pay off and shelves full of undesired stock - all because an illusory boom caused businessmen to gear up to a demand that never really existed. Would you call that a recession? Yes, indeed.

Inflation is an increase in money substitutes above the stock of real money in storage; the counterfeiting of paper money. Inflation simply means there are more paper money receipts in circulation than there is real money with which to back them up. As we've seen, this will cause prices to go up. But rising prices are not inflation; they are an effect of inflation.

The Effects of Inflation

Like every other tax, inflation acts to strongly influence the business policies we all must follow. But unlike specific and knowable taxes, inflation cannot be compensated for because it cannot be quantitatively specified in advance. It discourages prudence and thrift. It encourages squandering, gambling, and reckless waste of all kinds. It often makes it more profitable to speculate than to produce. It tears apart the whole fabric of stable economic relationships. Its inexcusable injustices drive men toward desperate remedies, leading them to demand totalitarian controls, thus planting the seeds of fascism and communism. It ends invariably in bitter disillusion and collapse. Between 1963 and 1973, of 40 countries whose inflation rate reached 15%, 38 abolished their democratic institutions in one way or another.

At first glance, you might think that inflation affects only the money supply, but the more you look at it the more convinced you will become that it is all-pervasive in its pernicious effects. In 1985, parents spent 40% less time with their children than they had spent in 1965. This is an excellent example of the insidious side-effects of inflation. Government inflation of the money supply confiscates the nation's wealth; thus working people are forced to spend more time earning money in order to maintain their standard of living. This of course leaves them with less time to spend with their children. I become more and more sympathetic with that majority of Germans who, when surveyed as to which was worse - WorldWar1 or the subsequent runaway inflation - replied, "the inflation was much worse than the war!"

Money substitutes are certificates of debt against the true wealth of an economy. As those substitutes decline in value, foreign holders of the paper may begin to unload it in exchange for other kinds of paper, thus starting an avalanche of similar domestic unloading in which a national debt (intended to be a legacy bequeathed to your children and grandchildren) would have to be paid NOW - or repudiated. In either case, the dollar would become worthless.

The politicians have seized the wealth of the nation, and given the nation back a mortgage on itself. This seizure is not merely the theft of wealth, it is the theft of your children's opportunity, of their future, of their hope.

If your next-door neighbor told you he was kiting checks drafted on your personal account, you think maybe you might get upset about it?

As Mises observed, the transition from Money to Wallpaper has five steps:

• 1. The paper is exchangeable for a specified amount of Au or Ag
• 2. The paper is exchangeable for N dollars in Au or Ag
• 3. The paper is N dollars - exchangeable for a specified number of another nation's bills.
• 4 . The paper is N dollars - exchangeable at the open market rate (whatever you can sucker some poor fool into trading for it).
• 5. Katastrophenbausse.

Hungary's 1946 inflation rate was so bad there aren't any words to describe it: 4.6 x 10 to the 30th power.

Foundations

As an example, here is a selection from a recent debate between two economists:

"Miron of Boston University points out that the behavior of indicators other than GNP appears to support Romer's position. 'Gordon has only done GNP,' he says. 'Christie's case is on firmer, broader ground.' Although Gordon denies the charge, Miron argues that a significant part of Gordon's newfound volatility in the old numbers comes not from including transportation and construction but from his choice of a particular price index to convert nominal dollar figures to 'real' GNP. The index in question was intended to convert consumer prices from current to constant terms, but Gordon uses it to adjust commodity prices instead. According to Gordon's published data, the choice of index could account for almost half of the difference between his figures and Romer's. There is no clear consensus on who is right. And regardless of who carries the current debate, the old mainstream dogma of a stabilized modern economy is in trouble. Although Romer and Gordon differ, says J. Bradford De Long of Harvard University, their views are much closer to each other's than either one is to the view of the past that economists treasured as recently as five years ago."

