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Wealth Equality vs Consumer Sovereignty

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Xerographica
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Founded: Aug 15, 2012
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Wealth Equality vs Consumer Sovereignty

Postby Xerographica » Thu Mar 07, 2013 2:37 am

Over at the Foundation for Economic Education, Max Borders posted a critique of the Wealth Inequality video...Wealth Inequality: Predictably Irrational. Here's the comment that I shared...

Imagine the exact same video but with the word "wealth" or "money" or "income" replaced with "skills" or "talent" or "ability". In a group of 100 people, a few people are going to be a couple standard deviations from the norm. They are going to be either really good looking or really ugly...really tall or really short...really intelligent or really stupid...really talented or really untalented.

The distribution of skills is essential to understanding the most important question: how should we use society's scarce resources? No matter how you spin it...there's always going to be some people who are going to come up with far better answers. But unlike in the public sector, in the private sector each and every one of us has the freedom to dollar vote for the people who provide the best answers.

For example, imagine there's one kid who throws lemons at passing cars...and another kid who sets up a lemonade stand. They are both answering the question of how society's limited resources should be used. The market works because we, the people, can use our own dollars to indicate which answer benefits us the most. The result is a distribution of resources that maximizes the amount of benefit we derive from society's limited resources.

On this recent post...Wealth Equality vs Consumer Sovereignty...I shared over 50 relevant passages.

If you're an advocate of free-markets and had to pick one passage to share with a liberal...which one would you choose? Here's the one passage that I would share...

The fundamental difference between decision-makers in the market and decision-makers in government is that the former are subject to continuous and consequential feedback which can force them to adjust to what others prefer and are willing to pay for, while those who make decisions in the political arena face no such inescapable feedback to force them to adjust to the reality of other people’s desires and preferences. - Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

If you're a liberal and had to pick one passage that you disagreed with the most...which passage would you pick?
Forsher wrote:You, I and everyone we know, knows Xero's threads are about one thing and one thing only.

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