[extropy-chat] Re: EDU: Public Schools

[Technotranscendence]

On Tuesday, January 20, 2004 5:48 PM Samantha Atkins
samantha at objectent.com wrote:
>> The fact is that actually working, creating, etc.
>> does more overall to help others than charity.
>> Nothing wrong with charity, but if most people
>> didn't do productive things and interact through
>> trade, most of humanity would have to die out.
>> Simply volunteering and reshuffling wealth
>> would not improve much.  Wealth has to be
>> created before it can be given -- or
>> redistributed.:)
>
> It depends on what you voluntarily do.

Hopefully, the work you do is voluntary...  I think you meant what you
volunteer for -- in the sense of work you're not doing for a paycheck.:)

> Many tasks can be done for pay or as a volunteer
> and have precisely equal value.  Volunteers also
> take on a lot of jobs that it would be hard to
> produce a viable business plan around but
> nonetheless add quite a bit of real longterm
> value that certainly is not simply "reshuffling
> wealth".   Wealth does not only consist of that
> which is bought and sold in the market place.

I won't dispute that volunteer work -- charitable work -- has value or
can create value, but there are two caveats here.  (Heck, for that
matter, in some sense, even a command economy can create some wealth.)
One is that in order to volunteer, one must already have some other
source of wealth.  Someone without at least the basic necessities will
die, so she or he won't be of much use as a volunteer.  Even on this
minimal level, you need something before you can give -- you need at
least to have basic necessities before you can help others.

The other is that the money economy is much more efficient than
volunteering.  Yes, the two are not mutually exclusive -- as can be seen
from the fact that people in advanced money economies not only do
volunteer work but fund charities and the like -- but my original
statement above was, "Nothing wrong with charity, but if most people
didn't do productive things and interact through trade, most of humanity
would have to die out."  The incentives and information problem are
resolved much better in a market.  Yes, charity meshes nicely with
market interactions, but absent market interactions, all else being
equal, overall efficiency would be so low that most of humanity would
have to die out just to sustain that rest who interact in non-market
but, hopefully, still voluntary ways.  (Non-market _involuntary_ ways --
i.e., the command economy also known as socialism -- have an
indisputably low efficiency.)

Both must coexist, but the big engine of wealth creation is the market
system.  This is why market interactions took off once they were
established.  E.g., we can see in very primitive peoples today
gift-giving cultures -- ones where people freely give gifts usually with
some expectation of a return.  These most likely preceded actually trade
of the non-gift sort in early societies -- or between them where such
exchanges were infrequent.  (See Elman R. Service's _The Hunters_, and
many other anthropology books cover the same phenomenon.)  While such
things still go on in modern, advanced economies, the bulk of
interactions resulting in wealth creation are market ones.

Now, value is subjective -- in the Austrian economics sense -- so you
could say you experience more value from your volunteer work -- and
hopefully you do get what is called "psychic profit" (no reference to
the paranormal, but just meaning the benefit is emotional or, forgive
the term, "spiritual" as opposed to for monetary gain) -- but, again,
most people do not, since they don't all spend their time doing
volunteer work.  Also, again, the market economy creates more material
wealth upon which to rest the charitable efforts.

The libertarian social ideal as I understand it is just to allow people
to interact voluntarily.  I believe -- and you seem to agree from your
other posts -- that under such conditions, people will still do
charitable work, though I think the bulk of social interaction will
still be via some form of market economy.

Cheers!

Dan
  See "The Hills of Rendome" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Rendome.html