Such nonsensical antics would be laughably ridiculous except for the harrowing fact that politicians distill their policies from the proposals of these economists, whilst the economists are distilling their proposals from fantasy. As Herman Daly, a senior economist with the World Bank, eloquently observed: "My major concern about my profession today is that our disciplinary preference for logically beautiful results over factually grounded policies has reached such fanatical proportions that we economists have become dangerous to the earth and its inhabitants."

If one insists on analyzing an imaginary problem which has no real-world equivalent, it may be appropriate to use an analytical model which has no real-world application. By the same token, if a model is designed to deal with real-world situations, it may not be able to handle purely imaginary problems. In either case, a solution is meaningless. But these "meaningless" solutions do indeed have real-world consequences when they are implemented through political coercion. A thief who presumed to justify his theft by saying that he was really helping his victims by his spending, thus giving retail trade a needed boost, would be slapped down without delay. But when this same idiocy is clothed in Keynesian mathematical equations and impressive references to the "multiplier effect," it carries far more conviction with a public that has been bamboozled into accepting the "mystique" that conventional economics is a valid tool of analysis.

In the 1989 edition of his famous textbook, ECONOMICS, Samuelson described the Soviet Union as being proof that, contrary to what many skeptics believe, a socialist economy can function and even thrive. Statements such as this show a contempt for truth that would turn Paul Goebbels green with envy. The fact that they are not considered an embarrassment by the economics profession speaks of the fatuity of that profession. But such statements, which tell us nothing about the real economic world, may tell us something about the minds of the people who make them. Many of the most dogmatic and fanatical socialists are not interested in personal wealth and live in self-imposed poverty. They think that asceticism is noble and virtuous (otherwise they wouldn't practice it themselves), and believing that it is virtuous, they want everyone else to live the same way. This is one reason why socialists never get discouraged if their ideology doesn't work (that is, doesn't produce prosperity).

THEY NEVER REALLY WANTED IT TO.

Commenting on economic "bubbles," Samuelson admits that "in all the arsenal of economic theory we have absolutely no way of predicting how long such a bubble will last." Well, anyone who takes a close look at "the arsenal of economic theory" will readily observe it to be so filled with fallacy that the world envisioned by Samuelson and his colleagues bears little correspondence to the world of reality. No wonder it has so little predictive power. Keynesian economics is unable to provide a theory that can even describe, let alone explain, observed economic reality and experience. If economists really knew what they are talking about, the Soviet Union never would have collapsed.

The economists and politicians are living in some kind of fantasy world, while the rest of us must live with the reality of the wreckage they are creating.

Another manifestation of unreal economic analysis can be seen in Ayn Rand's quasi-deification of industrialists as being men of punctilious ethical scruple and rigorous logical acumen. In fact, businessmen are just like many other people: stupid, shortsighted, and as quick to make use of coercion if they think it will serve their purpose. In a free marketplace they would have an ethically useful function, but the trouble is, and always has been, that there is no FREE marketplace. Societies have always been based on institutionalized coercion, and the people (including businessmen) accept this as natural social behavior. This acceptance is ingrained on many mental levels and during the entire life of the citizen, so it should be no surprise to see it exhibited by businessmen.

In spite of these gross flaws, economic theory lives on, surviving largely because there are some fundamental truths about the human condition that call for principled explanation. First enunciated in THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, these truths are:

• 1) The overwhelming majority of people are naturally and unswervingly interested in improving their material condition.
• 2) Repression of this natural desire leads only to impoverished societies.
• 3) When this natural desire is allowed sufficient expression so that commercial transactions are widespread, everyone does eventually indeed improve his condition, however unequally in extent or time. This is not all we need to know, but it is what we DO know, and it is surely not asking too much of economic theory that in its passion for sophisticated methodology it not ignore this knowlege. But it does.

Bootstrap Economics

• 1. Limitation of natural resources.
• 2. Paucity of knowledge.
• 3. Politically-imposed restrictions.

