Free Markets
March 23rd, 2006 | by Dr. Forbush |Everyone wants cash and that’s why markets work. If everyone could get more cash, then their life would be better, because they can buy all the crap any American who watches TV has been convinced that they need. We have all been told that America is a consumer economy because we consume more per person than any other country on Earth. Except maybe for some small countries that only have homes for wealthy monarchs and their kin. But, the desire for wealth drives the capitalistic drive to make distribution of goods more efficient. The drive for wealth drives innovation. The drive for wealth makes people work to feed and house themselves if nothing else…
Maybe the distribution of goods is not as fair as Jesus would like, but the drive to make money powers the industries with people who need money to buy food, goods and services which supplies these industries with the money needed to produce more goods and services and jobs. That is the magic of the free markets.
The truth is that people need food and shelter. They could go out into a forest and set up a tent and live there if they chose not to be part of our society. (Well, actually they would need to own some land to do that. And that would require money. And once we are talking money we are talking society again. Unless you are able to get to some remote piece of land that no one has claimed yet.) For modern man, money is the only way that people can live in our society. This means that people need to acquire money in some way to buy the things they need to survive. Removing yourself from that need for money is impossible in America.
For most people money is acquired by working. Someone with capital and a grand idea will use their capital to hire labor to pay people to do what they want done in order to realize their dream. Some people have no ideas and lots of capital, and they use their capital to invest in someone that has some ideas and no capital. The person with the capital therefore buys the ideas and is able to exploit those ideas to make more capital for himself or herself. Similarly the person with the ideas hopes that the person with the capital isn’t smart enough to realize the full potential for an idea, so that the person with the idea can make more money than the person with the capital. And, so it goes. America was built on these interactions one billionaire at a time.
So, the system works. People who need food and housing are able to make minimal amounts of money to survive. People with ideas are able to get those ideas realized. And, people with money are able to make more money.
So, why can’t we create another type of market that could benefit all of us? This market takes care of basic needs of food and shelter. However, it encourages waste and pollution. If someone has an idea to dig a hole in the ground and burn the coal he found there to make energy the idea wins if it is cheaper to do this than to make solar cells and get the energy from the sun. If the guy believes that throwing all the ashes from the burnt coal in the river is cheaper than burying them in the ground in a land fill, then throwing them in the river wins. If someone thinks taking Uranium and putting it in a pile creates energy more cheaply than building wind turbines, then the nuclear energy plan wins, even if they don’t consider what to do with the waste afterward. But, the problem with pollution is that it effects everyone. So, if one guy has a cheap idea that causes lots of pollution everyone who is effected by that pollution pays a price in a deteriorated environment. The guy who is polluting is “stealing cleanliness” from those who once had nice clean places to live and work.
Pollution is a fact of life. Every time we use the toilet we pollute the environment. So, just like the capitalist market that rewards people for having ideas and money we need a market that reward people for polluting less. A free market that rewards people for not destroying our environment would drive people to pollute less and find the means to pollute more efficiently. For example, nuclear energy could be cleaner if new processes to use the nuclear fuel were carefully studied. But, power companies were spooked in the past when their innovation in using nuclear energy resulted in Three Mile Island. The extraordinary safety measures triggered by this failure made nuclear energy expensive and scared the energy industry away from future investigations. But, if some type of low pollution rewards market were created new innovators could be driven to investigate their dreams. Other forms of energy would also be rewarded for being clean while dirty coal and oil would be less desirable.
The point is that Free Markets work, so why don’t we use them to preserve our world before its too late.
Cross Posted @ Bring It On, tblog, Blogger and BlogSpirit
