> ``I agree with your basic thrust, but the test lies in the Sunday
> concerts in the park. If there's at least some modestly enthusiastic
> attendance (and you could easily imagine that even some people who
> don't go are glad that the concerts are there), then you've arguably
> demonstrated that the market underprovided Sunday concerts, which
> would automatically justify hiring the so-so violinist.'' SA
>
> ----------------
>
> 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.
I know - that's why I said that if it turns out that people show up at and enjoy these WPA concerts, which the market hadn't been providing, then that proves that the market had been underproviding them.
> 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.
Yes of course, but notice that reform movements advocated free public *education*, not free public gewgags or hair-ribbons or pornography. The assumption was that precisely because education is such an important social need, you can be sure that whatever alternative uses public education might be draining resources away from, those uses were less important than education.
> 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.
No - as you quoted me saying, I think if the WPA puts on ex-cab-driver concerts that people enjoy, and it doesn't create a shortage of cabs, that proves that the economic system was previously failing to provide society with concerts (and maybe overproviding cabs). I think a lot of people on the left unwittingly hold a double standard. Anything they think more resources should be devoted towards is deemed to represent "social" priorities. Meanwhile, they deem the problem with our society to be its overly favoring "economic" priorities. But these are the *same thing*.
When East Germans found themselves with scarce, shoddy and irregularly available consumer goods and fled to the West, this was not just a problem with the "economy," it showed that the East Germans' "social needs" weren't being provided for. When the US spends $100 billion a year on unnecessary administrative costs for its inefficient for-profit health system, that's not just a failure to meet "social" priorities, it's a massive failure of the "economic" system. Society has finite resources. People have potentially limitless needs. How you fit one to the other is *both* an economic problem of efficiency and production functions *and* a social problem of met and unmet needs. It's a social-economic problem.
SA