The overwhelming majority of human beings are concerned each to increase his own standard of living, and to the extent that it is possible each will act to do so. In fact, to the extent that it is possible each DOES act to do so, unless he is inhibited by law from doing so. Each individual person is continually looking for a way to improve his personal standard of living - continually looking for a way to circumvent ANY obstacles that are placed in his path. The aggregate expression of all of these individual concerns results in what I call the Bootstrap Effect. Everywhere within an economic system the people who perform economic actions will raise the level of wealth creation of that system. And they will continue to raise it until they can find no way of raising it any further. Until they are balked by some restriction. If that restriction is removed, the individual people to whom it had been a barrier will now perceive a possibility to further raise their own personal standard of living - and will commence to do so. Increasing the general level of wealth creation until they encounter another obstacle. And if there are no obstacles, there is no limit to the height to which people will push their standard of living.

Economic Calculations

Government data is often meaningless on its own terms and almost always misrepresents the nature of an economy. For example: one man spends to build a bridge, another to destroy it. Does it make sense to sum these two expenditures together into a "GNP"? Incompatible plans do not add up to some kind of "super-plan" nor does spending on them add up to an aggregate reflecting total productivity of any kind whatever.

Also, government expenditures are always considered to be a productive contribution to the economy. But in fact government is a drain, and hence its expenditures should be subtracted from any aggregate of productivity.

All figures on economic performance are false in one way or another, each compounding itself on the others until the economic forecasts generated by the state are as fictitious as a list of Nixon's virtues. About the only thing the government's economic indicators truthfully indicate is that the market has ceased to function properly. It has ceased to function properly because the natural regulating mechanisms have been severely crippled by government interference.

One function of prices is to guide the factors of production so as to apportion the relative output of thousands of different commodities in accordance with demand. No bureaucrat, no matter how brilliant, can solve this problem arbitrarily. An example of the problem can be seen in The Guffey Act of 1937, which forbade the sale of coal at less than certain minimum prices fixed by government. Though Congress had started out to fix "the" price of coal, the government soon found itself (because of different sizes, thousands of mines, and shipments to thousands of different destinations by rail, truck, ship and barge) fixing 350,000 separate prices for coal.

Prices provide suppliers with signals of what consumers want, and relative prices are an important source of information - they represent the relative value of alternative uses of resources. Willingness to pay a high price typically means that the producer is doing a good job of providing for consumers. If that high price generates high profits, then the producer is able to obtain more of the resources and produce more of the desired commodity. By allocating resources on the basis of willingness to pay, the market results in resources being allocated to the highest valued uses, because those who are willing to pay the price clearly value the use of the product more than those who are unwilling to pay. As a result, resources are guided toward their most desired uses.

But a government-controlled economy does not use this source of information when determining how to allocate its resources, and thus the flow of profit does not act as a channel directing resources toward the most desirable uses. When a bureaucrat makes a mistake in regulating your affairs, he does not receive any feedback, in the form of personal economic loss, to alert him to his error. You receive all the feedback, but you are not in a position of control, so you cannot correct the error.

Hayek calls the implicit decision structure underlying the market the Extended Order. Nobody designed it, nobody fully understands it, and no one knows a fracton of what it "knows." As Leonard Read pointed out, there is not a person living who has the complete knowledge required to manufacture a simple thing like a pencil. Yet the extended order knows how to make pencils, laptop computers, nuclear-magnetic-resonance body scanners, and hundreds of thousands of other products. It also knows where and when they are required and in what quantity. It was the failure to comprehend this phenomenon, more than anything else, that was the chief intellectal flaw in Marxism and all its philosophical progeny. An ethical point here is that the thousands of people whose unwitting cooperation has made our options viable, have put forward their respective contributions voluntarily. Admittedly, they have agreed only to the terms of their individual transactions, but since that is their only point of contact with the rest of the extended order, their involvement has been a genuine case of unanimous consent.

"Regulating the market" is actually regulating people - preventing them from making trades which they otherwise would have made, or forcing them to make trades they would not have made. The market is a network of trade relationships, and a relationship can only be regulated by regulating the persons involved in it. Thus price control is people control.

