Tsk tsk, calling names, and we haven't even been properly introduced. Love the atmosphere in here. It would be right at home in any junior high school playground. Let's boil this out and see just how dumb you look for using a term like mercantilist when you probably have very little understanding of what it means at all.
Every time money is spent between people for goods or services, regardless of its source, it creates additional wealth for whomever is turning a profit in the deal.
Patently false. Government spending of tax money is most certainly not "money spent between people for goods and services" it is other people's money, taken with no regard to their own wishes, and spent upon goods and services a politician deems beneficial or necessary. Wealth is created when parties engage in voluntary trade to mutual benefit via the division of labor. Value is subjective. The only way to be sure that both parties have benefitted from a transaction is to establish that they traded their respective values after each has examined his own opportunity cost evaluation of the transaction and then voluntarilly participated in the trade.
Furthermore, what I said was true about Lawnmower Man. His entire salary is composed of tax money. What he "pays" in taxes could have just as easily been collected by the government simply by lowering his salary by some amount in the first place and the government merely retaining the difference, and that second approach would not have wasted resources used in overhead accounting when the government pays Lawnmower Man out of one hand and re-confiscates a portion of the money with the other. Lawnmower Man is, by nature of the transaction, a net tax consumer. He will never be a net tax payer unless the service he provides is objectively more valuable to the net tax payers (who do NOT work for government) than the salary the government pays Lawnmower Man. In addition to this, we have already established that this is not the case, specifically because mintogrubb has already informed us that the government got "some other guy to do it on a voluntary basis," — prima facie evidence that Lawnmower Man was being paid "a few grand a year" more than the market would bear for his service.
To compound folly, the original premise behind the post seems to be the fallacy that there are are a specific, set number of jobs in the world and that government politicians find and allocate them to people. In such a world, Lawnmower Man does inevitably go on welfare when dismissed by the government because of the original poster's hypothetical zero-sum game, not mine. The original poster implicitly assumes that there are no other jobs for Lawmower Man to take, no additional wealth for him to create, outside of cutting the grass on the village playing field. In actuallity, when the volunteer is found to mow the lawn for the government, essentially as a donation, then the tax payers pick up the value of the lawn service and Lawnmower Man is now free, not necessarilly to go on welfare, but to offer his services to someone else at profit to himself and them.
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Re: Economies are not closed systems, little mercantilist.
Date: 7/4/11 18:44 (UTC)Patently false. Government spending of tax money is most certainly not "money spent between people for goods and services" it is other people's money, taken with no regard to their own wishes, and spent upon goods and services a politician deems beneficial or necessary. Wealth is created when parties engage in voluntary trade to mutual benefit via the division of labor. Value is subjective. The only way to be sure that both parties have benefitted from a transaction is to establish that they traded their respective values after each has examined his own opportunity cost evaluation of the transaction and then voluntarilly participated in the trade.
Furthermore, what I said was true about Lawnmower Man. His entire salary is composed of tax money. What he "pays" in taxes could have just as easily been collected by the government simply by lowering his salary by some amount in the first place and the government merely retaining the difference, and that second approach would not have wasted resources used in overhead accounting when the government pays Lawnmower Man out of one hand and re-confiscates a portion of the money with the other. Lawnmower Man is, by nature of the transaction, a net tax consumer. He will never be a net tax payer unless the service he provides is objectively more valuable to the net tax payers (who do NOT work for government) than the salary the government pays Lawnmower Man. In addition to this, we have already established that this is not the case, specifically because
To compound folly, the original premise behind the post seems to be the fallacy that there are are a specific, set number of jobs in the world and that government politicians find and allocate them to people. In such a world, Lawnmower Man does inevitably go on welfare when dismissed by the government because of the original poster's hypothetical zero-sum game, not mine. The original poster implicitly assumes that there are no other jobs for Lawmower Man to take, no additional wealth for him to create, outside of cutting the grass on the village playing field. In actuallity, when the volunteer is found to mow the lawn for the government, essentially as a donation, then the tax payers pick up the value of the lawn service and Lawnmower Man is now free, not necessarilly to go on welfare, but to offer his services to someone else at profit to himself and them.