Is the push towards privitization all it's cracked up to be?

You are completely correct, Thomas. Now I think I'll hop aboard an AmTrak train with a $1M insurance policy!

thomas (your voice is sounding increasingly familiar, by the way. Are you fakename on abuzz?)

Let's assume my hypothesis is correct, or at least, reasonable...that folks now are no more happy in 3000 square foot homes than they were forty years ago in 1000 square foot homes.

If so, something else is in the mix here which makes the modern definition of 'good life' quite arbitrary. And surely that is so, as in other contexts, just owning two goats puts you smack in the middle class, or, in Australia, at the top of the heap. Clearly, 'wealth' is relative, and has no meaning outside of comparisons to others. Likewise, the 'good life'.

The dangerous part of adding in 'moral' considerations here is the danger inherent in telling people they ought not to want what they want. But you know that wants are commonly created (or we could even get cute, and refer to Aristotelian 'needs', if we use the tobacco industry example of ADDING MORE nicotine once they found it was addictive). As business isn't likely to act responsibly (particularly over the long term - I think we can safely assume that Exxon has no business plan for 100 years hence) often enough to just give them a pass, we'd better be prudent and acknowledge that is so, and regulate the bastards. Mileage and emmission standards...damned good ideas. Added taxation on SUVs like the Canyon Arrow, portrayed in an episode of The Simpsons ("Well it smells like a steak, and it's three lanes wide, six big tons of American pride), equally a fine notion.

Nope.


I agree that people value their place in the social pecking order, and that this is worth paying attention to. But I don't see how economic institutions can do anything about that. Strictly as a matter of logic, no economy can make everyone richer than their neighbor, and no economy can raise everyone into the top 80 percent of the income distribution, however happy that might make them. So I agree the free market doesn't solve the pecking order problem, but I don't see how government intervention can solve it either.


I agree, but it isn't clear to me which way this argument cuts. Wants are manipulated by businesses, but they are also manipulated by all kinds of political and religious missionaries. I see no reason to believe that manipulation by missionaries is more virtuous than manipulation by businesses, and some pretty good reasons that it isn't. For example, it seems to me that religious and political ideologues have killed a lot more humans than businesspeople.

Moreover, while there is only one way (or very few ways) of giving people what they want, there are infinitely many ways of giving people what they don't want. If you advocate the former, that's a reasonably well-defined policy. If you advocate the latter, it isn't. Unless you also say which way you wish to give people what they don't want. If one shouldn't give people what they want, why should one give them what you want? What makes your judgment superior to theirs?

thomas

Thanks for the answer on the fakename question. I know it was an odd question, but he's one of the (not many) voices on abuzz that I quite miss, a careful, bright fellow.
More appropriately, what makes any judgement 'superior' to any other?

That is, to some degree, answerable, as you know. A surgeon who has spent a lifetime dealing with spinal cord injuries will, pretty clearly, have a 'superior' view on seatbelt legislation than a nineteen year old fella from the trailer park.