Being imperfect, man does indeed need a regulating mechanism, but free enterprise does this admirably. Competition enables the businessman to continually check his ideas against his economic environment to see whether what he believes (and does) really works. If it doesn't, then either he goes under or, if he is clever, he will change his ways and go on to meet the competition's challenge. Unfortunately, government is not regulated by competition. Hence, no plan that government puts into operation can be tested by a competitor. Thus an error in government policy is almost never eradicated, except by revolution, war, or depression. Market competition is far less painful.

Agriculture in China:
An example of central control vs individual control

Since 1949, when the Communists took power, China's agricultural practices and system of property ownership have undergone several turbulent changes. Before the revolution, many Chinese farmers were poor tenants who tilled fields owned by wealthy landlords. Soon after Mao Tse-tung's peasant army conquered China, however, the government confiscated the holdings oflandlords and wealthy farmers and distributed the property among all farming households on an egalitarian basis. The new landowning families operated small, independent farms and sold their harvest on an open market. For the first time in recent Chinese history, the dream of "land to the tillers" was a reality. Farmers responded to the new system with extraordinary zeal: grain production went up by about 15 kilograms per person each year between 1949 and 1955.

In the 1950s, under the influence of the Soviet system, Mao became imbued with the ambition to build a powerful nation under a planned economic system. As a result, China gradually began to collectivize its agriculture. The government encouraged farmers to form groups known as mutual aid teams in the early 1950s; these teams consisted of no more than 10 households and served to coordinate the farming practices of the members. Property rights did not change, however - each family retained ownership of its plot. Later, during 1956 and 1957, the government further consolidated farms into agricultural collectives, each one with as many as 300 households. In this case, members actually had to surrender most of their land to the collective, although they could keep small private plots for growing food for the family.

The process of collectivization culminated in 1958, when the agricultural collectives merged into huge communes. These communes, each with an average size of about 4,000 families, took sole ownership of all property, including the private plots. All the farmers worked together on the land, receiving pay for time spent in the field, no matter how little they accomplished. And everyone shared the excess harvest. Under this system, none of the farmers had an individual stake in the land, so few cared about making improvements - in effect, the communes severed farmers from their land.

The result of collective farming was disastrous: in perhaps the world's worst famine, an estimated 30 million Chinese died between 1959 and 1962. The communal farms simply did not generate enough food for the country. In the 1960s the government broke up the communes into more manageable units. But collective farming continued on a smaller scale through the late 1970s, when some Chinese leaders started to rethink its viability.

The brainchild born of this rethinking was the policy known as the Household Responsibility System. This policy divided the collective land among individual households, creating a nation of small family farmers. The collective, however, maintained official ownership of the property. Initially, the farmers' rights to the land were to be valid for up to three years, but in 1984 the Communist Party ordered local officials to extend contracts to 15 years. In return for the right to work the land, farmers had to sell a small portion of their crops to the state at a fixed price. But they could keep the rest of their harvest, either to consume or to sell for a profit. The system clearly encouraged farmers to become more efficient: between 1980 and 1984, grain production increased by 16.2 kilograms per person each year, up from an annual average increase of 1.3 kilograms per person between 1955 and 1980.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The sensible solution to this problem lies in private ownership: each of the shepherds should own a tenth of the land. Then if he acquires one more sheep, he will immediately see that his pasture will be 10% worse off.

Murray Rothbard, in FOR A NEW LIBERTY:

Again we can see that the establishment of private property rather than government-owned "commons" could have avoided these difficulties. The fact that government asserts domain over the air is what makes air pollution a "tragedy of the commons" problem. In this case, the problem is exacerbated by attempts on the part of the government to dictate specific solutions to the problem, rather than solving it by means of some market- oriented method of pollution control such as:

Measure the amount of pollution being emitted and assess a quantity fine (e.g., $2/Kg/day). Gradually raise the amount of this fine, and continue to do so until the pollution falls to an acceptable level. Thus all the choices regarding production, handling and disposal of the pollutant would remain within the ambit of voluntary behavior rather than being expressed through fascist controls.

Another place in which the tragedy of the commons rears its ugly head is in the American judicial system. Its staggering backload of cases, resulting in years of delay in the clearing of trials, results in great part from its being a government-owned "commons" phenomenon.

