Econ 362, Lecture 07

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As Henry George wrote in 1879, we seek to satisfy our desires with the least exertion. He added the societal consequence that we have a strong tendency to do whatever we can to monopolize natural opportunities. Not everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed in this game.

[@wendellfitzgerald2]

The result is that a small percentage of our own kind have the right to charge the rest of us for access to our own planet the only home we have in the universe making themselves undeservedly wealthy. And ever increasingly wealthy as population and technical progress make land and natural resources more valuable and more costly in terms of land rent and sale price.

[@nthperson]

The objective of neoclassical economics is not to describe reality but to modify reality to conform with mathematical analysis. Human beings as a factor of production apply their labor to land (with or without the assistance of capital goods) to sometimes yield wealth. How much wealth can only be estimated based on aggregate performance over time. The yield from the use of specific forms of capital goods is far more predictable (subject to breakdowns, depreciation and loss of functional utility). The solution to the "problem" of conflict over the motivations of workers and the interests of the owners of businesses is for workers to form cooperative enterprises. Cooperatives versus corporations bring us a step closer to what Mortimer Adler and Louis Kelso described in their books as "universal capitalism." Our system of law has been pulled by corporate interests far too far in the direction of labor exploitation.