I think it's good to avoid the ideology inherent in the "factors of production" terminology. Maybe you haven't read as many economics textbooks as I have, but this term is loaded with dreck.
> In the SNA, generation of income account item "compensation of employees" (D.1) is one of the "uses" of value added (B.1) which is a difference between market output (sales) and intermediate consumption (cost of material used in the production process). The other use of the value added is operating surplus (D.2) whose uses include property income (P.4 - interest, distributed income of corporations, or rent) i.e. profits. <
Yoshie is right, however, in that _increases_ in the wage bill (variable capital) and plant and equipment (constant capital) come from property income (surplus-value), when we examine capitalism over time and for the entire capitalist world. It is profit that motivates the system...
>I argued that government produces public goods i.e. goods that are
consumed collectively and are "non-excludable" i.e. benefits are
available to everyone regardless of whether he paid for it or not.
For example, health care is a public good because I benefit from it
even if I do not see a doctor in my entire life? How? By curing sick
people and thus reducing the chance of spreading their diseases on me.
Since I benefit from it, the argument goes, I should pay for it, but that encounters a problem - the only way to make me pay is to deny me the benefit if I do not, and that is rather difficult without penalizing everyone ales even those who do pay (the so called neighborhood effect). Therefore, a rational solution to the problem is to ...<
Yoshie wasn't talking about "rational" solutions but about _what is_.
-- Jim Devine "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin
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