The Public Goods Problem

Remember the lighthouse, that legendary "public good" which your professor discussed in Economics 101? Though socially valuable, the lighthouse supposedly cannot be provided by the free market because it contains costs that cannot be reflected in the market price. Thus it is claimed that ships will benefit from the light without paying for the service. Therefore, since the lighthouse owner can't exclude free riders, it will be unprofitable to provide the lighhouse at all. However, your professor no doubt did not tell you that long before economists developed the theory of public goods and market failure, private entrepreneurs were building and operating profitable lighthouses throughout England.

Another example, which you have all experienced:

As I was chewing on my sandwich, a couple of girls came over and plugged the jukebox. When the music started, the boys began bouncing a little, obviously enjoying the rhythm, and the girls chatted away as they had been doing before. I realized that I had just witnessed a mirocosm of the "public goods" situation. Everybody was enjoying the music but only two had paid. They hadn't gone around shaking people down for their "fair share"; they hadn't insisted that the music be supplied for nothing; they hadn't even asked for contributions. The girls supplied everyone with a valuable good because they wanted it themselves.

In the year 6 AD the emperor Augustus (Julius Caesar's stepson) made a change in the Rome Fire Brigade. He got rid of the slaves and hired freemen in their place. He immediately discovered a tremendous improvement in the Brigade's performance and concluded that whereas slaves don't really give a damn, people who are free WANT to put out fires in their community.

The Public Goods fallacy assumes that people should - and indeed do - only produce goods and services from which non-paying others cannot benefit. Yet, think of deodorants, nice hair cuts, attractive clothing, pretty front lawns, grand architecture, etc., etc., etc. These all provide uncompensated benefits to others. When the voluntary, self-interested efforts of some people create free-rider benefits for others, that is a concrete instance of the harmony of men's interests, and should be celebrated and welcomed as such. Living in a civilized society NECESSARILY involves being a free-rider. One cannot help benefiting indirectly from the work of people who have a greater productive ability than one's own. This is neither a cause for regret nor a compromise of independence or responsibility; on the contrary, it is one of the most important benefits of living in a civilized society.

Fascism-Communism

Fascism: Under this system, many major choices regarding the operation of businesses are made by government, but the individual who operates each enterprise receives his income from the profits of the business. This is centralized planning with decentralized execution of the plan.

In America, these are usually fascist operations: Bus companies, Airlines, Truck lines, Radio and TV stations, Banks, Private elementary and secondary schools.

Communism: Under this system, all the business decisions are made by government, and the people operating the enterprise are government employees who receive their income from the government. A communist government expropriates all businesses and operates them as departments of the government. This is centralized planning AND centralized execution of the plan. The centralized execution is in the form of precise, all-inclusive doctrine.

In America, these are communist operations: Highway maintenance, Public Schools, Utility companies such as most water systems, and sometimes electric systems, Police (except private police companies, which are fascist).

What the pseudo-libertarians tout as "privatization" is quite often merely the conversion of a portion of a communist operation over to a fascist context.

Under fascism, the people are led to believe that they are working for themselves, even though in fact they are not. Under communism, they know they are not working for themselves. That is why fascism is less incompetent than communism. In fact, the level of efficiency of an economic system is a direct consequence of the degree to which the individuals who control specific economic activities are free to implement their own choices, and are acting in a context in which their own personal income is dependent on their own personal choices. This explains why communism is the least efficient of these systems, fascism is somewhat more efficient, and a free market is the most efficient of all. Only a free market demands competence. Authoritarian regimes place obedience above all other considerations.

I distinguish some other controls from the above categories of fascism and communism since these controls are not primarily oriented toward governing business operations but are intended as general restrictions on individual personal behavior. These are such things as driver's licenses, marriage and divorce laws, customs and immigration regulations.

Registration of vehicles, business licenses, building permits, land titles (deeds) and land tax are in yet another category - they are the government's assertion of eminent domain - the assertion that government is the ultimate owner of all property, and that the individual can make use of that property only with permission from the government.

Of course all these are also means by which government obtains some of its revenue.

