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Obviously, you've got me pinned, so I am going to change the game. Here's the problem with the above line of debate. The market and promoting the forces of the market to make the ultimate evaluations are not the only way to determine the social good. And further should not be, as the Great Depression was certainly demonstrating in the era of the WPA.
This is the reason we have public education for example, instead of a competitive private system. It was deamed through a variety of social reform movements in the 19th C. that a basic education should be given to all, not just the privilaged. That was the social good in itself. Now Marxist and other economist will argue various issues over the purpose served by public education. But the historical origin of the idea came from another quarter, the generallzed idea of the Enlightenment program, that the attainment of knowledge and intellectual skills should be promote for all (well all who are free, white and male mostly...) It's true there were plenty of experiments with company run towns and schools, but utimate the responsibility for education was given or taken over to the public sector to run.
See? You are looking at this from an entirely economic or economist point of view. This is the whole problem with the current administrations. They still believe the idea that the role and structure of society is to serve the needs of the economic system as determined by the market forces under capitalism. In fact, it's the other way around. The economic system whatever its forces are supposed to be should be channeled and regulated to serve the needs of the society. When the existing economic system fails to that, some other ordering system of social value must be put into play.
Remember I am not an economist. I am pretty against all that stuff. I've been going to commie night school run by the artist union local and I am thinking up ways to over throw the state. Today, I am sitting in my rundown WPA office waiting for the next bad artist to show up.
If that damned violinist comes back, because the concert idea failed, I'll send him over to Lomax Brothers maybe they can figure out what to do with him. He will be serving a social need to collect and conserve popular American cultures of the present and the past whether or not there is any economic need to do so. It is considered a social good by a bunch of commies in the Library of Congress.
CA