Kanner wrote...
nuculerman: You go ahead and feel free to redefine 'rational self interest' anyway you want here. Because until you do, no-one is going to have even the faintest idea what you are talking about. In the same post, you define lying, stealing, and cheating as 'obviously' bad things that any 'civilised' person can see are harmful. Then you go on to say that charity and altruism have no reward other than 'emotional value'.
But the reward for each is the same. You improve the collective, you benefit from the collective being stronger - at the personal cost of your time and energy. You hoard wealth for yourself, you weaken the collective for your own personal gain. This is almost directly analogus to stealing, lying and cheating someone vs. the 'morally' better equivilents.
My understanding of economics, additionally, is not limited by a personal desire to create excuses for my own guilty conscience. (The problem with basic economics is simply that people respond to incentives, so as a science it's got absolutely nothing to do, ultimately, with morality. Given the right incentives, people will do almost anything so long as it's the right choice for that situation. That fact alone does not give you any basis for a system of government - just a starting point for a system of laws.)
Anyway, please define 'rational self interest' so that you are clearly stating at what point you should give yourself a hundred billion dollars and let everyone else starve. Merely when it's legal? Because your previous definition seemed to extremely convieniently run right up to where the rule of law ended (taxes good) and then immediately stop (charity bad).
Are you really saying you are morally obligated to never donate money to a charity?
I haven't made "rational self interest" ambiguous at all. Please to put your failure to understand a basic concept on my shoulders.
When is it okay to "give myself a billion dollars and let everyone else starve?"
There are so many things wrong with that question I'm not sure where to begin. But I'll try to explain basic economics to you and the theory of egoism vs. rational egoism.
Firstly, I can't "give myself a billion dollars." I can earn a billion dollars, someone can give me a billion dollars, or I can steal a billion dollars. If I really want a billion dollars, the only two moral ways to get it are for someone who has earned it fairly in a free-trade economic system regulated by the enforcement of voluntary contracts to give it to me, or for me to earn it myself in a similar system. Thus the only rational AND moral way I have of getting a billion dollars is to earn it. How do I do that? Well, I buy and sell goods. I produce something that is of value to others and I trade them for something that they have produced which I value. Money is simply a medium for that trade. It allows me to sell my goods to anyone who values them instead of just someone who has something I value to trade with. And this is the foundation of economics. There is a demand for goods and services and people try to profit by supplying those goods and services. But how do I make such a staggering amount of money as a billion dollars? I start a business. A really big business. Since I can't possibly hope to make a billion dollar profit off a single good or service I need to build an organization that can provide those goods or services on a level I myself couldn't do alone.
This does a few things. It creates jobs, it generates wealth, and it increases the spending power of myself and all my new employees. All of these things are good for the "collective." The grocery store nearby now has more customers, the town nearby now has less unemployed to care for and the state now has more money to spend on "helping the poor." This is what Adam Smith meant by the "invisible hand" that turns a free market system, in which selfish people act in their own rational self interest, into the ultimate provider for "the collective."
So let's say I earn a billion dollars with my new business. I can horde it and sit on it, I can reinvest it in my own business, I can invest it in other businesses, or I can give it away to charity.
What would $1 billion do for charity and helping the collective? Well let's do some simple math. $1 billion would mean I could give 100,000 people, $10,000, 10,000 people $100,000 or 1,000 people $1 million. The first means I could give about 2% of the United States' unemployed enough money to live for a year in poverty, the second means I could give a negligible amount of the United State's unemployed enough money to live comfortably for two years, and the final options means I can give probably the amount of unemployed in my town alone enough money to live comfortably for 20 years.
Meanwhile, if I horde it, it means I can spend $20 million a year on myself for fifty years.
My final option is the option a rational egoist would take as it means more money in his pocket and the "emotional" value most people get from being the best at something. It requires me to reinvest in my own business or the business of others. With $1 billion I could take a $20 million profit and still have about $1 billion to spend on expanding my business. With $1 billion I can hire 20,000 more employees to help me make even more profit in the next quarter by producing more goods and services.
To summarize, I have essentially three options:
1. Feed 20,000 people for a year.
2. Spend $20 million every year for fifty years
3. Spend $20 million + interest every year for the rest of my life and feed 20,000 people + interest for the rest of their lives.
The rational egoist will choose the third option every single time. It means way more money in their pocket. Whether they meant to or not it also means they contributed far more to the "collective" than donating to charity ever could have.
It's the essential difference between giving someone a fish and teaching them to fish. Creating jobs is infinitely more valuable to the poor and wretched than cold hard cash.
And thus we finally come to the difference between "rational egoism" and "egoism." Most African dictators like to see others starve and are extremely racist. As a result, they do what is best for themselves, they horde wealth and abuse a particular ethnic group. Is that rationally best for themselves? Of course not. If they let their people produce freely there would be way more wealth to steal. They're getting 100% of nothing when they could be taking 40% of trillions like our government does. Making their citizens live in abject fear and poverty is clearly, to the rational person, not making them wealthier than they could be as a benevolent dictator. Perhaps they're too stupid to do simple math or perhaps they just like watching people suffer. Whichever the case, they're not acting in their own rational self interest, if we can agree that "watching people suffer" is not a rational payment to desire.
As for giving to charity being moral or not? It's amoral. You're free to earn money and do whatever you like with it. But, if your goal was truly to help the unemployed, you' be much better off giving your money to Walmart than giving to a charity. If you want to feed the homeless, you're much better off giving it to food supply company that gives a portion of their food to soup kitchens (quite a few) than to the actual soup kitchen. In both cases the company will invest your money to help you and others. This is because productive members of society are productive. They produce wealth. And the production of wealth is far more helpful to the disadvantaged than the redistribution of wealth.
"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is a misnomer of capitalism. What actually happens is the rich get richer and the poor get richer. The rich just get richer a lot faster.
Modifié par nuculerman, 10 décembre 2009 - 07:08 .
Retour en haut