Marx

According to Marx, no clear line can be drawn between economic and political processes. In his scheme, the forces of material production are a superhuman entity independent of the will and actions of individual men. Industrial production and wealth, he asserts, are not to be attributed to any individual's creative thought or action, but are a free gift of nature. Such gifts multiply automatically across time through the intervention of impersonal agencies called Science, Technology and Progress, and each man is morally entitled to his fair share of these gifts. Only the State can achieve social justice by wresting wealth from the hands of the vile, greedy rich, who have appropriated more than their fair share, and by redistributing it fairly among the virtuous, non-greedy poor. This is the underlying rationale of the Welfare State.

Because the use of coercion to confiscate wealth benefits one group ONLY at the expense of another, Marxists are led to the belief that life must be viewed as a zero-sum process in which original wealth-creation is ignored or even denied. (But then, how could Marx have originally created his ideas?) Inherent in this ideology is the view that the economic resources of the society must be monopolized in order to prevent certain other people from satisfying their own economic wants. This reflects the "zero-sum" assumption that economic resources and economic output are fixed - a national pie to be distributed by the state. But this coercive redistribution of wealth undercuts the very process that produced the wealth in the first place, thus Marxist societies inevitably end up impoverished. Under Marxist economics it is inevitable that some must starve so that others can eat.

When a theory invariably achieves only the opposite of its alleged goals, yet its advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that the theory is not a conviction or an ideal, but a spurious rationalization.

In a free market, a man's long-range failure, like his long-range success, is an objective reflection of his ability and his usefulness. It is precisely this inexorable rule of capitalism - "to each according to his ability" - that threatens the self-esteem of the Marxist, engendering his intense hatred for the free market. Ironically, the most passionately voiced charge against laissez-faire is that it is an unjust system. The man who hates and fears a free market does not confess that what he really resents is precisely the implacable justice of this market. The driving motive of the irrational policies of Marxism is the desire to destroy the hated system which rewards men according to their abilities, and to substitute one which will give to the frustrated mediocrities according to their needs.

Their Marxism is a wonderful tool that gives them an answer for everything - even an answer for the failures of Marxism. A Marxist writes: "The method of analysis Marx used to understand social domination and conflict is the most powerful way of understanding the very failures of his theory." But how can a theory that has failed be used to understand itself? Thus there is no possibility of controverting the committed Marxist. His Marxism makes him invulnerable to argument.

The Luddite Phenomenon

The great bulk of people infinitely prefer the continuance of a problem which they cannot explain to an explanation which they cannot understand. The opposition to innovation entails a desire to live in narrow-minded ignorance. Luddites are merely one type of hard-core conservatives.

Liability

In his book LIABILITY, Peter Huber looks at the origin and consequences of this kind of litigation. He observes that because of "a wholesale shift from consent to coercion in the law of accidents (and) a shift from individual to group responsibility ....the number of tort suits filed has increased steadily for over two decades. So has the probability that any given suit will conclude in an award. And the average size of awards has grown more rapidly still." This cancer on capitalism results in a severe threat to fundamental features of our economic system, such as technological innovation and the sanctity of contracts. As examples, he observes that liability accounts for 30% of the price of a stepladder, 95% of the price of vaccines, and 1/3rd the cost of a small airplane. The threat of liability suits and/or the cost of insurance has orphaned more than 500 drugs that are invaluable for treating rare but serious diseases.

Fifty years ago, such liability litigation would not have been conceived. Twentyfive years ago, it would have been laughed out of court. Today it is seriously considered, and the really scary aspect is this: there is NO WAY to tell in advance what the ruling of the court will be. The courts are not bound by any semblance of rationality or any adherence to the principle of Justice, and yet they exercise total dominion over the economic life of the country.

Productivity

Computers have enabled a tremendous productivity boost since the 1970s, but no matter how much more wealth per capita improved technology makes possible, there is always something to soak up the surplus and condemn ordinary people to a lifetime of labor. No matter how much productivity increases, people never seem to work less, only differently (harder!). The government is consuming, at an accelerated pace, the productivity potential of the country.

