Recently someone added, or tried to add, a comment on to ancient (July 1st 2004) Samizdata posting of mine, about some great photos taken by a guy called Richard Seaman, of the SpaceShipOne launch. Such are the ways of Samizdata that I got an email about the comment, and was thus reminded about the original posting. Which was quite short and included the following:
Seaman used a Canon 1Ds digital SLR camera, a snip at $8,000.
Seaman is a fine photographer, but much of the genius of these photos lies in the automatic focus system that this camera has in it. More fuss should be made of the people who devise things like this, I think. Boy would I love one of these – but smaller and for nearer $80, in a couple of years time.
Well, even since about last November, I have had just such a system on my camera. This camera didn’t cost me $80. It cost me just under £130. But then, I only had to wait just over a year for it. But in about July of this year, exactly two years after that earlier posting, I reckon that a cheapo digital camera with automatic focussing will probably cost, I don’t know, around … $80?
Imagine a world in which politicians cut there prices for their “services” to the tune of about 99% (or whatever amazing figure it is), over a period of two years. Ah, statists will say. But what politicians do is so much more difficult. But that’s the whole point of capitalism. It concentrates its efforts on that which is not merely desirable but on that which has become, despite all appearances to the contrary, possible. If it can’t be done, they just walk away from the problem, and make a note to come back later when it can. Meanwhile, they don’t throw good money after bad.
Politicians spend fortunes merely shuffling back and forth the fact that this or that problem is indeed a very great problem, claiming all the while that ever more money must be pointlessly thrown at it, right now, so that we can continue to hope against hope for an answer, immediately, from them.
And of course many of the problems of politicians are self-inflicted and impossible. Like: how do you abolish a queue for something very nice that you are giving away, but which you have only a limited supply of? Answer: forget it, fools. Many politicians actually prefer impossible problems, because if their preferred urgent problems were solved, then no more money would be “needed”. (The whole environmental movement is best understood, I suggest, as a search process to invent problems which are impossible to solve, because impossible to really know about, but very, very important – thus requiring infinite money and political interference, for ever.)
Capitalism. I love it. Just so long as nobody tries to make it compulsory reading.
Capitalism: the art of the possible!
Best regards
It concentrates its efforts on that which is not merely desirable but on that which has become, despite all appearances to the contrary, possible.
I’d say it is the other way round. It concentrates its efforts on making possible that which is merely desirable. And importantly, capitalism’s definition of the desirable is John Stuart Mill’s: “I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.”
Capitalism, the truest form of democracy: that of the wallet.
[If your vote costs you, you use it more wisely.]
Best regards
Oh, I don’t know. I know a number of leftists who would benefit from a compulsory reading of some capitalist tomes. Given their attitudes toward initiation of force in wanting to take my stuff, such would not be an initiation of force on our part, merely an act of self defense.
Capitalism doesn’t just work because it provides incentive and motivation, it works because it allows and organises the accumulation of the mutual trust needed for long-term and cooperative ventures – in the language of game theory, it facilitates positive-sum economics.
Those cameras cost millions, probably hundreds of millions to develop. And the (expensively-trained) engineers had to be paid for several years before a single one could be sold to support the venture. The investors trust they will get their investment back. It is only through the accumulation of capital that such work can be done without visible means of support, and it is only through intellectual property law that some other manufacturer cannot take the fruits of that research and start making them cheaply, because they do not have to pay off the investment. Property law and contract law are the foundation stones of capitalism, and its failure in certain nations is more often than not the result of bad law.
I think even some Leftists might become thoughtful if they were made to read Hernando DeSoto’s The Mystery of Capital. It says many of the things they want to hear about the world, although with different villains.
As for politicians, recall they are not interested in profit, since it isn’t their money they’re spending, but they are in the market for votes. People vote for bold and simplistic statements promising to solve the unsolvable, make sweeping reforms, and not bother them with lots of difficult questions. They don’t vote for people qualified to do the job, or those giving complicated explanations of complicated issues that try to make the public learn and think. They certainly don’t vote for people who put facts ahead of public opinion.
The market, with its usually admirable lack of snobbish elitism, delivers exactly what the customer asks for. The public get the politicians they deserve.
Agreed. I’ll fully believe in capitalism when I see bureaucrats forced to compete on a global level for their services. I have still yet to see what the Inland Revenue can offer that could not best be handled by 4000 clerks in Lahore doing the same job (not the hardest occupation in the world I would surmise) at a vastly reduced cost to British taxpayers. Once we take away the trappings, the sprawling ministries and the symbols of power then we can start to reduce the John Prescott’s of this world to working in a small office with an (unchauffeured) Vauxhall Astra as an official car.
Julian,
The last thing I want to see are government agencies improved in their efficiency at oppressing me and taking my stuff. The phrase “nobody’s life, liberty, or property is safe while congress is in session” is a warning against efficiently executed government power.
Now, if you are talking about spinning off government functions into multiple, competitive, for-profit joint stock corporations, and letting them outsource, globalize, re-engineer, downsize, and buzzword their way to capitalistic bliss, I’m all for it. Just don’t let them force their products and/or services down peoples throats with the barrel of a gun.
Politicians differ from a true market in an important respect: competition is severely limited. We have a fixed number of elected representatives. So this cartel can control the price of their vote and the buyer doesn’t really have anywhere else to go.
Fair Tax! Get the K street money out of politics.
At least move elections to the first Tuesday after April 15 (deadline to file income tax returns).
Oh, Ghu! NO to the so-called “Fair Tax”. FT is just one more example of the people thinking “BOHICA” is some sort of battle cry of liberty.