“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” - ― Elizabeth Warren
@StoneZhong10 жыл бұрын
I don't agree. To run a business, we have already paid for all the resources we used, it is already factored in.
@hansenchen110 жыл бұрын
Stone Zhong Stone Zhong said it well. As for the roads, and education, the state should not have forced people to pay for the benefit to other people in the first place. Whoever drives on the road, not others, should pay for it, and whoever wish himself or his children to be educated should pay for it himself, not using other people's hard earned money. Elizabeth Warren completely upended the rationale and mixed up the logic.
@hansenchen19 жыл бұрын
David Jung You and this article make the same fallacious assumption and commit again yet another fallacy of cherry picking. If a trade exerts any external cost to the whole society it also confers benefit to the whole society. It is cherry picking stating only the former and ignoring the latter. If there is any way to measure the cost and benefit, there would be great evidence that the latter far outweigh the former, simply by looking at the wealth generated by any free market capitalist country. By what you and your quoted article seem to advocate, if we have to count the external cost and benefit, the society should pay the wealthy financiers and entrepreneurs rather than tax them as they are the ones succeeding in making the life of every ones else better through their trading and those part are not completely accounted for by what they have been paid directly through the specific trades they have made. By the same token, the society should tax the poor and the sick for they impose cost more than benefit to the larger society through their activity.
@djung6509 жыл бұрын
Hansen Chen To be fair, I should, instead, have shared with you the article on livingeconomics.org/article.asp?docId=287. The existence of externality and the difficulty in measuring the external cost and benefit should remind all of us of the oversimplification in claiming: "To run a business, we have already paid for all the resources we used, it is already factored in."
@hansenchen19 жыл бұрын
David Jung This current link is an improvement over the first one you cited. However, both links fail to recognize the point I am making in my last post, which is the impossibility, and especially the absurdity, of computing an objective external "social" benefit and cost to any transaction. Elizabeth Warren's quote is just as erroneous as Stone Zhong's comment. They are equivalent. They are two sides of the same coin. The benefit and cost are all relative to individuals and the free market pricing system, and nothing else, is the only mechanism that is capable of computing the benefit and cost of all the transactions. If you have ever noticed and understood the Coase Theorem mentioned at the bottom of your second link, you would have known private property ownership is the only way to ensure the operation of the free market system, the only way to ensure all externalities are internalized, counted and thus eliminated. Ironically, Thomas Piketty and his Marxists cohorts advocate precisely to encroach on private property rights. Well then you get what you ask for, namely the miscalculation of externalities. That is another reason I said you and your spiritual friends can not even make a self-consistent story much less a scientific theory.