Jerry Pournelle: "It looks to me as if our choices are very limited: increase productivity, or have a declining standard of living. Or both. Unfortunately, most increases in productivity are eaten by new measures, such as the Clean Air Act. It's my opinion that most of the productivity increases made possible by small computers have disappeared into increased regulations."

Another thing that has kept the government alive while the federal debt curve goes up is that it is confiscating much of the wealth produced by the women who have liberated themselves since the 1960s.

Fair Trade

One propaganda device of these businessmen is the claim that they are all in favor of free trade - so long as it is "fair."

In this context, there is no such thing us "unfair" trade. The so-called "unfairness" here is not to the merchant nor to the consumer, but to a third party who objects to the transaction. This is an act of extreme presumptuousness. A third party has no right to intervene in a transaction between a willing buyer and a willing seller, especially not when the third party's complaint is that it is "unfair" to HIM that you, the buyer, are being offered such a bargain. What is he saying, if not that he has a right to your trade, your money, your time and effort, your life? It is an approach we might expect of a medieval baron upset by someone trading with his serfs. That sort of feudalism is what many American businessmen and labor unions are trying to put over on you in the name of Americanism.

The proper answer to such complaints is a venerable and very American retort which should be taken literally: "Mind your own business!"

Another protectionist scam uses the metaphor of competing "on a level playing field." It is very important to recognize that business is not a game or a sport. In sports, the goals achieved - the touchdowns, homeruns, knockouts - have no utilitarian value. Sports are activities whose meaning lies only in the displays of athletic excellence they call forth. Their entire value is in the how, rather than the what. In business activity the opposite is true. The how matters not at all, only the what. Consumers care not a whit how astoundingly adept are the maneuvers accomplished in the factory by an auto worker or how brilliant was the strategy of the company's marketing director. All that matters is the utilitarian outcome: how good is the product for our intended use? The metaphor of "a level playing field" has no meaning in business - unless it means an open marketplace without force or fraud, where everyone competes under conditions of free trade by voluntary consent. But open competition is precisely what the level-fielders are opposed to. They want to hobble the foreign runners in the race, to hobble them either by force (tariffs) or fraud (conning Americans into believing that buying foreign products damages our economy).

Note the power of the connotations of words: The Japanese are engaging in "dumping," we are told. But what is being "dumped" on us are inexpensive, high quality products. Their dumping consists of reducing the price below what we would have to pay for American products. This is also known as "underselling" and is considered a big plus when done domestically by American businesses. How many commercials have you heard that say "we are cheapest," "we will beat any offer," "guaranteed lowest price," etc. They are "dumping" savings on us. The "dumping" actually consists of showering us with wealth.

The Gross National Product

If I wash my car, the only effect on the GNP is the cost of the water and soap that I use. Suppose that I give the neighbor kid $5 to wash my car. In this case, the GNP is increased by the cost for the water and soap, plus the $5 I give the neighbor kid. But is the economy really more productive if I give the neighbor kid $5 than if I wash my own car?

When I get my shirt washed at a laundry for $1, the GNP is increased by $1. Suppose I marry my laundress and then no longer pay cash to her for washing my shirt. Is the economy more prosperous in the first case than the second?

I go to my dentist and get a root canal. He charges me $300, and the GNP is increased by $300. Then he hires me to paint his house and pays me $300. Now the GNP is up $600. Now suppose that instead of paying him cash, I agree to paint his house in exchange for the root canal. No cash changes hands. The GNP is $600 less than if we had paid each other cash rather than bartered. Is the economy more prosperous if we pass the $300 back and forth than if we barter?

This suggests a simple way to increase the GNP. All we need do is get Congress to pass a law mandating that every person in this country shine the shoes of exactly one other individual, charge him $20,000 for shining his shoes, and exempt such shoe-shine fees from taxation. The income of each individual in the United States would go up by $20,000. The GNP would double! But each individual would be left with the same amount of money as before; each would have done a trivial amount of labor; each would have had a trivial service performed for him. That's all. Would anyone be better off in the wake of such a doubling of the GNP?